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Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns

333 points by hubraumhugo 5mo ago

solomonb 5mo ago
Would love if we could get a tool that performed the same analysis on an arbitrary site as the author's playwright test setup.
julia-kafarska 5mo ago
There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.
- michaelcampbell 5mo ago
  Indeed, and I don't think there's any reliable signal other than the author saying so that something is "vibe coded" vs. "I used an LLM for some aspect of it."
  - avereveard 5mo ago
    Ask a llm for a code review along code duplication, encapsulation and sequential coupling as quality axes and the difference should show up readily
  - cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
    The biggest signal is not the code itself but whether the thing is actively and continually developed for more than a few weeks. And then look through the commits -- were they only adding new features, or did the author(s) put effort into improvements on engineering fundamentals (benchmarking, testing, documentation, etc)?
  - pscanf 5mo ago
    I recently ran an experiment where I tried to use _quantitative signals_ (and not _qualitative_ ones) to tell whether something is vibe-coded or not. My idea was that, if I see that your project is growing 10k LOC per week and you're the only developer working on it, it's most likely vibe-coded. I analyzed some open-source projects, but unfortunately it turns out not to be so clear cut. It's relatively easy to estimate the growth rate of a project, but figuring out how much time developers worked on it is very error prone, which results in both false positives and false negatives. I wrote a post about it (https://pscanf.com/s/352/ https://pscanf.com/s/352/) if you're interested in the details.
- user34283 5mo ago
  Perhaps a year ago “vibe coding” was indicative of a low quality product. It seems many have not updated their understanding to match today’s capabilities. I am vibe coding. That does not mean I am incompetent or that the product will be bad. I have 10 years of experience. Using agentic AI to implement, iterate, and debug issues is now the workflow most teams are targeting. While last year chances were slim for the agent to debug tricky issues, I feel that now it can figure out a lot once you have it instrument the app and provide logs. It sometimes feels like some commenters stick with last year’s mindset and feel entitled to yell about ‘AI slop’ at the first sign of an issue in a product and denigrate the author’s competence.
  - deaux 5mo ago
    No, it is still indicative of a low quality product. And I say that as someone who has probably been agentic coding longer than you have. Indicative in my dictionary doesn't mean definitive. It just makes it much more likely. You can make quality products while LLMs write >99% of the code. This has been possible for more than a year, so it's not a lack of updating of beliefs that is the issue. I've done so myself. Rather, 90% of above products are low quality, at a much higher rate than say, 2022, pre-GPT. As such, it's an indicator. That 10% exists, just like pearls can hide in a pile of shit. As others have said the reason is time investment. You can takes 2 months to build something where the LLM codes 99%. Or you can take 2 hours. HN, and everywhere else, is flooded by the latter. That's why it's mostly crap. I did the former. And luckily it led to a good result. Not a coincidence. This applies far beyond coding. It applies to _everything_ done with LLMs. You can use them to write a book in 2 hours. You can use them to write a book in 2 years.
    - all2 5mo ago
      I've been neck deep in a personal project since January that heavily leverages LLMs for the coding. Most of my time has been spent fitting abstractions together, trying to find meaningful relationships in a field that is still somewhat ill-defined. I suppose I could have thrown lots of cash at it and had it 'done' in a weekend, but I hate that idea. As it stands, I know what works and what doesn't (to the degree I can, I'm still learning, and I'll acknowledge I'm not super knowledgeable in most things) but I'm trying to apply what I know to a domain I don't readily understand well.
cammasmith 5mo ago
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.
fooker 5mo ago
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.
- phoronixrly 5mo ago
  Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting. If you're instead into learning from projects based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, they're utterly boring... I find that I just don't learn anything new from Show HN vibe-coded side projects, and I can often replicate them in a couple of hundred of dollars, so why bother looking at them? Also why bother sharing one in the first place, since it doesn't really show any personal prowess, and doesn't bring value to the community due to it being easy to replicate?
  - michaelcampbell 5mo ago
    > Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting. There's a lot of ways things can be of interest. The problem being solved, how it's being solved, the UI, UX, etc. THAT it is vibe coded may or may not be interesting to some, but finding it un-interesting because it's vibe coded is no better than finding that it is.
  - fooker 5mo ago
    Yes, I find looking at vibe coded stuff interesting when they solve a worthy problem. No amount of denial will roll back the technology that millions can use now, that makes it realistic to produce in a day software that would take at least months five years ago.
  - bdcravens 5mo ago
    This assumes that pre-LLM projects were based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, and not just boilerplated framework code, copying the design trends of the week. I'd challenge the lack of personal prowess argument. Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill, even if you're not hand-crafting CSS and SQL. I liken it to those who tune cars, who buy cars made in a factory, install parts made by someone else, using tools that are all standardized. In the middle somewhere is the human making decisions to create a final result, which is where the talent exists.
dematz 5mo ago
Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects (maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
- bobthepanda 5mo ago
  Cards have been in vogue for a while and I can’t recall the last time I saw super hard corners on a design system. It’s been a thing since at least Apple filing that patent on rounded corners.
  - malfist 5mo ago
    Look at the website you're on
    - bobthepanda 5mo ago
