I love this because, it reminds me that when people hate AI, They hate low effort AI slop.
This website demonstrates a tremendous amount of human effort, and it walks through the iterative design process that led to the final result. Taking inspiration, trying out ideas, tinkering—that's design.
So because of the article's premise, I'm going to be a bit of a dickhead. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, because it's not a judgement on the developers. I have also shipped way worse vibecoded frontends and this is coming from a UI guy, so it's not about being an AI hater or anything.
Your site looks like an AI made it.
Now there is an actually easy fix: just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic. And then I could buy that it was human-designed, at which point, it basically was. And just AI-coded.
Yeah, and the trade-off here is that it takes time. In the same way, you can write insightful blog posts or work emails using AI if you maintain creative control, but all of sudden, you're not moving at 100x speed. You're moving a lot closer to human speed.
This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.
It’s funny, this is exactly how I used opus to design an iOS app I’m building. Unfortunately fable was released and it seems my taste lines up with fable’s training quite a bit[1]. Now my app looks like ai anyway. You win some you lose some I guess.
Before everything looked like bootstrap or one of the other 5 design systems.
Website? Hero Image, 3 Colums, footer. This was peak design half a decade ago.
I love the list, but the design process I taught in school was way different — it was a loop of two steps, started anywhere:
1. Do something. (Many of the five above seem nice! But there’s lots of methods that fit different tasks)
2. Ask some users please for the love of god! Show it to somebody! Get your mom’s feedback! Anybody!!!
Etc. It was drilled into me pretty hard at GaTech by their HCI prof, but perhaps he spent so much time reiterating it because it’s heterodox.
It doesn’t help that “design” covers everything from splash pages that sell SaaS to doors and blankets and stuff. I’m a little dubious of any single unified framework other than the aforementioned Frantic Dyad that could hope to cover all that space.
I think, many of the folks commenting below, mentioning that the OP hasn't actually studied in a design program in school, also fail to mention that the attorney, and later U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln also had no formal education in learning to read.
The latter, in his path toward literacy, and eventually a J.D. (That's what attorneys are nowadays anyway) was largely due to his stubborn autodidactism, the same mettle that the OP himself chronicles and showcases in his blog.
If you put most people participating (or lurking) here on Hacker News through this scrutiny, you really shouldn't be surprised that this is generally the case with anyone who's been working in data processing, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, or WhatEv we're going to be calling it in the next decade.
Nowadays, when I think of n00bs, I don't think about the computer illiterate, I think about the motivated neophytes who spent two years grinding along in an IT track in college at the snails pace of semester courses and now they can consider themselves entry level python programmers with an extra semester where they took "Introduction to Java - CS-107".
If you're going to survive in this industry, you already have an insatiable curiosity for everything under the hood and morbid obsessions with break/fix - emphasis on 'fix' :)
If it looks like Yakko (the OP of this thread) went through two semesters (that really is a freakin' year in trad educational systems) of design school, but in reality really didn't... You would be wrong. He just did it on his own and at a pace he was comfortable with, arriving at the same dock to berth his ship as someone who actually spent a year being forced learn it at a snails pace.
Not everyone can be a network engineer, or a systems administrator, or full stack developer, etc., but those who thrive upon the work are almost always exceedingly autodidacts in those disciplines...
You literally cannot keep up with the pace of evolving technologies if you're doing so in a legacy educational institution.
Interview question: "Tell me about a nightmare scenario you were faced with when you were without the knowledge to fix the problem and yet, did so anyway - how and what did you do to rise to the occasion, and how did that make you feel like when everyone was back online again?"
The reason I added that quote, by the way, was because although nowadays people typically use "ignorance is bliss" as a blanket justification for willful ignorance, intellectual laziness, or avoiding uncomfortable truths, when English poet Thomas Gray coined the phrase in his 1742 poem (Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College), he was expressing a sentiment about the inevitable loss of childhood innocence.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise.
And yes, I knew I'd be downvoted for it, I love that.
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan
It looks like a lot of their early attemps are early gpt outputs or claude design outputs, which have a lot of the same smell. People are discounting how good image->html flows are these days though.
I had gemini describe this webpage as prompts, then fed it into an image -> code pipeline. Note that this is with 0 input from me:
This is with Opus 5.5 building it out on low effort, and yes the spec was already made from the original site, but 0->1 that doesn't result in purple gradients or claude brown is very much possible now.
Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.
This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).
There’s a nice Apple session from this year’s WWDC about this where they suggest using the new resizing feature of the simulator (born to support the foldable iPhone) to have a “drawer” for all the controls and tools to fine tune your UX. I’ll be stealing that for the web as well
This is the kind of creative work that I think will always need to be guided by human taste and vision but can be vastly enabled by AI. I really hope to see more people using AI to improve quality instead of velocity.
26 info warnings though I'm impressed there are no up front errors but the warnings are of potential problems. It's the same blunder I see many people who don't read the standards don't understand or bother with until it actually becomes a problem. But AI learned from them. That's why the problem exists within AI, too.
Looking at the source i was not surprised. A shell html page, that uses a shittonne of javascript, and obviously does not even include the static content per page load. Its sad that this is the status quo of the AI slop you see.
