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simonw 6 days 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")
vunderba 6 days ago [-]
My biggest issue with LLM‑assisted webpages (Claude Code is especially egregious) is the lack of respect for basic web content accessibility guidelines.
The number of dark‑mode sites I’ve seen where the text (and subtext) are various shades of dark brown or beige is just awful. For reference, you want a contrast ratio between the text and background of at least ~4:1 to be on the safe side.
This isn't even that hard to fix - hell you can add the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to a skill.
self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__=self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__||[];self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__.push("e:I[\"6ed23a8ff0cc\",[],\"default\",1]\nf:T400,The \"default\" light-mode look of most popular UI frameworks wouldn't have that same issue unless you put a lot of time into customizing your own styling, which most side projects wouldn't bother with (unless that look and feel was the point of the project). There certainly would be poor UI decisions but more likely in layout/placement/navigation, which could still be problematic for accessibility but probably not in a \"is this color scheme even readable\" kind of way.\u003cp\u003ePlus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text into every visible inch of the page without \u003ci\u003esome\u003c/i\u003e intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMaybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as \"cool looking\" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.\u003c/p\u003e10:T5f0,\u0026gt; \u003ci\u003echiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility\u003c/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eI hope you remember that well into your adult life.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYour hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYour vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYour limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. ")ass="_text_18fc9_18">Were/Are human-generated side projects better in this respect?
fenykep 6 days ago [-]
I assume not, but the emphasis here is that a new tool is homogenizing these projects and due to its scale it is more important that this homogenous output is up to a higher standard.
A hundred self-thought devs not implementing accessibility standards is a different problem than a school teaching 100 students lacking these standards in its curriculum.
sen 6 days ago [-]
Yes, because a majority just use a CSS framework to save time, and all the big/common frameworks have put a fair bit of effort into their default colours and typography.
I would rather go back to when all side projects used Bootstrap than this purple-on-purple-with-glowing-purple mess of stuff we have now.
stingraycharles 6 days ago [-]
It’s also interesting that you can tell which LLM provider was used to build certain sites, sometimes even model and version.
It’s insane though how many dark mode websites with purple there are right now, how come all LLMs converged on that style?
toraway 6 days ago [-]
The "default" light-mode look of most popular UI frameworks wouldn't have that same issue unless you put a lot of time into customizing your own styling, which most side projects wouldn't bother with (unless that look and feel was the point of the project). There certainly would be poor UI decisions but more likely in layout/placement/navigation, which could still be problematic for accessibility but probably not in a "is this color scheme even readable" kind of way.
Plus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text into every visible inch of the page without some intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).
Maybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as "cool looking" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.
6 days ago [-]
classified 5 days ago [-]
It depends. As with everything else, those who know what they're doing and can make good looking and readable dark mode sites are the minority. Too many who think they're cool make squeaky white text on pitch black background and/or commit other sins. AI represents the average of the majority, not of the best.
simonw 6 days ago [-]
I've genuinely had solid results from telling Claude "... and make sure it has good accessibility".
vunderba 6 days ago [-]
I could see that. I’ve found that the more specificity you add to your prompt and less freedom you give Claude Code to kind of just “do its own thing”, the better your results will be.
FWIW, there’s also an official frontend-design skill for CC [1]. A while back I incorporated some of the more relevant guidance from WCAG into it [2].
Yes, you have to enjoy micromanaging a machine to get somewhat acceptable results.
conception 6 days ago [-]
Note guidance for 4.7 specifically calls out being more specific compared to 4.6. Though the system prompt seems to say the opposite.
Tldr I would expect different outcomes with 4.7 with not being specific.
vunderba 6 days ago [-]
Honestly I'd heard so much seemingly conflicting information about the quality of 4.7 that I've got an override in CC to stay on Opus 4.6 (1 million token context) for the time being.
For reference, in the .claude/settings.local.json
{
"model": "claude-opus-4-6[1M]"
}
satvikpendem 6 days ago [-]
Something I've noticed when people complain about stuff like accessibility or other things that LLMs do "wrong", it really is a case of "you're holding it wrong." The LLM does indeed know how to do it right and it sometimes does so autonomously but when it doesn't, you can simply ask it to do so.