      I guess I should say on a new design system. HN doesn’t update all that much (and in this context that’s a good thing)
  - dematz 5mo ago
    You're absolutely right (as they say) - https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html I don't think it's just the base rate of rounded corners though, these posts feel like the AI tends to spit out a bullet point list of features, like you'd see on an AI readme where each feature has a tangential emoji, then for a website puts them in a grid of rounded rects
- forgotTheLast 5mo ago
  I think that's more of a NextJs thing than an LLM thing.
- port11 5mo ago
  Most — all? — of these patterns come from the obsession with Tailwind that swept over the frontend in the last few years. Composable CSS classes also seem like they’d be easier for LLMs to out together. I’m not sure we can tell what AI design looks like, Stitch and a number of other tools I’ve tried produce inconsistent, wild results. The common theme is that they’ll all look like Tailwind-style components if not given any other steering.
cr125rider 5mo ago
And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.
ultramann 5mo ago
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simonw 5mo ago
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")
- tsukurimashou 5mo ago
  > if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it? because I value the process of learning by doing
- Oras 5mo ago
  I agree. The problem is the noise ratio, not how the platform was implemented.
- dematz 5mo ago
  >if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
  - simonw 5mo ago
    Sure... and it might also help you do more original thinking in that domain, and hence help you get a lot more learning value out of the time you have for those side projects. The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - 5mo ago
michaelcampbell 5mo ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
- joegibbs 5mo ago
  AI definitely does seem to want to add coloured left borders, tags and superfluous numbers all over the place from my experience, you have to tell it specifically not to
cushycush 5mo ago
[flagged]
xnx 5mo ago
"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.
onetimeusename 5mo ago
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.
vijgaurav 5mo ago
Unless it is AI slop, I don't mind reading submissions that can be genuinely helpful.
bobthepanda 5mo ago
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.
- ValentineC 5mo ago
  > Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days. Shadcn works for Vercel, but is actually a human being (I think?). The UI framework is called shadcn/ui.
  - efilife 5mo ago
    Reminded me of this https://stallman-copypasta.github.io/ https://stallman-copypasta.github.io/
mccoyb 5mo ago
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.
- binary132 5mo ago
  In a marketplace with infinite low-quality supply and limited attention, it doesn’t really matter how good the good offerings are.
- doug_durham 5mo ago
  Why is that a problem? Reality will filter out the projects that are poorly developed just like it always has.
  - rglover 5mo ago
    Sure, but what greatness do we lose in the interim as it gets silenced by unending noise?
  - Der_Einzige 5mo ago
    Like it filters windows OS for making the start button an electron app? Oh wait, it didn’t and nothing is displacing windows. Reality doesn’t filter out shit man. We objectively had better vaccumes in the 80s (central vacuums were popular then). We had objectively better displays in the 80s too (vector displays/game consoles like the vectrex were putting out variable refresh rates into the 1000hz equivalent with extreme brightness and impossible to replicate phosphor glow. Worse is better. Like, actually getting worse is progress. Sometimes it really is good to “return to monkie” and take a page from the past.
cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
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.)
- binary132 5mo ago
  The ongoing tragedy of the commons has made the state of the commons uncommonly tragic, and it will become a wasteland. You are right to identify the problem, but yeah, “getting eyes on my slop” in a public forum just isn’t realistically going to happen any more when there’s an infinite ocean of supply of slop and ever-dwindling available interest in picking through it looking for ever fewer gems. The future is underground.
sebakubisz 5mo ago
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sgammon 5mo ago
did you even read and edit the title of this post?
binary132 5mo ago
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.
- buf 5mo ago
  It will be replaced with private networks soon. Last step of anonymous internet.
homeonthemtn 5mo ago
This is cynical. Listen if you want to put time into a project then show it to the Internet to collectively shit on it, then kudos to you. You went on a journey and gained experience through it. Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.
curious1008 5mo ago
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.
elevaet 5mo ago
This is great, now we can better disguise slopware!
- matsemann 5mo ago
  These designs are now the trend, though. So they will influence how human designed/built websites also look.
  - elevaet 5mo ago
    Yeah they are the trend, so they will probably cause a polarized response - some will find it cliche and reject it, others will coalesce around the standard.
saadn92 5mo ago
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ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Funny, because as far as 'vibecoded colors', it's not the Tailwind purple anymore, I would say recently it's more of the same beige scheme this very blog post is using.
yard2010 5mo ago
"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"
arnorhs 5mo ago
i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions. Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at. But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.
xantronix 5mo ago
> 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.
marcodena 5mo ago
Average is all you need
nottorp 5mo ago
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...
- swat535 5mo ago
  Yea, I mean we've had so many phases.. Bootstrap, Web 2.0, Tailwind, "Material" UI, etc.. with random frameworks, from Rails to NextJS.. There's always a trend and everyone follows them in Software. Now it's AI.. let's not pretend cutting corners is anything new in our industry. I guess you can always gloat about your artisan code but people who use Software for business never cared about that to begin with. Plus, wasn't the entire philosophy of CS was that "everyone can code" ? Opposing licensing requirements, etc ? Well.. there you have it, code is a commodity now and the barrier to entry is next to none.
