_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end
QuercusMax wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
I'm currently building a retro styled home assistant control app
running on a raspberry pi with a 3.5" touchscreen with all custom UI,
and I'm making it vaguely win3.1 styled, complete with color themes
including the famous Hot Dog Stand.
It's very satisfying to see these old UI styles - looks great on a
crappy little screen. Not everything needs to be Material Design or
whatever - it just takes up so much space!
Febriss33 wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
in my opinion giving a strong idea helps a lot. just bring it clear in
your mind and try to transfer with strong and clear scheme. in my
experience this reduces the do and re do thing
dustarion wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
I think its quite easy to get non sloppy looking ui code.
I normally start by asking it to follow apple design guidelines, and
then customise it from there.
The thing that makes it slop, is when you're not specific about what
you want. Then it's going to use the "average of all code" designs.
The other things is especially when adding animation, people often
prompt "animate the button" which to a developer is very vague and
would need alot more work.
dizhn wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
I am on a mobile browser and the desktopy look of the gtk and qt ones
are pretty bad.
tracerbulletx wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
I guess this is subjective, but this is almost the meme of the backend
engineer with no design taste.
Karliss wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
Did anyone commenting about Qt and how it makes sense actually looked
at the result?
I don't think any of Qt default themes in last 10-15 years have looked
anything close to that. With all those gradients and gray rectangular
boxes it's more like a parody of early 2000s x11 theming and Flash
based UI frameworks. My personal expectation when hearing QT style
would be more like the builtin Fusion style.
If you ignore the central part with gradients, right side with square
3d boxes look a bit like classic win32 style (which would also be what
QT used on windows by default) but you wouldn't normally end up with so
many nested raised 3d boxes (or visible nested boxes in general).
Buttons (and other clickable subcomponents) are raised, tabs are
raised, but UI group elements have more of recessed border and you
would use it sparingly. Often you would have just a separator line or
empty space for grouping elements in flatter UI hierarchy.
Qt is GUI framwework for C++. How would having a bunch of C++ code
containing barely any styling in training material help styling a
website? Also the whole point is that it's a style that you don't
recreate it hundred times it's what you get automatically by letting
the GUI framework and theme engine do it's work. The modern Qt with Qt
Quick/QML and it's flavor of CSS is closer to web development but those
kind of Apps lack any kind of characteristic QT style since the authors
are more likely to build the styling from scratch (resulting in one of
those UIs with random image in background and hardly recognizable
widgets) or based on builtin Qt versions of Google/Windows/Apple style
guides. Wouldn't expect any modern QML based app to look like the
obtained "Qt" style.
In the traditional desktop apps based on QtWidgets, you can customize
the style with css but the hard coded logic within the theming engine
(implemented as native dll) is equally important for the look, not
everything is is defined by css. You have to do either very little
customization (minor styling for individual special elements maybe a
color pallet swap) or override everything, otherwise it's easy to end
up with ugly, broken result. Typical problems being Qt changing default
base theme based on platform, theme engine switching to fallback
rendering path once you override certain style properties.
Another important aspect of the classic desktop look which doesn't
really translate well to websites is the set of widgets. Frameworks
like Qt(widgets) provide reasonably wide range of widgets and you would
use them as is. Unless you really needed it rarely would you create a
widget from scratch or recreate what's already available. You wouldn't
recreate a button, checkbox or a dropdown(combobox) using bunch of divs
which can't be said about the modern web design. You might customize
the behavior of builtin widget with subclassing or by combining
multiple builtin widgets. The API for drawing custom widget from
scratch is a pain and using it correctly to properly integrate with
theme engine is even bigger one.
atoav wrote 9 hours 54 min ago:
I decided to tell the LLM to not generate any CSS for a web frontend I
am working on. It is just not worth the hassle and doing it myself is
actually a way to think about usability and design in a valuable way,
that flows back into how I want the whole service to be structured.
The design coming out of a LLM may be okay if you have nothing to do
with design and can't program CSS, I just see a deeply inconsistent
mess.
I am convinced well designed software has to be thought out from the
user perspective. And if I am the one to commandeer a LLM, designing
myself is part of thinking about what I want.
jb_briant wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
I believe the ideal solution would be to take a genAI image from
gpt-image2 and transform it onto a pseudo-deterministic layout.
