You can't copy a feeling

Why "just copy this site" is the wrong instruction to give an AI, and what to ask for instead.

Spent half a Saturday trying to get an AI to copy a site I liked. The site was simple. White space. Tight grid. A particular shape language. I could see exactly what was happening. The AI could not. It rebuilt the markup, the colors, the type. It looked nothing like the original.

What you copy when you copy a site

You copy the markup. You copy the type stack. You copy the spacing tokens. You do not copy the constraint stack. The original team made a thousand decisions about what not to put on the page, what not to animate, what density to settle on. The thing you are looking at is what is left after the trimming. The AI has the artifact and none of the trimming.

What to ask for instead

I stopped asking the AI to copy and started asking it to reverse-engineer constraints. What is the maximum line length here. What is the type scale ratio. What is the density per row. What did this team probably reject to land here. The output is no longer a clone. It is a list of design decisions I can choose to import or not. That is more useful than any pixel match.

Ask for the rules, not the replica

A reference gives you a target, not source code. I cannot prompt my way into someone else's taste, but I can ask the model to recover the rules behind it. Once I have those rules, I can decide which ones belong in my own work.