jerf 5mo ago
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.
- preommr 5mo ago
  > 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards. That's basically the entire AI landscape atm. I keep seeing people do things like spend a weekend building a product then charging ridiculous prices for it with the justification that it's what those products would've cost a few years ago. For some reason, it doens't click for them that those prices were a reflection of the effort it took to get to that point and that the situation has changed.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  Really apt comment, and I think it applies to a broader domain than just coding. People want others to judge their super fancy slide deck or new branding by that same 2016 standard, essentially fabricating accomplishment for themselves.
jaronilan 5mo ago
I try to submit short (tech related) stories (https://github.com/jaronilan/stories https://github.com/jaronilan/stories) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))
sunir 5mo ago
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.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September 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.
- fainpul 5mo ago
  It doesn't feel like more ideas are explored, it feels like more variants of the same old things are produced. Ideas have always been hard and AI doesn't help with that.
  - yabones 5mo ago
    It feels like people are more willing to give their agent a prompt than search the web for existing solutions. I've noticed a crazy amount of clearly AI coded projects that do a small subset of an already existing and very trusted open source project. Comments usually point this out, and the OP never responds. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but the whole thing feels like a waste of time for everybody involved.
- Barbing 5mo ago
  This optimism, I like it. (Still plenty of scary stuff, but I should feel like you at least some of the time, healthy balance.)
- romaniv 5mo ago
  > 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. This is a manipulative combination of condescension, gaslighting and emotionalization. "It's fun to complain" trivializes and dismisses a valid observation about the content being submitted as self-indulgent whining. "I'd rather face the world" implies that people who want to see carefully constructed projects and human-written articles about them are refusing to face the world, i.e. delusional. "Find the joy in it" reduces the whole discussion to the question of self-imposed mindset, as if there is no possible rational reason to be unhappy about what's going on.
jameslk 5mo ago
> 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
nomdep 5mo ago
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?
mercurialsolo 5mo ago
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
computerphage 5mo ago
> 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
monkeynotes 5mo ago
Even his blog has the Claude vibe to it.
- efilife 5mo ago
  https://www.adriankrebs.ch/about https://www.adriankrebs.ch/about > The site is built with Astro. Design inspired by Paul Stamatiou. https://paulstamatiou.com https://paulstamatiou.com
fusslo 5mo ago
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.
- rglover 5mo ago
  That sounds maddening.
- all2 5mo ago
  A "you built it, you fix it" policy would be lovely in this situation.
amysox 5mo ago
I guess I was bucking the trend with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333, which points to https://electricminds.org 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/ https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/.
maxothex 5mo ago
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deleted 5mo ago
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lschueller 5mo ago
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...
figassis 5mo ago
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.
flexagoon 5mo ago
> 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
- bstsb 5mo ago
  yeah lots of these are used by AI because they're good. i use Space Grotesk for headings on my current project, rotheme, with Instrument Sans in the body, and my link shortener project uses Geist. maybe i'm an LLM too
raincole 5mo ago
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-declaration-of-independence-as-nearly-90-ai-generated/ https://dallasexpress.com/state/zerogpt-flags-1836-texas-dec...
vintagedave 5mo ago
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.
vladstudio 5mo ago
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
richard_chase 5mo ago
I used a colored left-border on my blog and thought it looked pretty fresh. I didn't realize that was an AI pattern.
sd9 5mo ago
I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.
dang 5mo ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (425 comments)
- deevus 5mo ago
  Thanks for this.
ofjcihen 5mo ago
> 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.
dang 5mo ago
Heavy slop (5+ patterns) · 105 sites · 21% Mild (2–4) · 230 sites · 46% Clean (0–1) · 165 sites · 33% Can we have a list of the "clean" ones please? Actually, if you give me a list of the IDs for all 3 categories, I'll make URLs for each that people can browse. 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.
- hubraumhugo 5mo ago
  Love the idea. Let me get to this over the weekend and open-source it, then ping you via email.
brianbcarter 5mo ago
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-create-Bjlc1GGwSqKkjOLJqYhtaQ https://www.perplexity.ai/search/given-these-how-can-we-crea...
deaux 5mo ago
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.
rbbydotdev 5mo ago
time to add plugins to hn, automated measure of ai comments and submissions to be the first ;)
meowspace 5mo ago
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fromaustinc 5mo ago
very interesting
mlmonkey 5mo ago
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?
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  Do you even really need "reactive web design"? Not every website needs to be a webapp, if the sites just a blog and links to the docs and downloads it's very reasonable to sit down and crank out some HTML and CSS like the good old days. Hell, use a static site generator and the HTML bit mostly disappears
tptacek 5mo ago
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.
qubob 5mo ago
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.
debarshri 5mo ago
I always ask it to use tailwind with shadcn. Then you get a generic UI which will not pass as AI generated.
skyberrys 5mo ago