Did anyone tried a non-naive approach, aka throwing the image with a
simple "rebuild it" prompt ?
george_max wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
Most of them don't look amazing, but I like the GTK version the most --
even though it looks slightly outdated.
AmareshHebbar wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
This makes perfect sense. Qt has very clear and strict design rules.
Standard web design has too many options. When the AI has too many
options, it just guesses and makes a mess. Forcing a desktop style
fixes that
SamDc73 wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
I think the original looks the best and by a large margin
aireview_pro wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
On the practical tooling side â I built a service that does on-demand
AI code review (aireviewpro.loca.lt). Interesting observation: the
model is much better at catching security issues than performance bugs,
probably because security patterns are more well-defined in training
data.
libeclipse wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
> Only one generation stuck out to me. Simply asking it to make it look
like a Qt app - to my tasteless eyes - removed almost all feeling of
slop. You can check some of the results out [here]( [1] ).
All of these examples sites are broken on mobile for me.
HTML [1]: https://envs.net/~volpe/projects/ai-design.html
LZ_Khan wrote 21 hours 7 min ago:
I think what makes something look like slop is rounded corner cards
with slight shadow, and sans serif font.
Also full caps / overemphasis on text that doesn't need it. For example
"DEMOCRAT" and "REPUBLICAN" in this example.
psygn89 wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
You went from slop to outdated (as far as looks are concerned). But
hey, what's old is new again, maybe we'll come full circle again.
derefr wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
I'd be curious to see a version prompted to recapitulate the style of a
Windows 9x app.
Everyone these days seems to fondly recall win9x as the last era when
there was an actual visual "system" that applications actually obeyed
(...or rather, that every app was forced into obeying, since Windows
just wasn't very extensible to performant custom third-party controls
until DirectDraw came along. But I digress.) I wonder whether LLMs can
build something that actually obeys those rules (i.e. composes
everything out of a hierarchy of [simulacra of] first-party W95-era GDI
controls â think "Minesweeper is a grid of buttons with icons on
them", that kind of thing), rather than just vaguely looking like W95.
flo_r wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
Tried macOS HIG for the same reason and got similar results, less slop,
more structure. I think what's happening is that the model has a very
specific grammar to pull from instead of averaging over everything
web-related it's ever seen.
The SaaS one is interesting as a control, it's essentially asking for
the average of all modern web UI, so you get exactly that.
cute_boi wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
My eyes are so sharp i can easily tell which one is slop coded whether
it is QT or GTK style theming lol.
willchis wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
What about a backend that prompts the LLM at runtime and generates a
new frontend for every user? It'd be like A/B (C/D/E/F..) testing with
no possible way to validate the results or fix bugs. Somebody make me
their CTO, quick.
pattilupone wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
Similarly, I've gotten a few reasonable results by asking for Microsoft
Office 2007 style or the Windows Vista file explorer, stuff like that.
evenman02 wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like there is a bug in the "Find State" dialog. If you search
"AR" for Arkansas and press the "Set R" or "Set D", it toggles the
Arizona state count, not Arkansas
jupp0r wrote 1 day ago:
Just have your agent use an existing design system. They provide
coherence and many styles to choose from (and customization if you
really need that for your personal use). I wouldn't expect agents to
invent a coherent component library from scratch for every project.
It's a solved problem. I'd personally just use something very popular
like MUI and be done.
jjcm wrote 1 day ago:
I'll share my results / my approach. Here are three designs from the
prompt->design thing I'm working on: [1] [2] (same as above, but with
your simplified map) [3] I've found that starting using diffusion to
render your creation, then using a LLM to build from the image creates
much less of a slop feel than just starting out with a LLM. You
wouldn't tell a construction crew to just build you a house without an
architectural plan, so why tell a LLM what visual result you want
without a visual guide?
my thing is diffui.ai if you want to check it out. It's basically a
harness for diffusion models to generate UI, as well as agent
integration for handoff.