I had a similar experience with my landing page for downread.com. I don't know whether the design looks vibe-coded, but I don't think anyone would put that much effort into a hand-coded homepage: the landing page (as well as the feature page) uses interactive, partially animated 'screenshots' that simulate aspects of the app. All buttons either do something or open a pop-up explaining what the button does.
That is a fun website design. My current strategy is to have a sub agent pretend to be a hackernews reader who hates AI slop. It then goes through the whole UI and removes all the slop.
It works really well, even with models like DeepSeek which have been completely poisoned with claudeslop. You get a website that actually makes sense, and doesn’t have random slop lines like “Logout— it stays logged in until the user logs out”
Now I guess I need to do a pass with a whimsy subagent to add fun little elements like this.
Loved the process write-up and the iteration screenshots.
The hero section looks cool, but the rest of the front page could be refined even further (it still has an AI‑generated look).
When doing web designs with AI, I start with design tokens, typography, then build out every section by multiple iterations. Unfortunately, the more vague the prompt is, the more "AI‑generated" the end result looks.
54 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 57.0 ms ] threadI explained that exactly what design is I just lack the skills to do it in illustrator and Photoshop but yes, no one gets it right the first time.
This website demonstrates a tremendous amount of human effort, and it walks through the iterative design process that led to the final result. Taking inspiration, trying out ideas, tinkering—that's design.
You know, it's okay.
Your site looks like an AI made it.
Now there is an actually easy fix: just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic. And then I could buy that it was human-designed, at which point, it basically was. And just AI-coded.
Otherwise it's quite cool, and well done.
1) have a high level functional goal
2) be inspired and think of a motif
3) go wide within that motif and explore
4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate
5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.
This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.
I like hearing it articulated for me.
[1] https://onda-cast.github.io/onda/
1. Do something. (Many of the five above seem nice! But there’s lots of methods that fit different tasks)
2. Ask some users please for the love of god! Show it to somebody! Get your mom’s feedback! Anybody!!!
Etc. It was drilled into me pretty hard at GaTech by their HCI prof, but perhaps he spent so much time reiterating it because it’s heterodox.
It doesn’t help that “design” covers everything from splash pages that sell SaaS to doors and blankets and stuff. I’m a little dubious of any single unified framework other than the aforementioned Frantic Dyad that could hope to cover all that space.
The latter, in his path toward literacy, and eventually a J.D. (That's what attorneys are nowadays anyway) was largely due to his stubborn autodidactism, the same mettle that the OP himself chronicles and showcases in his blog.
If you put most people participating (or lurking) here on Hacker News through this scrutiny, you really shouldn't be surprised that this is generally the case with anyone who's been working in data processing, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, or WhatEv we're going to be calling it in the next decade.
Nowadays, when I think of n00bs, I don't think about the computer illiterate, I think about the motivated neophytes who spent two years grinding along in an IT track in college at the snails pace of semester courses and now they can consider themselves entry level python programmers with an extra semester where they took "Introduction to Java - CS-107".
If you're going to survive in this industry, you already have an insatiable curiosity for everything under the hood and morbid obsessions with break/fix - emphasis on 'fix' :)
If it looks like Yakko (the OP of this thread) went through two semesters (that really is a freakin' year in trad educational systems) of design school, but in reality really didn't... You would be wrong. He just did it on his own and at a pace he was comfortable with, arriving at the same dock to berth his ship as someone who actually spent a year being forced learn it at a snails pace.
Not everyone can be a network engineer, or a systems administrator, or full stack developer, etc., but those who thrive upon the work are almost always exceedingly autodidacts in those disciplines...
You literally cannot keep up with the pace of evolving technologies if you're doing so in a legacy educational institution.
Interview question: "Tell me about a nightmare scenario you were faced with when you were without the knowledge to fix the problem and yet, did so anyway - how and what did you do to rise to the occasion, and how did that make you feel like when everyone was back online again?"
I really feel like it's very much random.
When job hunting -> does the recruiter shortlist you?
When on the job -> do you get laid off?
Neither has anything to do with your skills at the actual job.
> Neither has anything to do with your skills at the actual job.
I hate to break it to you. But it definitely does...
I had gemini describe this webpage as prompts, then fed it into an image -> code pipeline. Note that this is with 0 input from me:
https://html.non.io/railcode-example
This is with Opus 5.5 building it out on low effort, and yes the spec was already made from the original site, but 0->1 that doesn't result in purple gradients or claude brown is very much possible now.
This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).
Thanks for writing!
https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Frailcode.dev%...
Even when building with AI, I find it very useful to be picky about the details. Sometimes picky enough to go down to the code.
I feel like people who get the most out of AI tools are the ones who actually use it as a tool, and don't treat AI as the decision maker.
It works really well, even with models like DeepSeek which have been completely poisoned with claudeslop. You get a website that actually makes sense, and doesn’t have random slop lines like “Logout— it stays logged in until the user logs out”
Now I guess I need to do a pass with a whimsy subagent to add fun little elements like this.
Whether it's actual creativity or not, it is a lot of fun to have an idea and see it executed immediately!
When doing web designs with AI, I start with design tokens, typography, then build out every section by multiple iterations. Unfortunately, the more vague the prompt is, the more "AI‑generated" the end result looks.