Anyone using AI app builders for quick operator screen mockups?

General Discussion
1

I'm helping a small integrator here in New York and we're trying to speed up the early back-and-forth with clients on what an operator screen should look like. Before I commit to a tool for prototyping, I'm wondering how AI app builders fit into an Ignition project workflow. My concern is fidelity: a quick mockup is fine for layout conversations, but I don't want clients anchoring on something that can't realistically be built as a Perspective view with real tag bindings and no HTML. I haven't tried any of these tools myself yet and I'm not claiming any hands-on results, just third-party information I've come across online. If you've used this kind of tool for early client mockups, how close did the output get to something you could hand off to a real Perspective build, and did the styling assumptions cause problems later? Curious what people with actual project experience think.

Update after reading more - Best Figma Make Alternatives (2026) compares a few options, but I'm still unsure how much of the layout would survive translation into a real Perspective view. Leaning toward a short trial with one client before committing.

2

You can use almost anything to build a UI mock up and show that to clients. The biggest gap is having the knowledge of what's actually possible in perspective.

You could take a little more time and use an agent to spin up a gateway and generate a perspective view following this schema. That way you aren't wondering whether the mock up can be translated to perspective.

3

Claude Code is very capable of not just mockups, but building functional Perspective views/projects. Over the past couple months I've transitioned from using the Designer 100% of the time to build views, to only a few percent to make my own tweaks to the ZIP patches CC builds for me to import (using a Designer module CC built to facilitate the workflow).

The designs are still mostly my own, and require a lot of iterative refinement, but occasionally a nice feature I didn't anticipate will emerge from Claude's interpretation. More often, I have to point out what falls short or doesn't work right, but it never takes long to iron out the kinks.