alt Hacker NewsTells of a Slop UI
Comments
At least some of these are just for lack of caring. I vibe coded this landing page recently https://tui2web.com/ and fought off a lot of the defaults the LLM came up with after a few hours of iteration. Feel free to roast it, I'm not really attached, but I thought it did a reasonably good job.
This is similar to the rapid early adoption of the Bootstrap CSS framework. A lot of people were annoyed by the sudden spike of websites that looked and felt the same, but I think this was a tremendous step forward in usability and accessibility, and well worth the initial wave of cookie cutter websites.
I'm surprised this doesn't mention imo some of the most ubiquitous offenses:
- cards in cards in cards. everything is a card
- parchment background
- pointless dashboards
Huh, I guess when when AI leaders talk about their AI being unaligned, they meant the divs.
Love this blog mentioning the issue of implementation detail in prose. Likely my biggest irk of vibe coded apps.
Much of this is it's a simple problem to solve - just prompt agent of choice "Put all user visible text into a translation file for i10n" and then go through and edit said prose as a human.
In Art and UI/ UX of Apps I think AI slop will be a constantly moving target. Whenever you consume too much of a certain art style or music it starts grating you personally, your mind needs a certain amount of variety. With AI overproducing (the already mass produced) arts and apps, your brain will pick up on whatever common yells exist for whichever AI generation we’re at and will begin to hate it. Like the only solution would be for GPT-8 to give random completely different art style outputs for the same prompt to different users or else our brain will immediately start not liking the commonality of GPT-8 aesthetic decisions and begun to hate it.
I start with these rules, then adjust as I want...
EMPHASIZE:
- *Summary.* First paragraph like newspaper (who, what, where, when, how, why).
- *Benefits.* Focus on the benefits for the reader.
- *Why this matters* Focus on what it adds to the reader.
NO:
- *No tech stack.* Do not say the tech implementation; covered elsewhere.
- *No counts.* Do not say page counts, part counts, chapter counts, etc.
- *No special formatting.* Do not bold, not italic, not bullet lists.
- *No "if".* Do not say "If you do X then Y"; instead use positive.
- *No run-on sentences.* Do not use many clauses nor too many words.
- *No passive voice.* Do not use passive, or non-subject, sentences.
I just can't fathom how a multi-billion dollar company like Cloudflare could forego their design standards. They seem to have updated their landing page [0], but it's still very sloppy.
The most stupid thing about Slop AI is Heading + Description. Whenever I generate something with these things, they add a useless obvious header and a paragraph of crap beneath. I tell them I'm generating an specific tool for me and me only; and it explains what it is, I tell them I don't want them and they include these things anyway...
An "inactive" student is one who is enrolled but is not currently attending classes.
This is a super useful article but a lot of these complaints about things like alignments are also the natural outcome of me, a non-frontend person, building any kind of web frontend at all. So I wouldn't sweat it too much.
The most important thing I learned when graduating from "bad musician" to "passable musician" (passable enough to have listeners and fans, at least) was that there's no one single big trick that turns a song from bad to good: there's 100 tiny small tricks that add up. And you need to have experience to know what they are. A trained listener might be able to say "the midrange is too compressed", "there's too much high end", "the drum transients are't punching through", but a normal, casual listener is just going to say, "I dunno, it just doesn't sound right."
This UI slop is the same deal. A slightly misaligned dot off the timeline, color choices which don't really make sense given the website as a whole, using LLMism text. Nothing in here is an obviously major problem on its own. But when you add up 50 of these on a website, users get hit with that "this is slop" feeling.
The details matter. In isolation they seem irrelevant, but as a whole it's what elevates something from the AI slop garbage pile to something actually good.
That rings so true!
I'm vibe-coding an app to practice german, I want the most bare-bones possible, just something for myself. In the sign-in page, the clanker added SEVEN slogans and catch-phrases:
- A more human way to learn - Find your words. Then make them yours. - Good conversations make a language stick. Start where you are, and build from there. - One conversation at a time - Thoughtful practice. Your pace. Your progress. - YOUR LANGUAGE SPACE - A quiet space to learn, made just for you. - Sign in to pick up where you left off.
biege, biege & biege
These are all accurate and bad, but I have to wonder how many of these issues are just our current “ai can’t do hands” that will eventually be solved.
