alt Hacker NewsScoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns
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Yes, it's the September That Never Ended again. It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
Don't people just tell you if something is made by AI? It doesn't seem like something to hide. Look, I made something cool using an AI tool. That's great to hear, the thing I'm interested in is the Something Cool, but I do also want to know how, so I can learn how to build Something Cool myself.
Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects
(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.
When the surface dwellers have become crazed by disease and war, and their lands contaminated with the detritus of broken promises of innovation and heavy metals, we must build a new Eden.
As much as I adore Gemini as a concept, I yearn to express myself in the visual medium. Dillo might honestly be enough to render something beautiful within its constraints. With Wireguard meshes as the transport, and invitations offered and withdrawn by personal trust, perhaps we can have a place where our ideas could once again flourish without being amplified and distilled into mediocrity by the great monoliths looming like thunderous currents on the horizon.
LLM generated UI for MVPs and explorations seems acceptable, but I don't read every Show post (maybe I should!). But when tinkering becomes a product it should have its UI revised when starting to take it seriously -- human touch for Human Interfaces pays off (even if AI augmented in the effort).
The other issue of HN being inundated with AI bots is related, but a kind of different problem.
I think AI-generated look-feel and web design is basically fine, and that the real problem is that so much of the substance of these submissions is vibe-coded. Even that's OK conceptually, the real problem is that in the (bad) common case, there's no commitment and little thought to what's being shown, they're just variably cute ideas; it's like Freshmeat more than a real part of HN.
Why so many defensive comments? A good visual design has some personality.
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.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim (<-- this is what many accounts without much HN history now see, and it's responsible for the downtick to the right on OP's chart)
Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300329 - March 2026 (515 comments)
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (425 comments)
The problem is people want to use 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.
In 2016, if I saw 10,000 lines of code, that carried a certain proof-of-work with it. They probably couldn't help but give the code some testing as they were working up to that point. We know there has to have been a certain amount of thought in it. They've been living with it for some months, guaranteed.
In 2026, 10,000 lines of code means they spent a minimum amount of money on tokens. 10,000 lines can be generated pretty quickly in a single task, if it's something like "turn this big OpenAPI spec into an API in my language". It's entirely possible 90%+ of the project hasn't actually been tested, except by the unit tests the AI wrote itself, which is a great start, but not more than that for code that hasn't ever actually run in any real scenario from the real world.
Nothing about any of that in intrinsically wrong. But the standards have to be shifted. While the bar for a "Show HN" should perhaps not be high, it should probably be higher than "I typed a few things into a text box". And that not because that's necessarily "bad" either, but because of the mismatch between valuable human attention and the cheapness of being able to make a draw on it.
It's kind of a bummer in some sense... but then again, honestly, the space of things that can be built with an idea and a few prompts to an AI was frankly fairly well covered even before AI coding tools. Already I had a list of "projects we've already seen a lot of so don't expect the community to shower you with adulation" for any language community I've spent any significant time in. AI has grown the list of "projects I've seen too many times" a bit, but a lot of what I've seen is that we're getting an even larger torrent of the same projects we already had too many of before.
If we speak of design, most tech project sites, from "solo founder SAAS" to "we got 2 billion from YC" have looked the same to me for years.
We can hope the LLMs hallucinate slightly different CSS once in a while now...
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've been thinking about making something like this myself. Afraid to tell you that half the stuff in there is already outdated.
Models have their own archetypes. Since early this year almost every vibecoded website is Opus, which has its own style. It has different characteristics from a website by GPT. Yet again different from one by Gemini. Each one has its own set of traits. Opus 4.5/4.6 traits are markedly different from earlier versions. Mixing them all into one and then using it to "identify AI coded websites" doesn't work.
Is there anything wrong with using AI (Claude Code/Codex/Gemini etc.) to design your website or your app? As an engineer, I know what my strengths are; and I am pretty damn sure "reactive website design" is not one of them. Why not use AI to do the heavy lifting?
Well, I went straight to perp deep to ask how to ensure my cc sessions don't create websites that look like that. LOL.
But good thing is, it will now include those accessibility items, too. Personally I have misokinesia and migraines so I get it.
Here's what it found if you want to see: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/given-these-how-can-we-crea...
> 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.
so, n=1 plus Baader-Meinhof? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
Would love if we could get a tool that performed the same analysis on an arbitrary site as the author's playwright test setup.
There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.
