I build a tool in this space, so bias disclosed.

Agents are amazing at writing simple frontend, but dealing with the complexity of real apps? including state and how it propogates through the runtime? not so much. forcing the agent to either sepnd crazy amount of tokens to reason and guesstimate what the runtime might look like, and eventually make mistakes:

- spacing that looks fine in code but wrong in the browser

- a component that breaks only at one viewport

- HMR updates that do not match what the agent expected

- console/runtime errors the agent never saw

- CSS changes that technically apply but visually miss the target

For backend-ish work, repo context can be enough more often. For frontend, the page itself is part of the task.

I am testing a workflow where the agent can inspect DOM, screenshots, interactions, source, routes, browser logs, dev-server logs, and HMR feedback before editing.

Link for context: https://frontman.sh/
Fully Open Sourced and Self Hostable: https://github.com/frontman-ai/frontman

For frontend devs using AI agents: what runtime context actually helps?

And what is just tool bloat

Thanks!

Are there any Dev's from India, let have a chat!