People don't realize that you're allowed to tell LLMs/agents "no." In the real world, it's a professional faux pas to question the design of a creative coworker when you may not know design better, but LLMs/agents are not your coworkers.
Don't like abuse of serif fonts? "NEVER use serif fonts."
Don't like the gaudy color palettes? "Use this color palette with a white-dominant background"
Don't like the marketing fluff? "Remove all non-salient text from this app."
You're encouraged to be picky.
> It adds these // whenever anything close to tech is mentioned.
Shoot. I use those in my portfolio and didn't know they were using them everywhere.
> It adds these // whenever anything close to tech is mentioned.
I've done this before, in what I would argue was tasteful at the time.
Your list is missing all caps. I think overuse of all-caps is one of the biggest tells that a ui was vibe coded.
People are also weirdly defensive about their use of all-caps.
the prose is what kills me. It's so bad and is always the same predictable grandiose sentences.
As someone who didn't like the UI trends pre-LLM either, I simply shrug. Trading one crap for another.
Sure, a good designer could whip up a great UI. 95% of sites[1] didn't have a great (or even good) designer. I'm not sure the AI UIs are worse than the median that was out there.
[1] Including mine.
More guidance is needed on how to efficiently prompt an LLM to generate a correct UI. Describing the appearance, placement and behavior of UI elements for this is quite time-consuming. The contrast with server-side code generation is stark.
I always assumed the fingernail edge thing had to come from a popular library or something.
Also, incomplete sections. This site below has an FAQ section without answers.
So what is the best way of stopping this to happen?
I am doing some experiments in forcing the LLM to use a process.
Start with a brand guidelines, followed by building wireframes, followed by merging the two together.
Think of it like chain of thought but for something visual.
AI is just another tool and I have actually found it really fun to dive into design as a non-designer. It still takes a lot of time and effort but I can now create designs that I'm quite happy with that I'd have never been able to do before.
Wrote a bit about my process in a blog post [1]. Obviously my designs are far from perfect but I'm really happy with my company's website.
I think soon, we will be adding “Skip Claude” in the same vein as “Skip Intro” to this list.
However, this is personal, but I stopped caring as long as the content is good, the animations can do justice in explanation and I get to learn or get what I want from them.
I think that these things I've seen that are tells of a slop UI are when people without discernment (not as an insult!) don't do a pass over a UI. I'm working on a dumb little app to help me sequence photos for a book[0], and I'm building it with Claude (Opus 5.5, medium effort). The first pass was really sloppy, but I was surprised at how far I could get with some directed iterating.
This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.
The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.
[0]: https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/ (very much a work in progress, feedback welcome)
An active student means you're enrolled. It has implications, student discounts for example.
Ironically, your portfolio website gave me some 'slop vibes'. Not saying in any way that it was made with AI, maybe seeing monospace fonts where none are necessary triggers me now.
The one thing that vexxes me up so much is the model bring up internal decisions in consumer facing views.
It doesn't mention the most annoying tell- content that fades in as you scroll down a page. I'm seeing this everywhere recently and it's so distracting
A bunch of these patterns are things that real human designers have been using for a while (with the exception of emojis everywhere). This is like how some people assume an em dash automatically means AI generated text.
You can tell by looking at a UI whether it was purely generated by AI or not. Just like you can tell by looking at an AI-generated video.
All this kind of ugliness long pre-dates AI. My guess is the training data set is full of this kind of crap.
Don't forget carousels! And scroll hijacking!
If you can deterministically show and name these UI slop tropes so well, you can build a skill to help you detect and potentially avoid them.
Here's an experimental crack at it, giving your article attribution: https://github.com/who/skills/blob/main/.claude/skills/detec...