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.
rzmmm 5mo ago
Why so many defensive comments? A good visual design has some personality.
dataviz1000 5mo ago
> Every pattern is a deterministic CSS or DOM check. I intentionally do not take screenshots and let the LLM judge them. I use LLM models in my side projects like this guy uses them. So many times I spent days and weeks on a side project just to make sure it was perfect only to to have 0 interest from anyone else after sharing.
asp_hornet 5mo ago
> Is this bad? Not really, just uninspired. I signed up for a Mobbin account to find inspiration only to find every app and website looks the same. I came to the same conclusion, “this isn’t bad but it’s certainly uninspired”
janalsncm 5mo ago
Is this not the ultimate “judging a book by its cover”? Let’s take the opposite case, where someone handcrafted a website but the actual project/product was just a vibecoded mess? Is that not infinitely worse? Imo, what matters is what they actually made with the thing. I get that these LLMs are pumping out ugly websites. But unless the product is a design system or website builder, it’s not my main concern.
robeym 5mo ago
I've always seen similarities between side project websites. It just depends on what the most popular/easiest to use tool is at the time. There was a huge surge of almost identical reusable components 8-10 years ago, but I didn't see nearly as many people talking about that as I do now with AI. People who have side projects will often go with what's easiest to rollout. It doesn't bother me at all. I don't understand why it bothers so many people so much . Great job to everyone who has created something
Meterman 5mo ago
Agree with the efficiency framing — the aesthetic homogeneity is downstream of the fact that these are side projects and LLMs are faster than crafting a design system from scratch. The more interesting question the post raises, at least for me, is that distribution platforms like Show HN, Product Hunt, etc. were designed for an era when launching something was costly enough to be a signal. When a weekend project can ship a production-looking landing page, upvotes on these platforms start selecting for whatever catches the eye fastest, not whatever actually solves a problem. The signal degrades. I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm building a directory where you have to rank 5 other projects before you can post your own — trying to see if forced engagement produces better signal than one-click upvotes. Too early to say if it works, but I do think "how do we find the good stuff under the slop" is the real problem and it probably isn't solved by detecting AI design patterns.
- jackp96 5mo ago
  100% agree with you here. Psychologically, I'm pretty convinced that the best spaces on the internet (and potentially off of it) require some small amount of friction for quality conversation and collaboration. Comment sections on paid substacks tend to be much better than free ones. And on Hackernews (and Reddit, a decade ago), the old-school, text-heavy approach (complete with voting) help ensure that quality content rises. I find the balance fascinating — exactly how much friction do you need to create a healthy online community? And what are the best ways of doing that without making people pay?
- stingraycharles 5mo ago
  AI philosophizing on HN about the degrading impact AI has on HN is getting annoying and missing the point entirely.
anduril22 5mo ago
My hand coded app is shadcn/Radix - I wouldn't use that as an AI barometer.
waterTanuki 5mo ago
So it's true that AI-generated websites will follow similar style patterns given their training set and what the "modern" internet has converged on to be "optimal". But one could also argue based on the examples shown that any CSS template generated from shadcn's template generator (or any other for the most part) https://shadcnstudio.com/theme-generator https://shadcnstudio.com/theme-generator also has a vibe-coded sheen to it. Then the question becomes, do we need to go back to hand-picking every single css element to avoid being suspected of vibe coding? Why is it ok for someone to generate a css template on the fly using shadcn, but not ok to generate styles using claude code? Will someone using shadcn be judged the same as someone using claude code for styles?
faxuss 5mo ago
Clear and interesting take on “slop.” It feels spot on, though adding a concrete example or two could make it even more relatable.
aetherspawn 5mo ago
The problem is the bar of expectation has really raised since AI, now you absolutely must have a fancy website with 3-dozen pages and SaaS-like styling. Before, you could get away doing business with a basic 1-pager, which is about the same as what everyone else had, but these days looks lazy/incompetent. You don’t have any more time to throw it together than you did before so… yeah I guess slop it is. Probably not going to be humans reading it past the front page anyway. If you want to engage humans, use LinkedIn or TikTok or something.
seism 5mo ago
Every hackathon should use this.
jdw64 5mo ago
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classified 5mo ago
I thought editorializing titles is against the guidelines? The current title was editorialized from the article title "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly share the same vibe-coded look".
vipipiccf 5mo ago
I'm a backend developer. I can read and write frontend, but AI tools have genuinely helped me there. From a product dev perspective, they empower the storytelling and visualization of technical work while I stay focused on the problem-solving itself. That said, the AI slop problem is real. Most of it has very little depth. I'd love a sidebar tool that rates submissions on engineering rigor so projects with real technical depth don't get overlooked, and there's a clear differentiator between pure vibe-coding and engineering-backed work.
lucy_hnatchuk 5mo ago
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croemer 5mo ago
Would be good to show results in details, not just summary. A list of high and low scoring submissions, for example, to vibe check the method. Also, would be good to show trends over time rather than just a one-time pie chart showing breakdown into arbitrary categories.
globalnode 5mo ago
I loved the term "Heavy Slop" they used.
kykat 5mo ago
I've been using colored borders as design for ages... Hate seeing it becoming an "AI tell" :(
yamajun93 5mo ago
I don't think the problem itself is being AI-generated, but lazy AI-generated UI/UX often is. The vibe-coded aesthetic often signals "I didn't deeply consider how this actually works" - which can be a red flag even if the underlying tech is sound.