HTML [1]: https://image.non.io/10037610-e35e-44b0-b5c6-69d8fb772109.webp
HTML [2]: https://image.non.io/dcf067bc-e296-4744-9b36-2b882f3d791d.webp
HTML [3]: https://image.non.io/94fdfb04-c57d-4b81-8d53-7b0f707e4d63.webp
fireant wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
That's really nice. Have you tested if it works well with longer and
more detailed prompts? For example adding more whole product specs
and so on. It would be nice to generate a design system from
generated UI you like instead of recreating that UI directly.
tbreschi wrote 12 hours 1 min ago:
This is an interesting yet simple approach. To the OPâs original
question, how might you abstract this into a âdesign systemâ that
can be applied to their other projects?
nozzlegear wrote 1 day ago:
I kinda liked the Original, HIG and Windows 11 versions the most. When
I think "AI slop" (in terms of web design), I think dark theme, rich
purples and vibrant hues, huge headings, etc. The SaaS one kind of has
that with the purples and vibrant hues; it easily looks the "sloppiest"
to my eye.
Personal preferences I suppose.
the_lucifer wrote 1 day ago:
> I think dark theme, rich purples and vibrant hues, huge headings,
etc.
Don't forget the thin and tall serif fonts, with one singular
italicized word in the title.
lherron wrote 1 day ago:
You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for
decent results.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/fr...
satvikpendem wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
Fable was really good at design as well just off the bat without any
skills. Seems like Anthropic explicitly trained it for frontend.
brinki wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
frontend-design skill was a game changer to me, especially for
copying styles from websites i like
Rastonbury wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Try this if you have access to Claude Design, go to sites you like,
grab the html/css and a few screenshot and ask it to build a project,
it makes an almost 1:1 reproduction. place those files into ur
frontend project
woadwarrior01 wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
> Remember: Claude is capable of extraordinary creative work. Don't
hold back, show what can truly be created when thinking outside the
box and committing fully to a distinctive vision.
Manifestation for LLMs. :)
nate wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
Stuart Smalley (snl) must have written it.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMRX-Wj2WOk
lherron wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
âRedesign the site using frotend-design skillâ
HTML [1]: https://race-to-270.vercel.app/
a_t48 wrote 22 hours 5 min ago:
Why is everything so....wide?
viccis wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
I've had better results with this, when it comes to functional UIs
rather than marketing sites: [1] Found it on reddit after Claude
produced the lamest looking generic forms for all the pages on a
project I had it build. This did a pass over it and basically fixed
it all one shot.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/Dammyjay93/interface-design
gunapologist99 wrote 17 hours 8 min ago:
Looking at the examples on that page: Claude really is in love with
browns and oranges, isn't it.
leptons wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
>Apply the squint test to your work:
>Blur your eyes or step back
>Can you still perceive hierarchy?
>Is anything jumping out at you?
Telling an eyeless clanker to "blur your eyes" is just so
ridiculous. "Is anything jumping out at you?" That's quite a thing
for a machine to reason about, and reads like a waste of tokens.
I'm not sure who is writing these things, but they seem rather
clueless.
Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading
through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user
interfaces.
I'm pretty sure I'd have better luck just telling the LLM
explicitly what I want, because experience in UI/UX is still better
than what an LLM would slop out on its own.
stefan_ wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!",
and this is it?
> NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font
families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes
(particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable
layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks
context-specific character.
> brutally minimal, maximalist chaos, retro-futuristic,
organic/natural, luxury/refined, playful/toy-like,
editorial/magazine, brutalist/raw, art deco/geometric, soft/pastel,
industrial/utilitarian
> React, Vue
Sorry, but this is garbage.
hypfer wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
I've been wondering for a while if ignoring most of that bubble and
whatever it cooks up might be a wrong move on my part.
Glad to see that it's just noise.
I suppose the biggest effects these skills have is to prime the
user to expect something positive.
Actually kinda like what we do with LLMs. Just put a word in their
context window and they suddenly start behaving different because
probabilities changed.
Exoristos wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
Everyone should read through the (very short) skill file. Are we
supposed to be this naive or dimwitted? LLM marketing is a
transparent swindle at this point.
kbelder wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
"make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the
context."