Can we get some examples of what a good UI looks like then? I would like to see a UI design expert take a couple of these slop designs and show what each should look like according to their taste.
On the copywriting side, I added an instruction to always write the copy in a Markdown file and let me edit it before actually coding the UI. Miles better to edit 2-3 sentences at a time than look at an UI full of slop, dumbfounded on how to proceed.
But on the styling, there's just no good solution. I use things like https://katagami.ai to find inspiration and nudge it into a style direction but I still have to hand edit paddings and buttons and visual separation.
For example copying the Sumi prompt [0] and applying it onto my keyboard app landing page [1] ended up with something visually pleasant and informative. I would have spent way too many days doing animations and deciding on the theme.
But I still wish I could take an LLM and train it on my already human made websites and copy and get something that can follow a design language and writing style.
[0] https://katagami.ai/art-styles/en-019efd5c-2d50-7162-b204-31...
> CAN SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT AN INACTIVE STUDENT LOOKS LIKE??
Formally, it's a student who's in the system, but isn't currently enrolled in classes.
Informally, it's pretty much every undergrad who ever lived.
> This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho.
I'm not sure using a Fraktur-esque font for headers could ever be described as cute.
You forgot the small caps headings or tags added randomly everywhere.
It's a symptom of the long standing ghettoization of design and front end engineering. FE has always been cast as frivolous and unserious by conceited developers.
That's how you get slop that feels uncanny. There's no one in the room with the taste to call it out and no one in the room who cares enough to put in the time to fix it.
Apart from misalignment and slop text, does the rest really matter?
As long as it doesn't degrade the site's usability, does the general public care about fingernail cards or gradients?
Looks good enough.
the jump up arrow is not centered :D
the font is hard to read my fav is "unap-pealing".
the theme toggle is only on top.
the images are set to 0.85 opacity ?
The most obvious tell is the "No this. No that." copy which you find everywhere.
Every time someone puts precise language to what makes ai slop sloppy it feels like frontier labs get an ever clearer RL target. Not to say people shouldn’t publish these types of posts. I enjoy reading them and I hope they continue to be published.
While not playing WoW Forever myself, I like reading the news and subreddit about it. In the last days, every day a new "self-made" UI mod gets showcased transforming the UI into AI slop.
Disregarding any design standards and letting the AI role with it. People that mention it, in the comments, get blasted by accusations of gate-keeping.
I see this so often. Nobody is gate-keeping anyone, you can just learn the skill, read about UI design and art.
Why is it so hard for people to just put in the time?
A lot of these are examples of bad prompting (i.e. "build me a website for x y z"). Gradients can be prompted out, same as emoji slop. One line in the prompt / agents.md and you never see those. Color "rainbow" should be avoided by specifying a color palette. In case you don't have one, ask it for one "from literature / best practices" first. LLMs know the theory, but you have to have it in the context for it to be applied.
Misaligned stuff is the prompter's fault. Those should be caught by the human. they're the types of tasks that are fast/cheap to verify.
I'm really pissed off that my favorite web design style Brutalism is now an AI slop smell. They already took my em-dash! *shakes fist*.
Now that I think about it, Brutalist web design always reminds me of 80s and 90s video games. I wonder if the increased adoption of Brutalist webdesign has something to do with "nostalgia porn" instead of LLMs.
Stuff I'm missing in the list: "Claude beige" and "Claude anthracite grey".
watch this turn into a skill and become a popular meme on X...
I added a rule on my agents.md for the design part, I never like any UI element that styling have a bg and slightly dark version of same color used by the bg because it's really made me mad and seems get being used by Agent
This coincidently the first picture in this article by cloudflare
I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is that is happening when the robot writes stuff like “3 campuses, one app” example, I’m glad the author was able to identify it as chat context leaking through.
The other version of it is the robot over-indexing on some part of the prompt and leaving comments places. An example is I ask it to prefer integration tests using TestContainers, it starts adding comments to every new test saying “Real services, no mocks” or something.
And yes, I have a line in my *.MD saying not to do that.