333 points by hubraumhugo 5mo ago

Would love if we could get a tool that performed the same analysis on an arbitrary site as the author's playwright test setup.

julia-kafarska 5mo ago

There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.

michaelcampbell 5mo ago
Indeed, and I don't think there's any reliable signal other than the author saying so that something is "vibe coded" vs. "I used an LLM for some aspect of it."
- avereveard 5mo ago
  Ask a llm for a code review along code duplication, encapsulation and sequential coupling as quality axes and the difference should show up readily
- cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  The biggest signal is not the code itself but whether the thing is actively and continually developed for more than a few weeks. And then look through the commits -- were they only adding new features, or did the author(s) put effort into improvements on engineering fundamentals (benchmarking, testing, documentation, etc)?
- pscanf 5mo ago
  I recently ran an experiment where I tried to use _quantitative signals_ (and not _qualitative_ ones) to tell whether something is vibe-coded or not. My idea was that, if I see that your project is growing 10k LOC per week and you're the only developer working on it, it's most likely vibe-coded. I analyzed some open-source projects, but unfortunately it turns out not to be so clear cut. It's relatively easy to estimate the growth rate of a project, but figuring out how much time developers worked on it is very error prone, which results in both false positives and false negatives. I wrote a post about it (https://pscanf.com/s/352/ https://pscanf.com/s/352/) if you're interested in the details.
user34283 5mo ago
Perhaps a year ago “vibe coding” was indicative of a low quality product. It seems many have not updated their understanding to match today’s capabilities. I am vibe coding. That does not mean I am incompetent or that the product will be bad. I have 10 years of experience. Using agentic AI to implement, iterate, and debug issues is now the workflow most teams are targeting. While last year chances were slim for the agent to debug tricky issues, I feel that now it can figure out a lot once you have it instrument the app and provide logs. It sometimes feels like some commenters stick with last year’s mindset and feel entitled to yell about ‘AI slop’ at the first sign of an issue in a product and denigrate the author’s competence.
- deaux 5mo ago
  No, it is still indicative of a low quality product. And I say that as someone who has probably been agentic coding longer than you have. Indicative in my dictionary doesn't mean definitive. It just makes it much more likely. You can make quality products while LLMs write >99% of the code. This has been possible for more than a year, so it's not a lack of updating of beliefs that is the issue. I've done so myself. Rather, 90% of above products are low quality, at a much higher rate than say, 2022, pre-GPT. As such, it's an indicator. That 10% exists, just like pearls can hide in a pile of shit. As others have said the reason is time investment. You can takes 2 months to build something where the LLM codes 99%. Or you can take 2 hours. HN, and everywhere else, is flooded by the latter. That's why it's mostly crap. I did the former. And luckily it led to a good result. Not a coincidence. This applies far beyond coding. It applies to _everything_ done with LLMs. You can use them to write a book in 2 hours. You can use them to write a book in 2 years.
  - all2 5mo ago
    I've been neck deep in a personal project since January that heavily leverages LLMs for the coding. Most of my time has been spent fitting abstractions together, trying to find meaningful relationships in a field that is still somewhat ill-defined. I suppose I could have thrown lots of cash at it and had it 'done' in a weekend, but I hate that idea. As it stands, I know what works and what doesn't (to the degree I can, I'm still learning, and I'll acknowledge I'm not super knowledgeable in most things) but I'm trying to apply what I know to a domain I don't readily understand well.

cammasmith 5mo ago

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.

fooker 5mo ago

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.

phoronixrly 5mo ago
Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting. If you're instead into learning from projects based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, they're utterly boring... I find that I just don't learn anything new from Show HN vibe-coded side projects, and I can often replicate them in a couple of hundred of dollars, so why bother looking at them? Also why bother sharing one in the first place, since it doesn't really show any personal prowess, and doesn't bring value to the community due to it being easy to replicate?
- michaelcampbell 5mo ago
  > Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting. There's a lot of ways things can be of interest. The problem being solved, how it's being solved, the UI, UX, etc. THAT it is vibe coded may or may not be interesting to some, but finding it un-interesting because it's vibe coded is no better than finding that it is.
- fooker 5mo ago
  Yes, I find looking at vibe coded stuff interesting when they solve a worthy problem. No amount of denial will roll back the technology that millions can use now, that makes it realistic to produce in a day software that would take at least months five years ago.
- bdcravens 5mo ago
  This assumes that pre-LLM projects were based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, and not just boilerplated framework code, copying the design trends of the week. I'd challenge the lack of personal prowess argument. Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill, even if you're not hand-crafting CSS and SQL. I liken it to those who tune cars, who buy cars made in a factory, install parts made by someone else, using tools that are all standardized. In the middle somewhere is the human making decisions to create a final result, which is where the talent exists.