In other words, I've found people like the above to think of LLMs as fairly static, as if we couldn't change their behavior with a simple sentence, instead of complaining about it. It's strange, to me at least.
th0ma5 6 days ago [-]
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debarshri 6 days ago [-]
I think this is a second order thing when you are building a side project.
th0ma5 6 days ago [-]
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userbinator 5 days ago [-]
That basically shows the AI has learned what the average webpage looks like, and it's indeed horrible.
mettamage 6 days ago [-]
If you have some good sources let me know, I'll turn it into a guide that Claude can read
vunderba 6 days ago [-]
I use the W3 preliminary guidelines - you could try adapting them into a bespoke skill as a good start.
Another possibility (although I’ve never actually tried this myself) is an MCP server that someone built specifically to connect to Lighthouse, which includes accessibility testing as part of its benchmarks.
I am the author of lighthouse-mcp. Plugging in a11y-mcp https://github.com/priyankark/a11y-mcp specifically for a11y and there are a few other variants of it from other authors as well.
I use these tools myself and they just build upon the awesome work from the open source community
danielvaughn 6 days ago [-]
I think it's fine, so long as the intent is to refine the thing after you've validated the product idea and direction. There are a million things to optimize in web pages, and AI can't simply one-shot good decisions yet.
krapp 6 days ago [-]
Show HN submissions aren't for launching your startup in stealth mode. You shouldn't need to "validate the product idea and direction." It's supposed to be fun, not business.
victorbjorklund 6 days ago [-]
Honestly, my accessibility on my apps/websites is much better now with AI because you can just tell AI to do it (and run automated tests to validate it worked) vs not doing it at all for a small side project with 2 users.
slibhb 6 days ago [-]
Just chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility and I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
willchis 6 days ago [-]
People assume that accessibility is all about some small minority of less abled people who can't "read good", but it's a broad category that affects all users. If you build following the guidelines then you end up with a quality product that can be used by people who stumbled upon it while doom-scrolling instead of enjoying their beach vacation. The best analogy I heard was about drop-kerbs/curb-cuts... people wonder why we're catering for a small minority of wheelchair users everywhere and then they have a kid (or wheel luggage from the airport) and realize how great they are.
ryandrake 6 days ago [-]
Yup, accessibility is literally about broadening the population of people who can use your software. It's often associated with affordances for the less-abled, but that's just a subset of accessibility. I don't get the hostility! Just a guess but maybe 1 in 50 or so developers I've worked with in the past didn't just "not care" about accessibility but were outright hostile to it, as in affirmatively "We should not spend time working on this!" Bizarre.
corndoge 6 days ago [-]
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Those of us who care that technology be accessible to as many people as possible, such as low vision users, find it relevant. You can ignore it if you wish.
simonw 6 days ago [-]
Just chiming in to say that the idea someone would "not care at all about accessibility" (and openly state as much) is bewildering to me.
firecall 6 days ago [-]
If nothing else, as a web developer, accessibility is an interesting challenge and satisfying to do well!
assface 6 days ago [-]
> Just chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility
That's until you want to fill a form and find out it's dark grey text on a different dark grey background so you don't see what you're typing even with 20/20 sight :)
furyofantares 6 days ago [-]
Consider not being bewildered that people care about things you don't care about.
gostsamo 6 days ago [-]
I'm blind and accessibility is important to me. It is extremely disrespectful to see someone who just says "fuck you" and feels good about it. Please, at least consider that the world is bigger than you imagine and there is place for everyone in it and there is no need to be purposefully rude.
Barbing 6 days ago [-]
If they happen to read this comment I would love to know, well it’s too invasive…
But, context of how they were raised
That comment was wild
reaperducer 6 days ago [-]
I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Because Western society functions for the common good. We are not animals fighting for survival in the wilderness.
And because a web site not being accessible is a liability. Target was sued and had to pay millions for having your attitude.
postalcoder 6 days ago [-]
Accessibility is a broad umbrella of features that enable a ton of really cool stuff for everybody, not just the disabled. Things like agentic computer use is only possible because of "accessibility".
p1necone 6 days ago [-]
The same accessibility stuff that makes screen readers work well also makes automated UI tests simpler and less brittle too (correct aria roles, accessible names, label relationships etc).
Barbing 6 days ago [-]
Accessibility is the only way we have access to any settings on the iPhone
NewsaHackO 6 days ago [-]
I care about accessibility, but I agree with your sentiment. There is this recurring pattern people have when trying to detract from AI. They realize that saying they dislike AI for economic reasons is not going to garner any sympathy, so they try to hide behind some noble cause. At one point, it was about water use in datacenters. At another point, they become defenders for megacorporations' copyright. Now, they are trying the "AI doesn't cares about accessibility" angle. They are just trying to find some reason that sticks.
satvikpendem 6 days ago [-]
As they say, everyone will eventually become disabled in some form or fashion. When your eyes go due to old age you'll be glad to still be able to use the internet.
