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Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes
hope you enjoy
- jrflo 4mo agoThat ascii lava lamp effect is low key really cool
- carlos-menezes 4mo agoLags the hell out of my browser (Safari) window though.
- tyleo 4mo agoYeah probably my favorite of the bunch too. I bet there’s a fun project to do to make a customizer for that.
- replwoacause 4mo agoNot sure what's low key about it but I agree that it's cool
- tfitz237 4mo agoThese all look very professional for (basically) a parody library
- csomar 4mo agoWhat are the odds some companies end up using it for a real product?
- eranation 4mo ago100%
- scottyah 4mo agoHonestly I can just swap these bad boys in and ship in less than a couple hours if it'd be funny enough. I don't think they're bad designs at all, and I don't think every aspect of my business needs to be unique and obsessed over. IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.
- visha1v 4mo agothe distance b/w satire and SaaS is approx one quarter
- sgt 4mo agoWhat are the odds of LLM's being trained on this and picking it up as best practice?
- Boxxed 4mo ago...which might just show how predictable and similar all janky startup pages are.
- NuclearPM 4mo agoJanky?
- sv123 4mo agoDefinitely bookmarking for future ideas and inspiration, don't care if I'm shamed for it.
- arnley 4mo agoDefinitely using it for a hackathon project ( Live). The timing was too perfect not to try and use it.
- yieldcrv 4mo agoJust because they're showing contempt for the process doesn't mean the process isn't refined Joking about something tends to require an interconnected understanding of it
- marcosdumay 4mo agoIMO that means "professional" will look very different in a few years.
- MisterKent 4mo agoNow I can produce slop without AI.
- sph 4mo agoWhy would you do that, when you can make shit nobody needs 10x faster with AI
- hyperhello 4mo agoThe author should have AI set up a simple deployment to EC2 and Azure and make an endless series of semantically meaningless AI companies with web sites and submit them everywhere. The web sites should also do this themselves.
- igurss 4mo agoNice UI quality
- erdaltoprak 4mo agoIt's very fun and way too polished, thanks!
- imafish 4mo agoI heard you like AI slop...
- wg0 4mo agoMan... That's satire on a whole another level. What a technical and deep sense of humor.
- punkbit 4mo agoSpot on "AI Native".
- ajpaulson 4mo agoLmao!!! Awesome
- staminade 4mo agoVery funny. Although ironic that this whole library was built with AI.
- smhanov 4mo agoIt needs a purple gradient mode.
- padolsey 4mo agoThe most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
- Waterluvian 4mo agoNetscape knows best.
- ghurtado 4mo agoGive me Navigator or give me death
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoArray language proponents also like to do this. In their case I‘ll allow it, it matches the substance.
- arboles 4mo agoCan you link to a genuine example?
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoMinimalist example: https://kona.github.io/ https://kona.github.io/ Extremely Minimalist example: https://k.nyc/ https://k.nyc/
- arboles 4mo agoIn the pages you linked there's not much writing to really get a taste (https://k.nyc https://k.nyc responds with an unclosed <div> containing the letter k, come on), but I found some language examples in * https://codeberg.org/growler/k/pulls/ https://codeberg.org/growler/k/pulls/ * https://codeberg.org/growler/k/issues https://codeberg.org/growler/k/issues User @growler writes in succinct sentences and uses only periods. I'm having fun with the idea, in my head, that using array languages changes how you speak and write. HN commenters have also pointed out the peculiar way ngn/k writes C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31362512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31362512
- jtbayly 4mo agoI could see actually using this…
- Brajeshwar 4mo agoMany a true word is spoken in jest.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo agoNGL I'm going to steal/borrow/leach all sorts of these for my product. When in Rome!
- yosef123 4mo agoThis needs an additional subscriptions service tier, that's even more performative and even more AI
- kardianos 4mo agoSavage and accurate. 100%.
- marknutter 4mo agoYawn. This is just bootstrap all over again. So what if people who don't have design skills can now create pleasant looking websites?
- ghurtado 4mo agoThe thing about humor is that you don't have to tell people when you don't get a joke, you can just quietly continue to live your life while you wait for your next chance to be temporarily happy.
- marknutter 4mo agoI get the joke, and I do appreciate it. I shouldn't have been so flippant in my comment, I was more just pushing back on people who disparage others for using ai to create websites.
- avaer 4mo agoI've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it. It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
- epolanski 4mo agoSame for clickbait thumbnails, people hate them, and yet don't really click on non clickbaity ones.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoIn the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.
- 4chandaily 4mo agoThe perspective marketing world seems toxic. From the perspective of the "consumer", it sure does feel like we are being "ignored", "tricked", or "bamboozled" when our stated preferences are ignored in favor of "revealed preference". It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that. Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking. I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoYeah, it is highly toxic. I'd assume that in most cases those "revealed preferences" are specifically engineered, not organic. It's taking advantage of biological reflexes and calling it a true preference.