dematz 5mo ago

Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects (maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)

bobthepanda 5mo ago
Cards have been in vogue for a while and I can’t recall the last time I saw super hard corners on a design system. It’s been a thing since at least Apple filing that patent on rounded corners.
- malfist 5mo ago
  Look at the website you're on
  - bobthepanda 5mo ago
    I guess I should say on a new design system. HN doesn’t update all that much (and in this context that’s a good thing)
- dematz 5mo ago
  You're absolutely right (as they say) - https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html I don't think it's just the base rate of rounded corners though, these posts feel like the AI tends to spit out a bullet point list of features, like you'd see on an AI readme where each feature has a tangential emoji, then for a website puts them in a grid of rounded rects
forgotTheLast 5mo ago
I think that's more of a NextJs thing than an LLM thing.
port11 5mo ago
Most — all? — of these patterns come from the obsession with Tailwind that swept over the frontend in the last few years. Composable CSS classes also seem like they’d be easier for LLMs to out together. I’m not sure we can tell what AI design looks like, Stitch and a number of other tools I’ve tried produce inconsistent, wild results. The common theme is that they’ll all look like Tailwind-style components if not given any other steering.

cr125rider 5mo ago

And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.

ultramann 5mo ago

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simonw 5mo ago

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")

tsukurimashou 5mo ago
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it? because I value the process of learning by doing
Oras 5mo ago
I agree. The problem is the noise ratio, not how the platform was implemented.
dematz 5mo ago
>if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
- simonw 5mo ago
  Sure... and it might also help you do more original thinking in that domain, and hence help you get a lot more learning value out of the time you have for those side projects. The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- 5mo ago

michaelcampbell 5mo ago

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)

joegibbs 5mo ago
AI definitely does seem to want to add coloured left borders, tags and superfluous numbers all over the place from my experience, you have to tell it specifically not to

cushycush 5mo ago

[flagged]

xnx 5mo ago

"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.

onetimeusename 5mo ago

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.

vijgaurav 5mo ago

Unless it is AI slop, I don't mind reading submissions that can be genuinely helpful.

bobthepanda 5mo ago

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.

ValentineC 5mo ago
> Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days. Shadcn works for Vercel, but is actually a human being (I think?). The UI framework is called shadcn/ui.
- efilife 5mo ago
  Reminded me of this https://stallman-copypasta.github.io/ https://stallman-copypasta.github.io/

mccoyb 5mo ago

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.

binary132 5mo ago
In a marketplace with infinite low-quality supply and limited attention, it doesn’t really matter how good the good offerings are.
doug_durham 5mo ago
Why is that a problem? Reality will filter out the projects that are poorly developed just like it always has.
- rglover 5mo ago
  Sure, but what greatness do we lose in the interim as it gets silenced by unending noise?
- Der_Einzige 5mo ago
  Like it filters windows OS for making the start button an electron app? Oh wait, it didn’t and nothing is displacing windows. Reality doesn’t filter out shit man. We objectively had better vaccumes in the 80s (central vacuums were popular then). We had objectively better displays in the 80s too (vector displays/game consoles like the vectrex were putting out variable refresh rates into the 1000hz equivalent with extreme brightness and impossible to replicate phosphor glow. Worse is better. Like, actually getting worse is progress. Sometimes it really is good to “return to monkie” and take a page from the past.

cmrdporcupine 5mo ago

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.)

binary132 5mo ago
The ongoing tragedy of the commons has made the state of the commons uncommonly tragic, and it will become a wasteland. You are right to identify the problem, but yeah, “getting eyes on my slop” in a public forum just isn’t realistically going to happen any more when there’s an infinite ocean of supply of slop and ever-dwindling available interest in picking through it looking for ever fewer gems. The future is underground.

sebakubisz 5mo ago

[dead]

sgammon 5mo ago

did you even read and edit the title of this post?

binary132 5mo ago

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.

buf 5mo ago
It will be replaced with private networks soon. Last step of anonymous internet.

homeonthemtn 5mo ago

This is cynical. Listen if you want to put time into a project then show it to the Internet to collectively shit on it, then kudos to you. You went on a journey and gained experience through it. Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.

curious1008 5mo ago

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.

elevaet 5mo ago

This is great, now we can better disguise slopware!

matsemann 5mo ago
These designs are now the trend, though. So they will influence how human designed/built websites also look.
- elevaet 5mo ago
  Yeah they are the trend, so they will probably cause a polarized response - some will find it cliche and reject it, others will coalesce around the standard.

saadn92 5mo ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

Funny, because as far as 'vibecoded colors', it's not the Tailwind purple anymore, I would say recently it's more of the same beige scheme this very blog post is using.

yard2010 5mo ago

"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"

arnorhs 5mo ago

i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions. Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at. But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.

xantronix 5mo ago

> 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.

marcodena 5mo ago

Average is all you need

nottorp 5mo ago

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...

swat535 5mo ago
Yea, I mean we've had so many phases.. Bootstrap, Web 2.0, Tailwind, "Material" UI, etc.. with random frameworks, from Rails to NextJS.. There's always a trend and everyone follows them in Software. Now it's AI.. let's not pretend cutting corners is anything new in our industry. I guess you can always gloat about your artisan code but people who use Software for business never cared about that to begin with. Plus, wasn't the entire philosophy of CS was that "everyone can code" ? Opposing licensing requirements, etc ? Well.. there you have it, code is a commodity now and the barrier to entry is next to none.