Ironically this is perhaps the main motivation why a lot of companies force accessibility requirements internally. "We don't want an ADA lawsuit"
Now if only there were an ADA for website performance...
inetknght 6 days ago [-]
> chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
Your hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.
You brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. You brought this problem upon others. People won't care about your problems. Why should they, when you didn't care about theirs?
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Accessibility is legally required and not difficult to add.
Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people? Refusing to provide accessibility in your service is no different. You are actively discriminating in a way which could be illegal and certainly is unethical and amoral.
reaperducer 6 days ago [-]
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
It's not even about age.
You can twist an ankle playing basketball and need accessibility features like ramps and grab bars.
You can get hit in the eye by a bit of debris when your toy drone crashes, and need help reading a screen while it heals.
People who don't think they need accessibility only have to wait. Everyone gets their turn.
SoftTalker 6 days ago [-]
> Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people?
Bad analogy, as none of those traits require any accomodation in a website or app.
Not that I disagree with the premise. Almost everyone will eventually have trouble reading small, low contrast text or details on their phone or screen, if nothing else.
IanCal 6 days ago [-]
This seems very weirdly exclusionary to me. Don’t you care at all about the users trying to use your site?
CamperBob2 6 days ago [-]
Just chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility
You will.
duskdozer 5 days ago [-]
Accessible sites are also faster, lighter, and more responsive sites. Accessibility is a pro for everyone.
Barbing 6 days ago [-]
TIL slibhb will be young forever
guzfip 6 days ago [-]
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TimedToasts 6 days ago [-]
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ioseph 6 days ago [-]
How do you feel arriving at someone's house and there's no railings on the stairs? Even if it doesn't affect you (yet) it's unprofessional. We can do better
6 days ago [-]
CrimsonRain 6 days ago [-]
I think accessibility is a really admirable thing and helpful to society (like ramps or parking). But stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it on your own. Just write a chrome plugin using ai that adjusts css to set contrast ratio of your choice. Can even use a local llm to figure out replacement colors.
Accessibility that can be had on client side should not be a concern on server side.
Barbing 6 days ago [-]
>stop shoving your wants
“Don’t have bad vision if you didn’t want to be technical!”
(came across that way)
vunderba 6 days ago [-]
That's a really terrible option for the vast majority of people who simply lack that kind of tech savviness to be able to do it. And in my opinion, it's kind of selfish.
It also doesn't solve the issue if somebody is browsing your site on a mobile phone where the extension might not even work properly.
WCAG is not difficult - but it does require some modicum of effort.
mathgeek 6 days ago [-]
Obligatory “have Claude write one for you” (in jest of course). All kidding aside, folks have always underestimated how much accessibility helps even those who don’t think they need it.
vunderba 6 days ago [-]
Right? "Build your own extension" to fix a website's accessibility problems is the equivalent of telling somebody who is disabled to stop complaining about the lack of ramps when they can just modify their wheelchair with a jetpack.
Barbing 6 days ago [-]
They might not need it
…right now, today. But they might consider “build a world for ‘old’ you”
nozzlegear 6 days ago [-]
Our only recourse is to "stop shoving our wants on others," and instead make our own shit sandwich to fix someone else's shit sandwich?
reaperducer 6 days ago [-]
stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it on your own. Just write a chrome plugin using ai that adjusts css to set contrast ratio of your choice. Can even use a local llm to figure out replacement colors.
Stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it yourself.
Just get some concrete and some lumber, and build that wheelchair ramp.
You can even hire a contractor to follow you around town all day building them as needed.
8note 6 days ago [-]
as a comparison, i think the wheelchair itself is people making their own accessibility.
the wheelchair is not built into the site, and only requires a few hooks or the odd helping hand to work.
mapping back to software, and especially websites, your user agent is your user agent. it should render websites in the way you want to see them, regardless of what colours the designer chose.
an AI accessibility browser is more like a wheel chair than a ramp
anthonypasq 6 days ago [-]
right, so in this analogy i should be legally required to have wheelchair accessibility in my house?
spzb 6 days ago [-]
Not unless you invite the public in on a regular basis. Websites are available to the public - especially if you're trying to promote them on HN
wredcoll 6 days ago [-]
"legal" is distinct from "moral" which is distinct from "polite".
sdevonoes 6 days ago [-]
For me it wouldn’t make sense to use ai. Like I work on personal projects because they are fun: it’s fun to think about a problem, to solve it, to implement a solution, to learn new things and to fantasise about what if it gets popular and useful. If I can use AI to flip my fingers and make it happen, well wheres the fun? I have my day to day job to use AI for mundane things
Besides, the idea of paying 200$/month to have the privilege of using ai in my side projects… it’s just stupid for me
jorl17 6 days ago [-]
To me, it is incredibly fun to work in "product/idea space" and have the LLM do the gruntwork of coding for you.