- utopiah 4mo agoNeat, opened an issue there for a finicky bit of code that'd help me quite a bit. /s
- rirze 4mo agoI love it https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2#issuecomment-4651102819 https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2#issuecomme...
- eranation 4mo agoMy Claude feels personally attacked.
- grassfedgeek 4mo agoAdding github link for those who want to use it (I do): https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI
- lizhang 4mo agowait my readme isnt performative enough yet, let me add a chart showing the star history
- consumer451 4mo agolol. Genuinely curious, what is your reaction to so much "actually, this is great and useful" feedback?
- lizhang 4mo agothis gives me great motivation to take on even more story points next sprint!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Terretta 4mo ago“TokenStream – Server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025.” I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today. I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in. There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable. But yeah, talk about things nobody used....
- ChiperSoft 4mo agoCOMET was so far ahead of its time. Sierra Online used it for their webchat in 1995 and it was absolutely the best webchat out there for years
- wuliwong 4mo agoI get the whole trope thing and maybe I'm just an old man but I still am kinda impressed when Claude sh*ts out this type of UI 100 times faster than I ever could. It might also be that I never could have made UI even of this quality before AI. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
- kfarr 4mo agoSome of these are actually nice and appropriate to use in certain contexts. Also this issue is hilarious: https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2 https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2
- aogaili 4mo agoIt's still better than the sh*t developers produced three years ago. Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce. So, it's progress.
- chrisra 4mo agoAgreed. I enjoy looking at and using a lot of these components.
- CarlitosHighway 4mo agoWhy so angry?
- aogaili 4mo agoAnd who are you my therapist? Just argue the point, this is not group therapy forum. Passive-aggressive people are the angriest/nastiest people around.
- CarlitosHighway 4mo agoWhat gave you the idea I wanted to "therapy" you?
- lizhang 4mo agono more stars please, we are at a funny number
- kachoio 4mo agopretty decent, may even use some of the components eventually. star given
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- butz 4mo agoDickover is suspiciously missing. How will I ask visitors to subscribe to my newsletter?
- jdw64 4mo agoCoooooooooool!!!!
- prplfsh 4mo agoI love how this is both hilarious and extremely well made. Great job! And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).
- reactordev 4mo agoI was going to say that too. Some of these I definitely am guilty of. I have a few dozen that aren't on the list but it's a breath of fresh air to see it so well organized even though, we all know what it is :D fantastic job to the author(s).
- lizhang 4mo agoplease share your few dozen components
- reactordev 4mo agoWhy? They are silly gimmicks. You can easily prompt this. Claude: “In react, make a full screen component that renders pixel squares that fade in and accumulate over a page component, taken as a target prop.” Stupid crap like that. What’s cool is for those fullscreen tutorials or app walkthroughs, this works REALLY well to highlight the box on screen.
- apsurd 4mo agoor they can just prompt you for help.
- reassess_blind 4mo agoThe death of development, ladies and gentlemen.
- reactordev 4mo agodon't be so gloom. code that's more difficult than a zero-shot is worthy of sharing.
- Lupara 4mo ago[flagged]
- iishanto 4mo agoStarred this, my next project is going to be classified as slop anyway.
- jdw64 4mo agoThe funny thing is, the techniques shown here are the ones that were once considered something only advanced front-end developers or publishers could do. Seeing that a former symbol of skill has now become a subject of satire makes me think that what we call 'high-level' ultimately comes from what others can't do. I personally never even thought about how to implement ASCII art animation.
- kidfiji 4mo agoIt's less about "can't do" and more about creativity :)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jdw64 4mo agoWell, yes.
- arboles 4mo agoYeah, it used to function as proof-of-work but then the market was flooded with cheap printed circuits that trivialized the workload
- wbobeirne 4mo agoAs someone who used to pride myself on being able to make complex graphical designs a reality, it has definitely put me into a little bit of an identity crisis. But ultimately I think it just pushes you to find the things that are still hard for AIs, which in turn continues to differentiate your work from what everyone can now generate. Feels similar to the move away from realism to impressionism as the camera became available.
- manoDev 4mo agoSuch is everything: at first, painstakingly crafted; later, mass produced.
- 4mo ago
- darepublic 4mo agoSlick and self aware. Looks good
- julik 4mo agoThat is absolutely delightful
- pushMiau 4mo ago[dead]
- ChiperSoft 4mo agoOh wow, it uses normal css, how delightful! https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/src/styles.css https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/src/style...
- tomaytotomato 4mo agoWhen Agentic browsers become the norm, surely we will go back to the days of super plain HTML pages?
- zaptrem 4mo agoNeeds more WebGL spinning rubik's cube
- cubano 4mo agoWell...what about a <BLINK> as well? For gramps.
- guybedo 4mo agoit's obviously a satire and that makes me feel bad because some components are actually cool and i'd like to use them ...
- onesingleblast 4mo ago[dead]
- andrewstuart 4mo agoI’m interested but cannot be bothered doing 60 clicks trying to see it all.
