Standing on the Shoulders of Great Components
Every modern web application is built from the same fundamental pieces — buttons, forms, modals, dropdowns, navigation menus, data tables. Building these from scratch every time is wasteful. That's why component libraries exist.
Today, we're announcing that Layout's AI now has deep integration with shadcn/ui, one of the most popular and well-crafted component libraries in the React ecosystem. This means when you ask Layout to build your app, it reaches for battle-tested, beautifully designed components instead of generating everything from zero.
What This Means for Your Apps
Higher Quality Out of the Box
shadcn/ui components are built on Radix UI primitives, which means they come with robust accessibility, keyboard navigation, and screen reader support baked in. When Layout uses these components in your app, you get a level of polish that would take days to implement manually.
- Buttons with proper focus states, loading spinners, and variant styles
- Forms with inline validation, error messages, and accessible labels
- Dialogs that trap focus, close on escape, and animate smoothly
- Data Tables with sorting, filtering, pagination, and row selection
- Dropdown Menus with keyboard navigation and nested submenus
Consistent Design Language
One of the hardest parts of building a UI is maintaining visual consistency. When different components are built by different people (or different AI prompts), the result is often a patchwork of conflicting styles.
With shadcn/ui integration, every component in your app shares the same design tokens — colors, border radii, shadows, spacing, and typography. The result looks cohesive and intentional, like it was designed by a single person with a clear vision.
Full Customization
Unlike traditional component libraries that lock you into their design decisions, shadcn/ui components are copied directly into your project. This means you own the code. Want to change the primary color? Update a CSS variable. Need a button variant that doesn't exist? Modify the component file directly.
Layout takes advantage of this by customizing components to match your app's visual style. When you describe your design preferences — "use a dark theme with blue accents" or "make it minimal with lots of white space" — the AI adjusts the component theme accordingly.
How It Works in Practice
Here's what happens when you ask Layout to build a settings page:
Your prompt: "Create a settings page with sections for profile information, notification preferences, and account security."
What Layout generates:
- A Tabs component for switching between sections
- Form components with Input, Select, and Switch elements for each setting
- A Card wrapper around each section for visual grouping
- Button components for save and cancel actions
- A Toast notification for confirming changes
- Proper form validation with error messages
Every one of these components comes from shadcn/ui, fully styled and accessible. The AI wires them together with the right props, event handlers, and layout structure.
The Best of Both Worlds
AI code generation is powerful but imperfect. Component libraries are polished but still require manual assembly. By combining the two, Layout gives you the speed of AI generation with the quality of hand-crafted components.
You describe what you want. The AI figures out which components to use, how to compose them, and how to style them for your specific use case. The result is an app that looks and feels like it was built by a senior front-end engineer — because in a way, it was.
Try It Now
Component library integration is available now in all Layout projects. Start building your next app and see how shadcn/ui components elevate the quality of AI-generated code. Better components, better apps, less effort.