It is also very fun to tackle hard engineering problems.
I enjoy both, and tend to oscillate between wanting to do a lot of one, or a lot of the other. I do recognize that I've been coding for so long that it's much more exciting to be solving "product problems" rather than "engineering problems", I suspect mostly because it's the area I've explored the least (of the two).
And there is a LOT to learn about a domain while you're working on the problem, even without even looking at the code.
I was surprised to realize that some of my friends don't share this sentiment. They take very little pleasure from being product developers, and instead really just enjoy being engineers who work on the code and the architecture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just found it very surprising. To be honest, I guess perhaps what I found the most surprising is that I am not one of those people?
And when you get your product in the hands of users can finally get that direct feedback line to/from them and can start working on the problems they find and thinking of product (not necessarily engineering) solutions for them? Man, that's so satisfying. It's like falling in love with coding all over again.
sieve 6 days ago [-]
It doesn't work like that. AI is not a Jinn. You cannot simply command it and have it produce an entire project from thin air. You get to have fun: do the thinking part, and let it do the boring stuff.
I have a long list of projects that I have thought about but never implemented because of lack of time and energy. LLMs have made that happen.
I like designing programming languages and developing parsers/compilers and virtual machines. But the steps beyond type-checking are so incredibly boring (and I don't like using C or LLVM as targets) that I have done the front end 15-20 times over the last couple of decades and the back end only 3-4 times.
This time, I spent two weeks developing a spec for the VM, including concurrency, exception handling and GC. And I led the AI through each subsystem till I was satisfied with the result. I now have a VM that is within 8x of C in tight loops. Without JIT. It is incredible to be able to allocate arrays of 4B elements and touch each element at random, something that would make python cry.
Working on the compiler now.
6r17 6 days ago [-]
Fun is not always about finding up the exact look or design of something - you might be having it for your own particular reason - and by the time a website has to present it might have shifted already. That's why these land and why we might be confused about the process
yodsanklai 6 days ago [-]
You can still have fun with your side projects. AI helps, but if you want to build something nice, you still need to provide most of the intellectual input, while AI can help with the more tedious things. I have a personal project that I abandoned because it was becoming too much for me, and there were parts that I didn't enjoy doing.
I anticipate that people with a builder spirit and strong technical background are going to be able to build awesome things in the future. What the Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack of today will be able to build?
IanCal 6 days ago [-]
It depends if the interesting part of the solution is the website for you. Maybe it is and that’s fine but for others it isn’t. Maybe they’ve got a cool backend thing and the ui isn’t the key part.
If it helps compare, you might have a full desire to manage a tricky server and all the various parts of it. It’d be removing the fun to just put a site on GitHub pages rather than hosting it on a pdp11. But if you want to show off your demo scene work you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed out on the fun just putting things up on a regular site.
toyg 6 days ago [-]
Personally, I'm using side projects to test what a basic agentic setup can achieve, i.e. not paying for anything but the electricity bill. Reaching that state is the real side project.
(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)
philipwhiuk 6 days ago [-]
The one caveat I have with this is that the underlying project might be fun but the website/write-up might be a chore. Hence AI for the chore bit.
I don't think this is overwhelmingly the reason though - I think many are just all AI, but if the project is technically interesting it might be sufficient to get me to grimace through it.
yard2010 6 days ago [-]
It doesn't have to be like this. For me one 20$ acc with another one for backup I rarely use, is more than enough. I leverage this tool simply as a typist - it can't think so it mustn't, it can't architect since it's merely a "guess the next word" game with many extra steps, but boy can it type fast. I just make sure it types exactly what I would have typed and nothing else, this way I get to enjoy both worlds - improve my throughput and not produce slop.
maplethorpe 6 days ago [-]
> Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
It depends what your goals are. All of my side projects were started because I wanted to learn something. Using a "skip to the end" button wouldn't really make sense for me.
