> do you find that a lot of people use diffusion models for UI mockups? i’ve always been surprised that people wouldn’t use LLMs exclusively for that instead

Not yet, but it's what I quit my role at Figma to make a bet on for my startup. In my experience diffusion is a far, far better creative designer than LLMs. LLMs are trained for consistent output, which makes sense for a billing function, but leads to some very obvious smell when doing frontend work (take claude design as an example - it's often very obvious what comes out of it). Image models have a bit more creativity baked in, and are trained on color usage, whitespace, and visual balance a lot more. I've found the image->html approach leads to much better results, basically using an image model as an architect.

Would love to be connected with the team for when you all are ready to finetune it. My email is j@diffui.ai

When VL models started becoming popular a while back, a relatively common workflow was to use generative models (like the original Nano Banana) to generate initial UI mockups and then throw the images at a VL model to convert them into CSS and HTML.

However feels like LLMs such as Opus 5.5 in particular are surprisingly adept at generating UI mockups right off the bat these days. And since they’re already code, they’re much easier to modify and tweak.