What is it supposed to do when fed instructions like this?
esperent wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
I think it's very clear what it's supposed to do from that text.
Just read it at face value.
Whether it does anything useful or not is another matter. I don't
think Anthropic or anyone else is doing evals on these skills,
and for something subjective like design that would be especially
hard anyway.
In other words, does this skill actually change the designs you
get out in a positive way, consistently? Who knows? But it's
certainly good marketing for Anthropic that whenever agentic web
design gets brought up, someone will definitely mention this
skill and confidently claim that they get better results by using
it, without anything except social proof to back that up.
PaulHoule wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
For years I would use free fonts and spend hours picking them out
and getting depressed because they all had something wrong with
themâ¦. You get what you pay for.
For a recent project I really liked a font which was in the Adobe
Fonts collection and when I had to set stuff in that font with
Pillow I gladly bought the font from the foundry because it looks
great and saves hours of searching for a âfreeâ font, that is
âfreeâ as in puppy.
duffycommaryan wrote 1 day ago:
The frontend-design skill defeats its own purpose imo. The design
equivalent of "it's not x, it's y."
tclancy wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
It's load-bearing though.
airstrike wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
You just need a few more smoke tests and you'll be fine.
smusamashah wrote 1 day ago:
I have seen so many brown sites that look all the same, all designed
by this thing most likely. So no.
Retr0id wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
Agreed. It's not that the designs it produces are bad necessarily,
they're just very same-y. People often talk about the bootstrap
era, but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly
associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the
frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole).
sublinear wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
The comparison is pretty accurate though. The moment anyone dared
to stray from the bootstrap defaults is when the whole thing
would go to shit.
Every steaming pile said less about the development effort and so
much more about the project management. This same boneheaded
top-down approach is why AI isn't working for anyone without
being willing to pour as much effort into babysitting as just
writing the damn code yourself.
Old adages continue to ring true and as loud as ever. There's no
such thing as a free lunch.
re-thc wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
> but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly
associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the
frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole)
They were, at least for that era. Just maybe not at AI-scale.
PaulHoule wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
Like you had to know a little HTML in the bootstrap era. I
made what I thought was a pretty nifty landing page but I got
endless complaints because âit looked like bootstrapâ
taimaishuzzzz wrote 1 day ago:
claude slop :D
tamimio wrote 1 day ago:
Those arenât âslopâ, those are exactly what non webdev used to
see in the past decade, now that webdevs are seeing it done without
them doing it and everywhere, the reality check hit them hard. Gtk/qt
UI feels like duct tape toys even before AI, material is so tasteless
but years ago it was the âde factoâ in any design or icons set,
most front end ui/ux are literally copy paste of the same template and
components, even before AI. Imo only some old apple and windows vista
where the UI was actually pleasant to see and interact with.
solidasparagus wrote 1 day ago:
I think the slop part is just what you get when you inject no opinions
and put in no effort to apply taste (which you probably have and/or
could develop). No care is put in. It looks generic and sloppy because
it is generic and sloppy. You might have preferences over which generic
and sloppy style is preferred, but at the end of the day a UI built
without effort is going to look like what it is.
But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be
opinionated, why do you care?
unleaded wrote 1 day ago:
This is mostly the fault of the model, a lot of them have been trained
to generate HTML in a specific style. Claude's is pretty distinct for
example, I think the new DeepSeek copies it. Some of them can generate
more humanlike HTML like Kimi K2 IIRC, which I feel is the model with
the least amount of post-training in general.
It's necessary if you don't want it to generate HTML with images and
other assets you don't have of course, that's why they use emojis or
meticulously handcrafted SVGs, or WebAudio synthesized sound which
pretty much no humans did before.
Xotic007 wrote 1 day ago:
Makes sense. Slop is basically what you get when there's nothing
specific to copy and so the AI it just averages every web style
together. Qt works because there's really only one way Qt looks.Modern
web has a million versions of everything so you average all that and
get slop.
kstenerud wrote 1 day ago:
TLDR: Once a design gets old enough that LLMs can reproduce them, they
are now "slop".