- lizhang 4mo agoyou can now use square brackets [] to navigate between components •ᴗ•
- andrewstuart 4mo agoCan you show them all on the front page?
- hypfer 4mo agoThis is like building nerve agents for funsies. I am torn between respect and terror.
- drob518 4mo agoI’m totally triggered, but in the most ironic way. Or something like that.
- gkfasdfasdf 4mo agoThe lib is a joke I know, but these will absolutely get your prototype greenlit.
- lizhang 4mo agoif it helps you raise a series A please send me a little caesars hot n ready
- the__alchemist 4mo agoWow, Blazing fast! Does this use Fiber?
- winddude 4mo agoneeds something for showing and copying simple terminal commands.
- starkgoose 4mo agoI find it funny that a website showcasing pretty preformative ui and yet fails so miserably at functional ui where it's painful to be used mobile
- loh 4mo agoActually quite good for a meme library! Unironically considering using some of this, or pulling some inspiration from it at least. Also, I'm curious as to when the animated gradient text started being a popular thing. I started doing it back in 2021 or so. I think I was inspired by some of Apple's webpages at the time.
- alehlopeh 4mo agoI love the research. Those 6 files plus a 2 sentence prompt were probably enough for Claude to one-shot the entire library. https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/research/ https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/research/
- elwell 4mo agoThe animated graph nodes background is obligatory for token sale marketing sites during 2017/18 ICO boom https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/node-graph https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/node-gr...
- lloydatkinson 4mo agoI assume this is where charlatan companies like Vercel get their UI from
- inopinatus 4mo agoI don’t understand why the obnoxious popover didn’t automatically manifest when I scrolled its own doco. Needs more IntersectionObserver. Bonus points if the component props thereof are named like “selfArmTrigger”, I suppose.
- professroclaw 4mo ago[flagged]
- manoDev 4mo agoLovely. These React components are the new spam mail.
- gulugawa 4mo agoGreat work! It sounds to me like something a startup would use to vibe code a UI.
- the_arun 4mo agoWell done. I don't know what others say, I liked it being a non UX person.
- noobcoder 4mo agoThe purple colors look very sloppy, pls not the purplish tint
- SilverSlash 4mo agoI like the concept. It would indeed be good to have a modern component library with AI design tropes as I think the old components libs haven't caught up. But in this particular case I must say, a lot of the components here just look plain ugly.
- vladsiu 4mo ago[dead]
- glaslong 4mo agoFinally! Bootstrap for AI Wrappers
- smrtinsert 4mo agoNot nearly enough animated gradient dropshadow. Check out googles AI Mode button and the same loading button status thing while waiting for responses in AI Mode. Please add it so I don't have to prompt for it - I can't tell if I'm joking.
- emvied 4mo agoI never knew it was called an eyebrow pill!
- tanepiper 4mo agoI don't actually hate this...
- dongbinlee 4mo agoNow I can make my landing page look funded before the product exists.
- thedetailsguy 4mo agoNit - the UI glitches/flashes as I scroll the page.
- myaccountonhn 4mo agoIt's funny how many people here like it. Well it doesn't surprise me since the websites being upvoted here from startups look like this too. Personally I barf when I come across a website that looks like this and close it immediately. It's about as appealing as stock images. I also immediately think that this is for a SAAS that will be bog-slow, expensive and only integrates with github.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- azangru 4mo agoWell, at least the copy on the site reads like satire. I didn't notice it at first, looking at components; but then I started reading the text. P.S.: The popover description is brilliant: > The obtrusive newsletter modal every AI startup deploys. Takes over the entire viewport with a blurred backdrop. By design, neither the Escape key nor backdrop clicks close it; the visitor either submits the form inside or clicks the tiny dismissal link at the bottom. Pair with `timer` to auto-open after the visitor has skimmed a few paragraphs.
- myaccountonhn 4mo agoYes I think the satire is brilliant. It really does feel like just another saas.
- igorusovich89 4mo ago[flagged]
- cdogukank 4mo ago[dead]
- LucasOe 4mo agoFuck. My personal portfolio website has like three of these components, even though I don't like using AI for development.
- bhargab_kalita 4mo agoI really loved the design but I am getting overwhelmed by seeing the ui-libraries being dumped everday
- CarlitosHighway 4mo agoIt needs some kind of "Japan" component...don't ask me what it does or how it looks like, but sites with performative UI will need some kind of reference to Japan.
- rubyevans109 4mo agoThis is hilarious, I have definitely written components that look exactly like some of these before. The 'loading animation that looks busy' one hits too close to home. Do people really fall for this stuff in demos?
- m1rsh0 4mo agoPretty cool library. I'm gonna use it for one of my projects.
- aryasyn 4mo agoHaha well tagged, "Performative", finally a place for the majority of vibe coders to reference to and switch from blandly coded UI.
- merveceylan 3mo agoAs a designer I've thought a lot about why these tropes spread, they're all basically an "I belong to the club" signal. But once everyone wears the same costume, the costume stops meaning anything. This nails that.
- echoforgex 3mo ago[dead]