I’m not a huge fan of AI’s heavy use of emojis, and I know I’m not the only one. Occasionally I appreciate emojis as a visual cue in a long AI chat, but I’ve found that coding agents tend to use them too heavily in UIs, especially as navigation elements. They tend to look chaotic (too many colors that might not match the rest of the UI), and are an obvious sign of an out-of-the-box AI project.
My quick way to get around this is to instruct the coding agent to use an icon library. I’ve been using Bootstrap Icons most frequently, though there are plenty of other open icon sets out there. You can even leave the choice to the coding agent to fit to your project’s needs.
I make sure to tell it to download the icon library (at least the relevant portions) to the repo, rather than using from a public CDN, to limit external dependencies.