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
This seems to be a new iteration of what IMO made frontend work
somewhat painful for almost the entire time I've been building
software. It used to take the form that people did something with
html that it wasn't designed to do. That thing looked cool and so
everyone wanted it. This lead to pain and the perception that the
tool is inadequate. So we eventually got CSS. And it continued there.
Someone figured out a way to get cool dropshadows and rounded
corners. These were cumbersome to implement. And so on.
LordDragonfang wrote 1 day ago:
On the matter of being without taste -- which I assume the author is
using as a self-derogatory descriptor for not having skill in UI design
-- the styling of links on this page could use some change. The link
color is so close to the body color that I initially thought there
weren't any links, and scrolled trying to find the examples. You can't
both remove the underline and have such a low contrast font color, it's
bad UX.
(For the record, even though I don't mind qt, I think this particular
example still comes across as slop because of the overuse of gradients
on buttons and headings. In general, a lot of these suffer from overuse
of gradients, but OP appears to just be averse to border-radius)
high_byte wrote 1 day ago:
on the other hand steve jobs would've called Qt human-slop
guess it's a matter of taste
kvasserman wrote 1 day ago:
I thought that AI would at least be good at 2 things: writing (text)
and doing UI. It's not good at either. Text it generated reads like
slop and UI it creates looks like slop. The way I approach it now is
this: for text, I have to write it myself and only use AI to check
grammar and catch weirdly phrased passages. For UI, it's like with the
rest of the code. You have to stay on the top of it and keep demanding
changes to match your vision/architecture/taste until it gets it close
to what you want. In both cases, not knowing what "good" looks like is
a real problem, because AI definitely has no idea.
XorNot wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
I really just want someone to make a decent point and click design
library. I don't want to steward an amateur coder I just want to draw
exactly what I want out of toolkit of good enough components.
Give me VB6 or whatever for the web.
aviperl wrote 1 day ago:
Only a small anecdote, but I'm 2 projects into telling Claude to "make
it look like Google podcasts" and getting satisfactory results. Still
smells like llm in parts, but overall it is not screaming low effort.
bronlund wrote 1 day ago:
I donno. They all look ugly.
When making small tools for myself, I just tell it to use Svelte and
then wrap it up using Tauri - no graphical cues whatsoever. And they
usually comes out pretty good by my taste.
dewey wrote 1 day ago:
That's just the "original" they mentioned here without a prompt ( [1]
) but these ofen are easily identified as AI generated. I don't think
it's too bad but it's definitely a tell.
HTML [1]: https://envs.net/~volpe/projects/ai-design.html
mynameisvlad wrote 1 day ago:
Is that a problem?
kordlessagain wrote 1 day ago:
HN has huge issues right now with AI generated code or design.
I have a friend who is a graphic designer/market strategy guy and
he's been using Anthropic to build sites and even did an agent on
his own page that helps guide the user through onboarding. I
reviewed the code a few times and gave him some tips and it looks
pretty good and works flawlessly.
He maintain a lot of customer's sites (design wise) and all the
customers are responsible for their own hosting and ssl certs. He
got tired of them calling him about expired ones, so he had
Claude write a script and use Agentmail to notify him when one
expires.
A few of them were needing updating when he wrote it, and when I
reviewed it (with Claude Fable) it discovered that in the event
they were all up-to-date, it wouldn't email him. Other than that,
it works perfectly and runs on his machine on a schedule.
This morning he had it write a script to monitor his computer for
load, after having issues with Adobe.
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
What year is it? If you're running a barebones server, just use
certbot. It'll automatically renew your certs. Very easy to set
up and it's been stable for years without touching it.
mschuster91 wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
> HN has huge issues right now with AI generated code or
design.
Yes, because for those of us who enjoy scrolling through /new
despite the deluge of spam that has always been a problem, we
now have to sift through not just the obvious AI generated
stuff that we can discard after a few sentences, but also the
stuff where it only becomes obvious after already sinking in
10, 15 minutes of your time that it is undisclosed AI slop with
a touch of human effort (or a non-OpenAI/Anthropic model).
And there have been cases here where someone submitted AI vibed
stuff and in the comments it became pretty obvious they had
zero understanding of what they were doing. The amount of
collective time wasted in this thread is absurd.