jerf 5mo ago

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.

preommr 5mo ago
> 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards. That's basically the entire AI landscape atm. I keep seeing people do things like spend a weekend building a product then charging ridiculous prices for it with the justification that it's what those products would've cost a few years ago. For some reason, it doens't click for them that those prices were a reflection of the effort it took to get to that point and that the situation has changed.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
Really apt comment, and I think it applies to a broader domain than just coding. People want others to judge their super fancy slide deck or new branding by that same 2016 standard, essentially fabricating accomplishment for themselves.

jaronilan 5mo ago

I try to submit short (tech related) stories (https://github.com/jaronilan/stories https://github.com/jaronilan/stories) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))

sunir 5mo ago

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.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September 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.

fainpul 5mo ago
It doesn't feel like more ideas are explored, it feels like more variants of the same old things are produced. Ideas have always been hard and AI doesn't help with that.
- yabones 5mo ago
  It feels like people are more willing to give their agent a prompt than search the web for existing solutions. I've noticed a crazy amount of clearly AI coded projects that do a small subset of an already existing and very trusted open source project. Comments usually point this out, and the OP never responds. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but the whole thing feels like a waste of time for everybody involved.
Barbing 5mo ago
This optimism, I like it. (Still plenty of scary stuff, but I should feel like you at least some of the time, healthy balance.)
romaniv 5mo ago
> 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. This is a manipulative combination of condescension, gaslighting and emotionalization. "It's fun to complain" trivializes and dismisses a valid observation about the content being submitted as self-indulgent whining. "I'd rather face the world" implies that people who want to see carefully constructed projects and human-written articles about them are refusing to face the world, i.e. delusional. "Find the joy in it" reduces the whole discussion to the question of self-imposed mindset, as if there is no possible rational reason to be unhappy about what's going on.

jameslk 5mo ago

> 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

nomdep 5mo ago

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?

mercurialsolo 5mo ago

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

computerphage 5mo ago

> 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

monkeynotes 5mo ago

Even his blog has the Claude vibe to it.

efilife 5mo ago
https://www.adriankrebs.ch/about https://www.adriankrebs.ch/about > The site is built with Astro. Design inspired by Paul Stamatiou. https://paulstamatiou.com https://paulstamatiou.com

fusslo 5mo ago

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.

rglover 5mo ago
That sounds maddening.
all2 5mo ago
A "you built it, you fix it" policy would be lovely in this situation.

amysox 5mo ago

I guess I was bucking the trend with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333, which points to https://electricminds.org 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/ https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/.

maxothex 5mo ago

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deleted 5mo ago

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lschueller 5mo ago

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...

figassis 5mo ago

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.

flexagoon 5mo ago

> 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

bstsb 5mo ago
yeah lots of these are used by AI because they're good. i use Space Grotesk for headings on my current project, rotheme, with Instrument Sans in the body, and my link shortener project uses Geist. maybe i'm an LLM too

raincole 5mo ago

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-declaration-of-independence-as-nearly-90-ai-generated/ https://dallasexpress.com/state/zerogpt-flags-1836-texas-dec...

vintagedave 5mo ago

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.

vladstudio 5mo ago

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

richard_chase 5mo ago

I used a colored left-border on my blog and thought it looked pretty fresh. I didn't realize that was an AI pattern.

sd9 5mo ago

I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.

dang 5mo ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (425 comments)

deevus 5mo ago
Thanks for this.

ofjcihen 5mo ago

> 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.

dang 5mo ago

Heavy slop (5+ patterns) · 105 sites · 21% Mild (2–4) · 230 sites · 46% Clean (0–1) · 165 sites · 33% Can we have a list of the "clean" ones please? Actually, if you give me a list of the IDs for all 3 categories, I'll make URLs for each that people can browse. 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.

hubraumhugo 5mo ago
Love the idea. Let me get to this over the weekend and open-source it, then ping you via email.

brianbcarter 5mo ago

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-create-Bjlc1GGwSqKkjOLJqYhtaQ https://www.perplexity.ai/search/given-these-how-can-we-crea...

deaux 5mo ago

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.

rbbydotdev 5mo ago

time to add plugins to hn, automated measure of ai comments and submissions to be the first ;)

meowspace 5mo ago

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fromaustinc 5mo ago

very interesting

mlmonkey 5mo ago

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?

mghackerlady 5mo ago
Do you even really need "reactive web design"? Not every website needs to be a webapp, if the sites just a blog and links to the docs and downloads it's very reasonable to sit down and crank out some HTML and CSS like the good old days. Hell, use a static site generator and the HTML bit mostly disappears

tptacek 5mo ago

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.

qubob 5mo ago

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.

debarshri 5mo ago

I always ask it to use tailwind with shadcn. Then you get a generic UI which will not pass as AI generated.

skyberrys 5mo ago

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.

rzmmm 5mo ago

Why so many defensive comments? A good visual design has some personality.

dataviz1000 5mo ago

> Every pattern is a deterministic CSS or DOM check. I intentionally do not take screenshots and let the LLM judge them. I use LLM models in my side projects like this guy uses them. So many times I spent days and weeks on a side project just to make sure it was perfect only to to have 0 interest from anyone else after sharing.

