Anyone have good lines to include in a prompt to direct LLMs from their default tailwind/Linear/etc. design modes on the first shot?

I agree there is a "sameness" that you get from tailwind.

Tailwind has a unique benefit in that you can change the CSS of the page and just that page. There is no chance that you make a change that breaks the rest of the site because you wrote a rule wrong. In some environments/applications this is a big deal.

But honestly that's the only credit i'll give it. The class names are still confusing to me and you do get more flexibility with CSS. And i'd rather be writing classless css and targeting custom HTML elements anyway.

Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" framework even though they were capable of writing the CSS from scratch. Now LLMs have trained on this boring cookie-cutter UI work so no one should be surprised that this is what comes out.

https://impeccable.style/slop/ is a great approach to identifying slop