Personally, I'd love to see HN adopt something like
r/amateurradio:
> Moderation feels that this is the best course of action in
response from the community. It prevents people from just
shoving out stuff they vibecoded the night before but allows
for those apps that gain traction a chance to be shared.
HTML [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1t6n8xk...
petercooper wrote 1 day ago:
If you're just having fun with it, there are a whole bunch of other
things that produce interesting options, like asking it to theme
according to a movie (think Clockwork Orange, Backrooms, anything with
a strong aesthetic), or throw screenshots and photos at it and use it
as a "design system" (magazine/print layouts can work well with this on
stronger models).
rafram wrote 1 day ago:
All of these look quite terrible to my eyes. None of them really
resemble the classic AI slop landing page, either (of which this [1] is
a decent illustration). I'm no huge fan of that style, but it's at
least readable and functional, and thus better than the results you got
by a mile.
It seems like you were starting with an existing HTML file you asked it
to redesign. Generating from scratch with strict guidelines could be
more representative.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/
duffycommaryan wrote 1 day ago:
Agree. I find this route reliably produces better results. Not sure I
understand why though. Intuitively I'd think the models would be able
to do approximate designs with higher fidelity using code as the
primary reference.
sevenseacat wrote 1 day ago:
I had to read the post about five times and still didn't see the link
to the actual examples - I actually had to view source to see the URL.
I like the idea - all of the designs are pretty meh though. If I had to
pick one, I'd pick the HIG one (apart from that cursed glass effect on
scroll) and then probably the Win11 one.
toppy wrote 1 day ago:
"You can check some of the results out here" in Qt section
m00dy wrote 1 day ago:
design.md
LucidLynx wrote 1 day ago:
>> Slop is not a distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many
others. Even when I got it to make a page to look like X, it looked
like X with slop.
Today, I can visit a website and instantly tell it was generated using
LLMs and agents from A to Z:
1. Everything is in blue or mauve gradient, with a white background,
and a single JavaScript-heavy page that lags as soon as you scroll a
little.
2. There are always a ton of 404 pages.
3. Third, the HTML comments often expose credentials and to-do
listsâsometimes even right above the login page (true story...).
This kind of website is a hard pass for me, and I add the company (and
its founders) to my personal blacklist of people and companies Iâll
never use anything from.
deaux wrote 1 day ago:
So you can tell for maybe 20% of websites that have been generated by
LLMs over the last few months.
jstummbillig wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think that is true, in the way that it always wasn't: How
would you be able to tell when it's done properly?
Think WordPress installations: Depending on how it's done you can
either tell at a glance (probably ~90% of WP installations at some
points in time) or you have no clue until you look at the html
source.
Of course, when given the option to not do it properly is always
alluring and then you can tell.
mft_ wrote 1 day ago:
Can you quantify what it is you donât like? Like, to my eyes
âoriginalâ is fine - and itâs very similar to âQTâ expect
with rounded corners and brighter colours.
properbrew wrote 1 day ago:
I find it such a hard thing to quantify, I know it's not helpful but
you can just feel the slop seep through.
I'm not sure if it's because I've iterated through so many sites that
LLMs have produced that "slop" is instantly recognisable and it just
feels soulless.
Not like web pages ever had a soul, but it's not there on the generic
LLM generated sites.
smnplk wrote 1 day ago:
Imagine you get this original version from a frontend guy pre AI ,
would you still see slop seep through ?
HughParry wrote 1 day ago:
Iâd probably think it looked alright.
I think itâs the fact that my eyes have been blasted with a
certain visual âvibeâ, and Iâve come to associate it with
apps that are, on average, a bit lazy
emsixteen wrote 1 day ago:
I'd probably just accept that I'd hired them through fiverr.
stabbles wrote 1 day ago:
This begs for a modern version of [1] , where the CSS is generated by
different LLMs and prompts.
HTML [1]: https://csszengarden.com/
fractallyte wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
llmzengarden?
sevenseacat wrote 1 day ago:
that'd be awesome
iSnow wrote 1 day ago:
Obviously this is a personal preference, but the multiple layers of
beveled grey on the Qt UI is not something I like, as it forces a lot
of grouping on the eye where it doesn't serve any purpose.