asp_hornet 5mo ago

> Is this bad? Not really, just uninspired. I signed up for a Mobbin account to find inspiration only to find every app and website looks the same. I came to the same conclusion, “this isn’t bad but it’s certainly uninspired”

janalsncm 5mo ago

Is this not the ultimate “judging a book by its cover”? Let’s take the opposite case, where someone handcrafted a website but the actual project/product was just a vibecoded mess? Is that not infinitely worse? Imo, what matters is what they actually made with the thing. I get that these LLMs are pumping out ugly websites. But unless the product is a design system or website builder, it’s not my main concern.

robeym 5mo ago

I've always seen similarities between side project websites. It just depends on what the most popular/easiest to use tool is at the time. There was a huge surge of almost identical reusable components 8-10 years ago, but I didn't see nearly as many people talking about that as I do now with AI. People who have side projects will often go with what's easiest to rollout. It doesn't bother me at all. I don't understand why it bothers so many people so much . Great job to everyone who has created something

Meterman 5mo ago

Agree with the efficiency framing — the aesthetic homogeneity is downstream of the fact that these are side projects and LLMs are faster than crafting a design system from scratch. The more interesting question the post raises, at least for me, is that distribution platforms like Show HN, Product Hunt, etc. were designed for an era when launching something was costly enough to be a signal. When a weekend project can ship a production-looking landing page, upvotes on these platforms start selecting for whatever catches the eye fastest, not whatever actually solves a problem. The signal degrades. I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm building a directory where you have to rank 5 other projects before you can post your own — trying to see if forced engagement produces better signal than one-click upvotes. Too early to say if it works, but I do think "how do we find the good stuff under the slop" is the real problem and it probably isn't solved by detecting AI design patterns.

jackp96 5mo ago
100% agree with you here. Psychologically, I'm pretty convinced that the best spaces on the internet (and potentially off of it) require some small amount of friction for quality conversation and collaboration. Comment sections on paid substacks tend to be much better than free ones. And on Hackernews (and Reddit, a decade ago), the old-school, text-heavy approach (complete with voting) help ensure that quality content rises. I find the balance fascinating — exactly how much friction do you need to create a healthy online community? And what are the best ways of doing that without making people pay?
stingraycharles 5mo ago
AI philosophizing on HN about the degrading impact AI has on HN is getting annoying and missing the point entirely.

anduril22 5mo ago

My hand coded app is shadcn/Radix - I wouldn't use that as an AI barometer.

waterTanuki 5mo ago

So it's true that AI-generated websites will follow similar style patterns given their training set and what the "modern" internet has converged on to be "optimal". But one could also argue based on the examples shown that any CSS template generated from shadcn's template generator (or any other for the most part) https://shadcnstudio.com/theme-generator https://shadcnstudio.com/theme-generator also has a vibe-coded sheen to it. Then the question becomes, do we need to go back to hand-picking every single css element to avoid being suspected of vibe coding? Why is it ok for someone to generate a css template on the fly using shadcn, but not ok to generate styles using claude code? Will someone using shadcn be judged the same as someone using claude code for styles?

faxuss 5mo ago

Clear and interesting take on “slop.” It feels spot on, though adding a concrete example or two could make it even more relatable.

aetherspawn 5mo ago

The problem is the bar of expectation has really raised since AI, now you absolutely must have a fancy website with 3-dozen pages and SaaS-like styling. Before, you could get away doing business with a basic 1-pager, which is about the same as what everyone else had, but these days looks lazy/incompetent. You don’t have any more time to throw it together than you did before so… yeah I guess slop it is. Probably not going to be humans reading it past the front page anyway. If you want to engage humans, use LinkedIn or TikTok or something.

seism 5mo ago

Every hackathon should use this.

jdw64 5mo ago

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classified 5mo ago

I thought editorializing titles is against the guidelines? The current title was editorialized from the article title "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly share the same vibe-coded look".

vipipiccf 5mo ago

I'm a backend developer. I can read and write frontend, but AI tools have genuinely helped me there. From a product dev perspective, they empower the storytelling and visualization of technical work while I stay focused on the problem-solving itself. That said, the AI slop problem is real. Most of it has very little depth. I'd love a sidebar tool that rates submissions on engineering rigor so projects with real technical depth don't get overlooked, and there's a clear differentiator between pure vibe-coding and engineering-backed work.

lucy_hnatchuk 5mo ago

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croemer 5mo ago

Would be good to show results in details, not just summary. A list of high and low scoring submissions, for example, to vibe check the method. Also, would be good to show trends over time rather than just a one-time pie chart showing breakdown into arbitrary categories.

globalnode 5mo ago

I loved the term "Heavy Slop" they used.

kykat 5mo ago

I've been using colored borders as design for ages... Hate seeing it becoming an "AI tell" :(

yamajun93 5mo ago

I don't think the problem itself is being AI-generated, but lazy AI-generated UI/UX often is. The vibe-coded aesthetic often signals "I didn't deeply consider how this actually works" - which can be a red flag even if the underlying tech is sound.