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
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.<p>I would go with the original, Apple or the Win11 one. Material would be good, what's with the lavender shades?<p>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.
This begs for a modern version of <a href="https://csszengarden.com/" rel="nofollow">https://csszengarden.com/</a>, where the CSS is generated by different LLMs and prompts.
llmzengarden?
that'd be awesome
You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results.<p><a href="https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/frontend-design/skills/frontend-design/SKILL.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...</a>
I have seen so many brown sites that look all the same, all designed by this thing most likely. So no.
Agreed. It's not that the designs it produces are <i>bad</i> 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).
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.<p>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.<p>Old adages continue to ring true and as loud as ever. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
> 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)<p>They were, at least for that era. Just maybe not at AI-scale.
claude slop :D
> 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.<p>Manifestation for LLMs. :)
“Redesign the site using frotend-design skill”<p><a href="https://race-to-270.vercel.app/" rel="nofollow">https://race-to-270.vercel.app/</a>
The frontend-design skill defeats its own purpose imo. The design equivalent of "it's not x, it's y."
I've had better results with this, when it comes to functional UIs rather than marketing sites: <a href="https://github.com/Dammyjay93/interface-design" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Dammyjay93/interface-design</a><p>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.
>Apply the squint test to your work:<p>>Blur your eyes or step back
>Can you still perceive hierarchy?
>Is anything jumping out at you?<p>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.<p>Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user interfaces.<p>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.
I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!", and this is it?<p>> 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.<p>> brutally minimal, maximalist chaos, retro-futuristic, organic/natural, luxury/refined, playful/toy-like, editorial/magazine, brutalist/raw, art deco/geometric, soft/pastel, industrial/utilitarian<p>> React, Vue<p>Sorry, but this is garbage.
"make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the context."<p>What is it supposed to do when fed instructions like this?
I think it's very clear what it's <i>supposed</i> to do from that text. Just read it at face value.<p>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.<p>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.
For years I would use free fonts and spend hours picking them out and getting depressed because they all had something wrong with them…. You get what you pay for.<p>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 “free” font, that is “free” as in puppy.
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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.
I donno. They all look ugly.<p>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.
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.
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 <i>Clockwork Orange</i>, <i>Backrooms</i>, 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).
I'd be curious to see a version prompted to recapitulate the style of a Windows 9x app.<p>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 — think "Minesweeper is a grid of buttons with icons on them", that kind of thing), rather than just vaguely looking like W95.
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.<p>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.
I'll share my results / my approach. Here are three designs from the prompt->design thing I'm working on:<p><a href="https://image.non.io/10037610-e35e-44b0-b5c6-69d8fb772109.webp" rel="nofollow">https://image.non.io/10037610-e35e-44b0-b5c6-69d8fb772109.we...</a><p><a href="https://image.non.io/dcf067bc-e296-4744-9b36-2b882f3d791d.webp" rel="nofollow">https://image.non.io/dcf067bc-e296-4744-9b36-2b882f3d791d.we...</a> (same as above, but with your simplified map)<p><a href="https://image.non.io/94fdfb04-c57d-4b81-8d53-7b0f707e4d63.webp" rel="nofollow">https://image.non.io/94fdfb04-c57d-4b81-8d53-7b0f707e4d63.we...</a><p>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?<p>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.
Can you quantify what it is you don’t like? Like, to my eyes ‘original’ is fine - and it’s very similar to ‘QT’ expect with rounded corners and brighter colours.
I find it such a hard thing to quantify, I know it's not helpful but you can just feel the slop seep through.<p>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.<p>Not like web pages ever had a soul, but it's not there on the generic LLM generated sites.
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.
I've been doing this recently - working with Qt on a local app.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
I think the original looks the best and by a large margin
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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/" rel="nofollow">https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/</a>
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.
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
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. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
Any chance you could share screenshots?<p>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?).
Similarly, I've gotten a few reasonable results by asking for Microsoft Office 2007 style or the Windows Vista file explorer, stuff like that.
On the practical tooling side — 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.
as someone with little to no design background they all look the same to me except the bloated sass which is clearly inferior<p>is there a way to quantifiably measure how much better one design would be from another?
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.
No. It's completely subjective.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
I think what makes something look like slop is rounded corner cards with slight shadow, and sans serif font.<p>Also full caps / overemphasis on text that doesn't need it. For example "DEMOCRAT" and "REPUBLICAN" in this example.
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.
>> 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.<p>Today, I can visit a website and instantly tell it was generated using LLMs and agents from A to Z:<p>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.<p>2. There are always a ton of 404 pages.<p>3. Third, the HTML comments often expose credentials and to-do lists—sometimes even right above the login page (true story...).<p>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 I’ll never use anything from.
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?<p>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.<p>Of course, when given the option to not do it properly is always alluring and then you can tell.
So you can tell for maybe 20% of websites that have been generated by LLMs over the last few months.
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.
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.<p>Personal preferences I suppose.
> I think dark theme, rich purples and vibrant hues, huge headings, etc.<p>Don't forget the thin and tall serif fonts, with one singular italicized word in the title.
To me the "AI slop" mostly just looks like the last decade of SaaS products.<p>Do the landing pages of auth0.com, devcycle.com, micro.com, or datadog.com <i>not</i> look like slop to other people?
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be opinionated, why do you care?
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.
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.
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.
> 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](<a href="https://envs.net/~volpe/projects/ai-design.html" rel="nofollow">https://envs.net/~volpe/projects/ai-design.html</a>).<p>All of these examples sites are broken on mobile for me.
on the other hand steve jobs would've called Qt human-slop<p>guess it's a matter of taste
My eyes are so sharp i can easily tell which one is slop coded whether it is QT or GTK style theming lol.
design.md
Those aren’t “slop”, 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 “de facto” 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.
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 <i>weren't</i> 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.<p>(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)
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TLDR: Once a design gets old enough that LLMs can reproduce them, they are now "slop".