I would go with the original, Apple or the Win11 one. Material would be
good, what's with the lavender shades?
I always try to reduce the palette: say two background shades max, no
drop shadows, only as many foreground colors as needed and if it seems
to bland, add more bells and whistles.
PaulHoule wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
At this point I dunno if Win11 has an âoriginalâ UI. Up until
Win 8 Microsoft kept introducing new widget sets. I think the
official answer for how you are supposed to develop desktop apps is
âuse Electronâ so far as I can tell⦠or better yet make a web
application.
kwanbix wrote 1 day ago:
I liked GTK and WIn11.
ramesh31 wrote 1 day ago:
Tailwind is the answer. Always pure Tailwind, not custom classes +
utilities. It makes a massive difference vs. stylesheets. The LLM is
able to actually reason about your UI in discrete chunks with a
semantic layer over the styling, vs. bouncing back and forth between
CSS/HTML and trying to reason about custom classes generated on the
fly.
kingkongjaffa wrote 1 day ago:
Does anyone have good examples of well designed web applications - not
landing pages or peoples tech blogs, which are often listed here on HN.
But like actual applications that do a complex task with the user using
it as a tool.
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
Linear
crazysim wrote 1 day ago:
[1] has a reputation
HTML [1]: https://www.mcmaster.com/
dominotw wrote 1 day ago:
coulve been a pdf file
mywittyname wrote 1 day ago:
I've been doing this recently - working with Qt on a local app.
I've had good luck providing a png "design board" with all of the
template colors and having the first task be to build out a design
gallery with all of the ui widget. Then have the design docs specify
which component to use. Ensure that the documents specify to only use
pre-existing components and have a list of each component and their
intended use cases.
Of course, this learning came after seeing how awful V1 of the app was.
Initially, it looked really impressive, but once you started clicking
around it became obvious how incoherent the design was.
Claude's new frontend-design plugin is solid for web apps in my
testing. My wife and I have been using it to build her an app and her
discerning design eye is largely impressed with what it's done.
swiftcoder wrote 1 day ago:
To me the "AI slop" mostly just looks like the last decade of SaaS
products.
Do the landing pages of auth0.com, devcycle.com, micro.com, or
datadog.com not look like slop to other people?
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, no these don't look like AI slop. At worst they are 'web
slop'. But even with that said a site that looks like this is what I
expect these days from most businesses. I'm not looking at these
companies for their far out web design capabilities, in fact a site
that's somewhat standardized and has things where we expect them is
far more useful.
deaux wrote 1 day ago:
auth0 does get close to slop. If I were them I'd definitely change
things up. Devcycle and Datadog are nothing like generated slop. I
haven't seen Fable websites yet - supposedly a lot better - but Opus
and GPT can't design anything even close to those two. They can
implement it if you give them a screenshot, but that's not designing
something. Micro.com shows me a domain sale page.
swiftcoder wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
sorry, that was meant to be miro.com, before autocorrect struck
wuliwong wrote 1 day ago:
My experience with this is 180 degrees opposite. It's been really easy
to create really nice UIs for all kinds of one-off apps I've made for
myself with AI. In fact, it has been one of the most fun parts of this
whole AI thing. ¯\_(ã)_/¯
itake wrote 1 day ago:
Any chance you could share screenshots?
Even the example apps in the post seemed like AI slop to me. Common
markers are too noisy/busy (mainly repeated or rephrased
information). Text being a bit too big (Codex-only?).
chorkpop wrote 1 day ago:
Yes in my experience, AI designs might look okay on first glance
but when you really start to look you start to see strange and
inconsistent things. Similar to looking at generated code.
contextfree wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
Someone on Twitter dubbed it the "agentic ick"
mywittyname wrote 1 day ago:
You can have it fix these things. It has the tools to analyze
screenshots of the app and correct things like formating,
alignment, color, etc.
I've been building a personal app with Opus 4.8 over the past two
weeks and the design is excellent. I provided it with
screenshots of what I wanted, then had it build out a gallery of
functional UI elements (like designers do). Claude built out a
tool that would screenshot the app, compare it to the design
screenshot and automatically reposition elements or update the
styles to match.