bluefirebrand 6 days ago [-]
The difference between people who want to learn things versus people who just want a finished product is going to be a big dividing line in the post AI world
fragmede 5 days ago [-]
Learn what though? Is knowing CSS at all relevant to making a site all about, say, every type of cheese? If I have, say, 6 hours to build that site, does learning about CSS make the site better, or does learnin about the history of rennet make the site better? The assumption that using AI to replace learning about CSS is replaced by being a drooling moron with the time saved instead, is unfounded. The AI is a fountain of knowledge (that you have to double check). That people choose to not to learn about topics they don't find interesting because they'd rather learn about topics they do find interesting, doesn't automatically make them dumber than you.
latexr 5 days ago [-]
> If I have, say, 6 hours to build that site
Then chances are it’ll be subpar either way. Every type of cheese, in six hours? The CSS isn’t the bottleneck there, it’s information hierarchy and the information itself. You can’t possibly learn about the history of cheeses and summarise it and organise it for a website in that amount of time. Writing the website code isn’t the lengthy part.
> That people choose to not to learn about topics they don't find interesting because they'd rather learn about topics they do find interesting, doesn't automatically make them dumber than you.
Why so rough? I don’t see any judgement of character or intelligence in the comment you’re replying to.
tomtomdesign 6 days ago [-]
It's also a nice opportunity to learn while getting something out!
janalsncm 6 days ago [-]
The person’s goals might not be spending a lot of time on CSS. Because a person who just does everything from scratch may find themselves learning about what FlexBox is or why your z-index isn’t working.
Going off of the two screenshots in the OP, neither of those were about frontend.
So if the choice is spending time designing a more human frontend or spending more time on the core product, I don’t fault people for choosing the latter.
Now if the core product also stinks, that’s a different issue.
dematz 6 days 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
DiscourseFan 6 days ago [-]
I don’t know if that’s true, I made a little web app for displaying the schedule for my team based on our billable hours, and I didn’t do any of the scripting myself but I did have to think a lot about what the app would do and what it would look like and what kind of functionality I wanted, tradeoffs between functionality and specific use cases, etc. It just made the scripting part go faster, that’s all.
Peritract 6 days ago [-]
That's still less thinking overall that someone who thought about all of that and thought about the scripting would have done.
IanCal 6 days ago [-]
And even less than someone who wrote an interpreter for the script, less than someone who also chanted times tables while doing it.
More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.
Peritract 6 days ago [-]
That's not a good-faith argument; obviously we're talking about relevant thought, rather than distraction (which, in context, would be less thought).
IanCal 6 days ago [-]
It is a good faith argument, my point is exactly that the actual scripting was not part of the relevant thought any more than the interpreter would have been.
eddieroger 6 days ago [-]
That adds up over time, though, and it works in reverse. AI will always be able to read and write faster than a person can. You may be able to write the script, but in the time it would take to /literally/ write it, you're on to the next thing. And if that script is actually a feature that spans two or three or 10 files, now you're really cooking.
TaupeRanger 6 days ago [-]
Not likely. Original thinking in a "side project" is almost never about the code itself, but the ideas and end product implementation. You might be able to invent things like Carmack's BSP implementation, Torvald's Content Addressable Storage, etc. but even things like that can be aided by LLMs at this point, at least in the prototyping/idea phases. AI doesn't prevent you from having good ideas or doing original thinking if that is your goal.
JoelMcCracken 6 days ago [-]
Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
Before, it was like:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)
Now:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.
criley2 6 days ago [-]
Even more than validating ideas, I think my personal AI use falls into two categories:
- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't
- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision
I've enjoyed using AI for both cases.
8note 6 days ago [-]
i particularly like that right now i get to hear about different small practices people do that arent the AI itself, but that i wouldnt have considered otherwise.
git worktrees as an example.
locknitpicker 6 days ago [-]
> Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
This.
Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.
gf000 6 days ago [-]
But I might want some cool original project with a boring but working web UI, so that other people can actually try out what I have created.
dematz 6 days ago [-]
For sure, I'm doing something very similar, asking an AI to make a boring but working web app using an API I'm working on. The API is the interesting part and the web app is basically just to test it.
I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.
simonw 6 days 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.
6 days ago [-]
nothinkjustai 6 days ago [-]
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
Because generally speaking, stuff that is AI generated is largely devoid of value. If it’s AI generated anyone can prompt it into existence, so the likely hood that someone will find value in and use what you made is approximately zero. What you made is likely low quality, since you vibe coded it with little effort and that always shows. Lastly you don’t even get to experience the joy of solving problems yourself or the pride of having built something with your own skill.
