I demoed a new prototype UI to our UI/UX team this week — an extension of the rebuild I'd already been doing. A second senior dev in the room said he'd push it to production immediately if it weren't for needing to loop in the contracting team first. Then he reached out directly with something more specific: take that same UI/UX and apply it to our internal site, which was still running the exact same outdated styling as everything else.
More than prompting for updates
This wasn't just asking AI for a fresh coat of paint. I fixed real UI issues in our datatables, and effectively rebuilt the entire frontend. Instead of only prompting for individual updates, I built AI skills to guide the work itself — generating reusable CSS classes, tokenizing colors instead of hardcoding them, and pushing for actual modularity instead of one-off fixes per page.
Building it so it travels
The point wasn't just to fix this one site — it was to build the styles so they could be applied to our other systems too. I reworked the styling from the ground up, then went through the existing files extracting the pieces that needed the new classes and implementing them in place, instead of leaving the new system sitting next to the old one.
Three days
Planning and executing a frontend rebuild like this normally takes days by itself before any code gets touched. I had a new frontend in three. The site had been running the most basic default Bootstrap styling for about 20 years; it has a modern look now. There's still plenty left to improve, but the gap between "outdated" and "current" closed faster than I expected it could.
Update: that rebuild is still in testing, and it's already led to something bigger — see the follow-up on becoming the lead on our new design system.