You can also provide it with a style guideline prompt and have it
double check all the work it produced matches the UI style
guidelines before committing.
singingtoday wrote 1 day ago:
This has also been my experience. I do find it takes a review pass
with a direction including things like "make sure text isn't
overlapping." "Make sure text isn't overflowing out of buttons" - I
find that's a really common one.
iqihs wrote 1 day ago:
as someone with little to no design background they all look the same
to me except the bloated sass which is clearly inferior
is there a way to quantifiably measure how much better one design would
be from another?
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
No. It's completely subjective.
The whole "AI slop" noise is, at its core, human slop. It is people
applying a hopefully pejorative label, trying to appeal to other slop
aficionados that like whatever the current trendy slur is, in an
objectively undefinable way.
In this case this guy likes the way Qt apps, they think it looks
better, but it isn't a big trick they are revealing: They made it
conform to the style they like, but this doesn't translate to anyone
else in any measurable way. I think web apps looking like Qt apps
feel like the late 90s and it's just weird, but my taste also is
entirely subjective and mine alone.
wuliwong wrote 1 day ago:
This article is purely subjective. I'm sure there are some academics
that could explain ways to objectively score usability but this
article is purely subjective.
voxleone wrote 1 day ago:
Qt is heavily represented in training data. Qt has existed for decades
and the model has likely seen Qt tutorials, screenshots, source code,
discussions, etc. As a result, "Qt application" is a highly coherent
concept in the latent space. "Qt app" is almost like a named
distribution.
abraxas wrote 1 day ago:
I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop.
The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no
longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since
desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in
favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop.
AI is just amplifying it.
Retr0id wrote 1 day ago:
Continuing in that vein, it'd be interesting to see a Win98 version.
Edit:
HTML [1]: https://retr0.id/stuff/deslop/
vunderba wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
There's an entire lightweight CSS lib around the Win9x look as
well:
HTML [1]: https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
contextfree wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
It's really funny that it uses the Windows dotted-line focus
rectangle as a stylistic signifier of "Windowsy thing" while having
no idea what it's for.
Retr0id wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
Heh well there was a dashed border in the "original" version and
I suppose it just made it the windows-y equivalent. I imagine it
wouldn't have done the same if it was prompted from scratch.
("it" being Opus 4.8 btw)
dofm wrote 1 day ago:
Oh man. I am a sort of pragmatic AI cynic and I wasn't even a fan
of how Windows 98 looked but my heart just skipped a beat.
What does it do if you suggest it looks like an
OpenLook/XView/OpenWindows application? (That is where my heart
really belongs)
Doubt there's much in the training set...
econ wrote 1 day ago:
I use to make whole websites using system colors. The colors kept
getting worse and eventually everyone hated it including myself.
unleaded wrote 1 day ago:
I really wish CSS added an option to set font antialiasing and
hinting. Would make all these old windows style websites look 1000x
better.
thewebguyd wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, that's immediately so much better than the others to the point
its kind of sad.
We've really went behind in terms of UX as an industry.
slopinthebag wrote 1 day ago:
Unironically the best one out of the lot. Man, we digressed so far
from where we were...
econ wrote 1 day ago:
I fix some bugs here
HTML [1]: https://phpbb.go-here.nl
Gander5739 wrote 1 day ago:
For some balance in the replies, I must say I find this rather
hideous. To each their own, I suppose.
properbrew wrote 1 day ago:
This one works well. I think it's because there's no shine to it,
it's just the data, what you need, right there without trying to
fluff it all out with rounded edges and superfluous stuff.
shooly wrote 1 day ago:
What? Do you not see all those borders and insets literally
everywhere here?
properbrew wrote 1 day ago:
Well yes, but if I wanted a completely flat lifeless page I
would just use excel and turn off borders.
econ wrote 1 day ago:
The opposite, to change it into the modern version remove all
borders and make all backgrounds the same color.
That is how to make it uneasy on the eyes.
vitalyan1234 wrote 1 day ago:
i love this so much it's unreal
ghrl wrote 1 day ago:
That's refreshingly usable and not-slop-looking, nice additional
style.
DIR <- back to front page