I always ask it to use tailwind with shadcn. Then you get a generic UI which will not pass as AI generated.
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.
At least in the field I work in (ecommerce/retail), design is often what separates one brand from another when presenting their products. Maybe it won't happen on the web as much in the future, but I suspect it will still be important when it comes to visually communicating to consumers
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.
off topic AI-related anecdote:
at my workplace the phrase in status/report-out meetings "I built" now means "I asked claude to build"
All of a sudden managers, architects (who haven't written code in a decade), and directors are all building tools
so now we're debugging the tools "they built" and why our product isn't working with them.
I think HN is the crowd that values MVPs. And LLMs are the best tool to quickly materialize an idea. So I think we should judge these submissions on merit and not on our collective rejection of reality. If they succeed I’m sure (or hope) their user facing app won’t remain vibe coded.
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.
I try to submit short (tech related) stories (https://github.com/jaronilan/stories) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))
The best design is invisible - most (web)sites are designed for text based reading / watching - primary modality. Maybe we will see more inspired design - with voice, video or agent scanners using which one can talk to an agent via an assistant
I guess I was bucking the trend with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333, which points to https://electricminds.org.
The UI of Electric Minds Reborn (Amsterdam Web Communities System) was not AI-generated. At most, it was AI translated, as I used Claude to help turn old clunky 2006-era HTML into modern styling with Tailwind CSS. See also https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/.
I used a colored left-border on my blog and thought it looked pretty fresh. I didn't realize that was an AI pattern.
> Barely passing body-text contrast in dark themes
This has been killing me recently. Apparently I need slightly higher contrast than some people, and these vibe coded UIs are basically unreadable to my eyes
Is the data (or scoring of each site) available?
It’s entirely possible a Show HN I posted is included and I’d love to know how it scored.
What missing from the article is that they didn't use the same "slop score" to measure Show HN posts from <2023. Nor they released this script so the readers can verify it against known human-made landing pages.
Why? Let me guess: because these patterns were frequently seen in human-made sites too, but that won't fit the narrative.
Remember, several AI detectors claimed Declaration Of Independence was AI-generated[0]. Keep this info in mind when someone (like the author of this article) proudly shows you their home-made AI detector.
[0]: https://dallasexpress.com/state/zerogpt-flags-1836-texas-dec...
time to add plugins to hn, automated measure of ai comments and submissions to be the first ;)
I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.
> Slop fonts: Space Grotesk, Instrument Serif, Geist, Syne, Fraunces
Nooo please don't ruin great fonts by associating them with low effort vibecoding
They may be somewhat overused but they are popular for a reason
"vibe code" now just means "coded with AI" which should not be anymore of an insult than "IDE coded".
I'm much more critical of closed-source, subscription, wrappers over open source software of simple prompts.
reminds me of a short fun tweets exchange, something like:
- all designs are going to be AI generated and look the same
- well unless you ask your agent to make it look different
> Is this bad? Not really, just uninspired. After all, validating a business idea was never about fancy design, and before the AI era, everything looked like Bootstrap.
In a sense it shows that the creator didn’t care enough to make their UI/presentation unique which causes some like me to question exactly how much effort they bothered to put in at all.
As part of our code security review we have a “sloppification” score. Higher numbers have been reliably usable by people like me as indicators of what to focus my pentesting efforts on.
Before the usual suspects get snarky: Does that mean AI only generates slop? No. But it is an indicator of effort and oversights.
What this article calls AI design traits are design patterns that were already very common before AI: gradients, centered hero, stat banner, all-caps heading, purple accent, etc. You can blame most of them on TailwindUI and shadcn.
Are we going to call 'AI slop' everything that doesn't reinvent design from zero for a marketing page?
Heavy slop (5+ patterns) · 105 sites · 21%
Mild (2–4) · 230 sites · 46%
Clean (0–1) · 165 sites · 33%
If the community feels that the division is useful, then we can maybe take you up on your offer to open-source the project, and perhaps find a way to use it on HN itself.
"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"
Well summarized. Especially the design routines are quite obvious.
There is a longterm phenomenon, that quite a lot of pages are presented here, and not existent anymore after 12 months or so... This was already the case before the whole ai slop flodded in... But since then the rate just grew massively.
It's particularly annoying, when there is an actually useful service or app, you sign up, after a couple of months all is gone...
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.
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.)
Average is all you need
And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.
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 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.
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")