Using some AI to build something is fine, it’s when it’s used so much that it’s immediately obvious on the packaging - the show hn post, the readme, the code itself.
all2 6 days ago [-]
I've found that value is largely derived from polish and vision.
It's easy to prompt some stuff into existence over a weekend. It is hard to polish it, fix bugs, have tidy UX, and so on. There's this meme going around (maybe from that Silicon Valley show?) where the grey-beard says he is valued for his taste and his conviction in that taste. This is -- fortunately or not -- reality.
Vision and taste won't get you the whole way, but they are a huge part of the equation. This is why Apple, for example, was so successful under Jobs: he had vision, and he had good taste.
nothinkjustai 6 days ago [-]
I agree, and for those who would counter “just use AI to polish”, those who use AI to avoid doing the work of building something are likewise going to avoid doing the work to polish it, if they even possess the taste required to do so.
keybored 6 days 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?
Why would you put forth anything but this line?
The only side projects I do is contributing to an existing project. You can’t use AI for it because of provenance matters. But why would I want to? I want to program.
For private side projects this makes sense if you want the outcome more than the process. But even then I am skeptical. There is the benign effect of learning things: the more you know the more you desire to to know because you get more and more aware of the infinite horizon of not-knowing. I haven’t experienced this myself for “building”, but based on anecdotes I’m not psyched about the psychological profile of getting everything for free (in terms of programming). Some people seem to get manic about it. What’s the point of realizing your desires if that just means producing more of them? And the key to satiating that unsatiable desire is to put tokens into the alienation machine.
For side projects that you publicize (show hn) this makes less sense. There is a freaking glut of “I built this” with the predictable feedback around the Net, in these times: why the F would I take the time to test what you have “built” when I can “build” the same thing and get exactly what I want?
layer8 6 days ago [-]
> Side projects are typically time constrained
What is the urgency in completing side projects? Commercial projects are usually the ones where you have some urgency.
simonw 6 days ago [-]
If you only have a few hours a week and you want to actually finish a project the speed with which you can build is extremely important.
layer8 6 days ago [-]
Only if you think finishing your side-projects is extremely important.
JohnFen 6 days ago [-]
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
I wouldn't use it because one of the reasons that I do side projects is to enjoy myself and learn new things, and these tools tend to do much of the stuff that I enjoy and learn from.
theshrike79 5 days ago [-]
So you _never_ do side projects to solve a problem? It's always about learning and enjoyment, it doesn't matter how long it takes?
norir 6 days ago [-]
I also expect that most side projects that are made with ai end up abandoned within 3 months and contribute next to nothing to the user's personal development and that the use of ai prevented them from the kind of deliberate practice that could have led to durable skill growth which ultimately will lead to much better work (side or main projects).
acedTrex 6 days ago [-]
This fact, which i do believe to be true, has completely killed my interest in almost all of other peoples projects.
My interest in a project has always been rooted in the idea that its interesting to see other knowledgable people or people learning to attack a problem for themselves. I have really never cared about the "thing that it does." I liked reading the code, dissecting attempts and really learning about the person that wrote it through their line by line decisions.
That is now all gone. The "noise ratio" of slop projects which have none of the previously interesting thought and intentionality have drowned out the "rigorous projects."
It's actually very sad for me, it was something I previously really enjoyed. I am looking for a board that aggregates projects that still have that interesting "human factor" i would subscribe in a heartbeat.
gib444 6 days ago [-]
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
Getting a McDonald's saves time too
strogonoff 6 days ago [-]
I don’t expect most side-projects to be built with LLMs now. I would expect LLM uptake to be higher in the workplace (where it’s mandatory and/or people operate on the “the ends justify the means” paradigm), but outside of that there’s a higher likelihood someone is doing it because they enjoy programming and problem-solving as a process, and why outsource something you like to a black box that will regurgitate you an average of volunteer contributions (often non-consensually obtained) for some corporation’s profit?
shafyy 5 days ago [-]
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
Ethical concerns, environmental concerns, political concerns and legal concerns.
ramon156 5 days ago [-]
On top of that, if any brainlet with an LLM can build it, why bother?
Does your idea stand out? Then AI can get ~50% done, and you still have to fill in the gaps. People who do that right will not look very LLM-assisted unless you dig through the commits. That's how it should be done, imo.
