alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Performative-UI – a react component library of design tropes
hope you enjoy
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I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it.
It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
I love how this is both hilarious and extremely well made. Great job!
And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).
When Agentic browsers become the norm, surely we will go back to the days of super plain HTML pages?
Oh wow, it uses normal css, how delightful! https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/src/style...
These all look very professional for (basically) a parody library
The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
I get the whole trope thing and maybe I'm just an old man but I still am kinda impressed when Claude sh*ts out this type of UI 100 times faster than I ever could. It might also be that I never could have made UI even of this quality before AI. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
It's still better than the sh*t developers produced three years ago.
Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.
So, it's progress.
Some of these are actually nice and appropriate to use in certain contexts. Also this issue is hilarious: https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2
Dickover is suspiciously missing. How will I ask visitors to subscribe to my newsletter?
“TokenStream – Server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025.”
I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.
I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.
There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.
But yeah, talk about things nobody used....
Adding github link for those who want to use it (I do): https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI
That is absolutely delightful
I could see actually using this…
Savage and accurate. 100%.
Many a true word is spoken in jest.
My Claude feels personally attacked.
pretty decent, may even use some of the components eventually. star given
This needs an additional subscriptions service tier, that's even more performative and even more AI
It's very fun and way too polished, thanks!
Coooooooooool!!!!
Slick and self aware. Looks good
Very funny. Although ironic that this whole library was built with AI.
Spot on "AI Native".
no more stars please, we are at a funny number
It needs a purple gradient mode.
NGL I'm going to steal/borrow/leach all sorts of these for my product.
When in Rome!
Starred this, my next project is going to be classified as slop anyway.
Man... That's satire on a whole another level. What a technical and deep sense of humor.
Nice UI quality
Lmao!!! Awesome
I heard you like AI slop...
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Neat, opened an issue there for a finicky bit of code that'd help me quite a bit. /s
Yawn. This is just bootstrap all over again. So what if people who don't have design skills can now create pleasant looking websites?
The funny thing is, the techniques shown here are the ones that were once considered something only advanced front-end developers or publishers could do. Seeing that a former symbol of skill has now become a subject of satire makes me think that what we call 'high-level' ultimately comes from what others can't do. I personally never even thought about how to implement ASCII art animation.