Interesting post. I'm notoriously bad at noticing the common characteristics in AI writing, but once they were pointed out, I realized I've been seeing them everywhere in websites.
Given that the ones that surfaced on the frontpage were pretty interesting, vibe coded or not, I’d say the voting mechanism is working as a good filter.
I expect most side-projects are being built with AI-assistance now. Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
They're also the ideal place to try out new AI tools that your professional work might not let you experiment with.
(The headline of this piece doesn't really do it justice - it misuses "vibe coded" and fails to communicate that the substance of the post is about visual design traits common with AI-generated frontends, which is a much more interesting conversation to be having. UPDATE: the headline changed, it's now much better - "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look" - it was previously "Show HN submissions tripled and are now mostly vibe-coded")
Most — all? — of these patterns come from the obsession with Tailwind that swept over the frontend in the last few years. Composable CSS classes also seem like they’d be easier for LLMs to out together.
I’m not sure we can tell what AI design looks like, Stitch and a number of other tools I’ve tried produce inconsistent, wild results. The common theme is that they’ll all look like Tailwind-style components if not given any other steering.
> A designer recently told me that “colored left borders are almost as reliable a sign of AI-generated design as em-dashes for text”, so I started to notice them on many pages.
AI definitely does seem to want to add coloured left borders, tags and superfluous numbers all over the place from my experience, you have to tell it specifically not to
I've looked at some Show HN submissions initially feeling impressed and finding it's either not even working code or it's obvious AI code someone is trying to take credit for writing themselves. If GitHub is used now as a resume builder but AI can do all the work, the signal is basically gone.
The problem is not vibe coding itself. The problem is that certain untrained people do not have or perhaps do not care to learn the necessary skills to refine the result into something novel, or clear / precise, something which communicates (clearly) the idea they are trying to convey to others (who are hoping to learn something new).
In a climate where it seems like VC are woefully bereft of the same skills, there's an impetus to just slop garbage up for any vague idea, without taking the care or time to polish it into something which has that intangibly human sense of greatness and clarity.
I see, you've done something -- but why? If you continue to ask this question, you will arrive at good science ... but many submissions are not aimed at that level of communication or stop far ahead of the point at which the question becomes interesting.
There's that phrase: "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" which strikes as poignant, except it seems like the audience today are also fools ... the inmates are running the asylum.
Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days. I don’t think that by itself is going to be a good validation of AI slop because it’s a common stack with the Vercel next.js base. And it lets you do a lot of customization so you don’t need to reinvent the wheels on things like accordions and dropdowns.
The coding tools raise the bar and muddy the waters. If "Show HN" submissions can just as easily be done by myself in a weekend, I don't pay attention. The signal-noise ratio just gets destroyed and the forum will just be ignored.
Likewise, the issue is often that many of these projects show no evidence of long term maintenance. That might be the new signal we watch for?
There also used to be a sense in the tech community of "if you build it they will come" and that has been basically completely lost at this point. Between the discussion earlier this week of people's fraudulent GH stars, and this topic, and the wave of submissions I see on e.g. r/rust, it's just hard to imagine how -- as a pure "tech nerd" -- to get eyes or assistance on projects these days.
I have projects I've held off on "Show HN" for years because I felt I wasn't ready for the flood of users or questions and criticisms. Maybe the jokes on me. (Of course like everyone else these days, I've used AI to work on them, but much of them predate agentic tools.)
Dead Internet theory is not only not wrong, we are now actively entering a time when it is finally driving the seeds of the human collectives that will define the future underground.
This is cynical. Listen if you want to put time into a project then show it to the Internet to collectively shit on it, then kudos to you. You went on a journey and gained experience through it.
Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.
There will be more and more as the coding agents advance. However, I think it'll reach a point where the people currently building the "vibe-coded" products get a better understanding of what they are actually building and the rest (vast majority) wont even bother to try coding at all, even with AI's assistance.
Funny, because as far as 'vibecoded colors', it's not the Tailwind purple anymore, I would say recently it's more of the same beige scheme this very blog post is using.
"Please read this page and make sure to remember everything in it, when I ask you to vibe code something, do the exact opposite so it doesn't look like slop. Please remember this"
i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions.
Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at.
But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.
91 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadThey're also the ideal place to try out new AI tools that your professional work might not let you experiment with.
(The headline of this piece doesn't really do it justice - it misuses "vibe coded" and fails to communicate that the substance of the post is about visual design traits common with AI-generated frontends, which is a much more interesting conversation to be having. UPDATE: the headline changed, it's now much better - "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look" - it was previously "Show HN submissions tripled and are now mostly vibe-coded")
Ethical concerns, environmental concerns, political concerns and legal concerns.
because I value the process of learning by doing
(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
I’m not sure we can tell what AI design looks like, Stitch and a number of other tools I’ve tried produce inconsistent, wild results. The common theme is that they’ll all look like Tailwind-style components if not given any other steering.
so, n=1 plus Baader-Meinhof? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
I'm much more critical of closed-source, subscription, wrappers over open source software of simple prompts.
In a climate where it seems like VC are woefully bereft of the same skills, there's an impetus to just slop garbage up for any vague idea, without taking the care or time to polish it into something which has that intangibly human sense of greatness and clarity.
I see, you've done something -- but why? If you continue to ask this question, you will arrive at good science ... but many submissions are not aimed at that level of communication or stop far ahead of the point at which the question becomes interesting.
There's that phrase: "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" which strikes as poignant, except it seems like the audience today are also fools ... the inmates are running the asylum.
Likewise, the issue is often that many of these projects show no evidence of long term maintenance. That might be the new signal we watch for?
There also used to be a sense in the tech community of "if you build it they will come" and that has been basically completely lost at this point. Between the discussion earlier this week of people's fraudulent GH stars, and this topic, and the wave of submissions I see on e.g. r/rust, it's just hard to imagine how -- as a pure "tech nerd" -- to get eyes or assistance on projects these days.
I have projects I've held off on "Show HN" for years because I felt I wasn't ready for the flood of users or questions and criticisms. Maybe the jokes on me. (Of course like everyone else these days, I've used AI to work on them, but much of them predate agentic tools.)
Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.
Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at.
But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.