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 6 days ago [-]
It depends on the project, I think. If your side project is a thing you hope it will make you a millionaire, sure, AI all the way. But if your side project is a just a cool thing or a learning experience, I would say the exact opposite. I would expect $JOB to be very time-constrained and vibecoding-friendly (maybe even too friendly) whereas your side-project should be all artisanal free-range code.
tsukurimashou 5 days ago [-]
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
because I value the process of learning by doing
thih9 6 days ago [-]
> Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
There could be many reasons to not use ai in a case like this, eg: retaining more control, breaking some new ground, because it’s fun, because it’s personal, etc.
shagie 6 days ago [-]
On the visual design traits...
I'm primarily a backend developer. Most of my work has been in serving json or occasionally xml. Spring Shell in Java is something that I'm closer to working with than a GUI. When I've done web work, the most complimentary thing that was said about my design is "spartan".
So, if I was to have a web facing personal project... would black text on a white background with the default font and clunky <form> elements be ok? I know we are ok with it on the HN Settings page. They work... but they don't meet what I perceive other people have as minimum standards for web facing interfaces today.
And so... if I was to have some web facing project that I wanted to show to others, I'd probably work with some AI tooling to help create a gui, and it would very likely have the visual design traits that other AI generated front ends have.
duskdozer 5 days ago [-]
I wish more people would just ship the spartan version. Even if they want to have a "modern" one too. I'm tired of the internet being slower than it was 20 years ago despite massively improved network and hardware capability.
hubraumhugo 6 days ago [-]
Appreciate the feedback, just updated the title to be more clear.
glimshe 6 days ago [-]
If AI saves you time, why not use it on your main projects too? All other things equal, should users care about whether AI was used?
moralestapia 6 days ago [-]
I've been coding for 20 years now, almost every single afternoon.
I've never met someone who has spent more time coding than me (although for sure such people exist). I love writing code, I consider it an art form. I don't mind spending days optimizing a function until the code is beautiful (at least to me).
I also have dozens of projects in mind that I don't have time to go through; cue the meme of "I bought another domain that will sit empty for years", I have like 60 of those right now.
AI assistance/vibecoding, whatever you call it, has been a massive win for me because now I can sketch out those projects in a weekend, put them out and then, if I decide they're worth spending more time on, tradcode the parts that I really care about. As it is for many others, AI is another tool in my toolbox. It's the pencil and paper I use to draft stuff.
It's tricky because I do get that we all want to get rid of low-value AI slop, but also, it wouldn't be fair to me, and people like me, to have authentic projects discredited just because you used AI in the creative process; not just as part of it, but perhaps even to write ALL of the code. And then, why would that be a bad thing?
What difference does it make if it was me writing functionally identical code letter-by-letter instead of writing a comprehensive prompt and guiding AI to do as I wish?
6 days ago [-]
Oras 6 days ago [-]
I agree. The problem is the noise ratio, not how the platform was implemented.
(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
bobthepanda 6 days 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.
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
malfist 6 days ago [-]
Look at the website you're on
bobthepanda 6 days 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)
port11 4 days 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.
forgotTheLast 6 days ago [-]
I think that's more of a NextJs thing than an LLM thing.
dang 6 days ago [-]
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim (<-- this is what many accounts without much HN history now see, and it's responsible for the downtick to the right on OP's chart)
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 6 days 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 6 days 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.
canarias_mate 5 days ago [-]
[flagged]
xantronix 6 days 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.
nottorp 6 days 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 6 days 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.
onetimeusename 6 days 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.
cmrdporcupine 6 days 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 6 days 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.
qubob 6 days 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.
fooker 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days 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.
bdcravens 6 days 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.
phoronixrly 6 days ago [-]
I agree that some (many) pre-LLM Show HN projects were worthless as well. But at least they were fewer, which meant that interesting projects were harder to miss.
> Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill
The LLM outputs this out of the box? Where's the skill?
I don't believe the comparison to car tuners benefits your thesis here. The spectrum of people I know who tune their cars varies from utter idiots to professional engineers. You cannot state as a fact that anyone who does it has insight or even natural talent. The bar is so low that anyone who has enough money can do it (just like coding with LLMs). In fact one can say that most people are incompetent, and by tuning their cars to varying degrees they endanger themselves and others, enlarge their running/maintenance costs, lower their car's resale value, and harm the environment.
fooker 6 days 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.
6 days ago [-]
sunir 6 days 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.
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 6 days 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 6 days 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.
romaniv 6 days 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.
PhunkyPhil 6 days ago [-]
_Nobody_ has the right take. Believe it or not, being seemingly laissez-faire about something can be a well evaluated and rigorous position. I highly doubt that OP doesn't care about the potential negative ramifications of AI, and it's frankly disingenuous and confusing to see every clause interpreted in the worst way possible.
Each clause you've highlighted has a nugget of truth, but that nugget is not inherently negative, it's just a different perspective which you aren't picking up on.
Barbing 6 days 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.)
julia-kafarska 6 days ago [-]
There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.
michaelcampbell 6 days 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."
pscanf 6 days 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.
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)?
avereveard 6 days 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
user34283 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days 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.
tptacek 6 days 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.
michaelcampbell 6 days 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.
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
waterTanuki 6 days 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 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?
croemer 5 days 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.
asp_hornet 6 days 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”
robeym 6 days 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
deaux 6 days 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.
cammasmith 6 days 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.
binary132 6 days 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 6 days ago [-]
It will be replaced with private networks soon. Last step of anonymous internet.
brianbcarter 6 days 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.
> 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
yamajun93 5 days 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.
raincole 6 days 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.
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.
fusslo 6 days 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.
all2 6 days ago [-]
A "you built it, you fix it" policy would be lovely in this situation.
rglover 6 days ago [-]
That sounds maddening.
curious1008 6 days 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.
dataviz1000 6 days 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.
skyberrys 6 days 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.
figassis 6 days 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.
jaronilan 6 days ago [-]
I try to submit short (tech related) stories (https://github.com/jaronilan/stories) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))
mercurialsolo 6 days 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
classified 5 days 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".
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/.
computerphage 6 days 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
ChrisArchitect 6 days 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.
flexagoon 6 days 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 6 days 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
kykat 5 days ago [-]
I've been using colored borders as design for ages... Hate seeing it becoming an "AI tell" :(
solomonb 6 days 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.
richard_chase 6 days 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.
vintagedave 6 days 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.
debarshri 6 days ago [-]
I always ask it to use tailwind with shadcn. Then you get a generic UI which will not pass as AI generated.
anduril22 6 days ago [-]
My hand coded app is shadcn/Radix - I wouldn't use that as an AI barometer.
mlmonkey 6 days 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 5 days 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
rzmmm 6 days ago [-]
Why so many defensive comments? A good visual design has some personality.
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 6 days ago [-]
Love the idea. Let me get to this over the weekend and open-source it, then ping you via email.
Meterman 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days ago [-]
AI philosophizing on HN about the degrading impact AI has on HN is getting annoying and missing the point entirely.
sd9 6 days ago [-]
I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.
bobthepanda 6 days 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 6 days 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?).
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?
vladstudio 6 days 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
elevaet 6 days ago [-]
This is great, now we can better disguise slopware!
matsemann 6 days ago [-]
These designs are now the trend, though. So they will influence how human designed/built websites also look.
elevaet 6 days 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.
vipipiccf 5 days 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.
> 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.
xnx 6 days 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.
seism 5 days ago [-]
Every hackathon should use this.
rbbydotdev 6 days ago [-]
time to add plugins to hn, automated measure of ai comments and submissions to be the first ;)
aetherspawn 6 days 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.
yard2010 6 days 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"
janalsncm 6 days 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.
cr125rider 6 days ago [-]
And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.
lschueller 6 days 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...
marcodena 6 days ago [-]
Average is all you need
faxuss 6 days ago [-]
Clear and interesting take on “slop.” It feels spot on, though adding a concrete example or two could make it even more relatable.
fromaustinc 6 days ago [-]
very interesting
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vijgaurav 6 days ago [-]
Unless it is AI slop, I don't mind reading submissions that can be genuinely helpful.
globalnode 5 days ago [-]
I loved the term "Heavy Slop" they used.
arnorhs 6 days 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.
sgammon 6 days ago [-]
did you even read and edit the title of this post?
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mccoyb 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days ago [-]
Why is that a problem? Reality will filter out the projects that are poorly developed just like it always has.
rglover 6 days ago [-]
Sure, but what greatness do we lose in the interim as it gets silenced by unending noise?
Der_Einzige 6 days 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.
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")
The number of dark‑mode sites I’ve seen where the text (and subtext) are various shades of dark brown or beige is just awful. For reference, you want a contrast ratio between the text and background of at least ~4:1 to be on the safe side.
This isn't even that hard to fix - hell you can add the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to a skill.
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
A hundred self-thought devs not implementing accessibility standards is a different problem than a school teaching 100 students lacking these standards in its curriculum.
I would rather go back to when all side projects used Bootstrap than this purple-on-purple-with-glowing-purple mess of stuff we have now.
It’s insane though how many dark mode websites with purple there are right now, how come all LLMs converged on that style?
Plus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text into every visible inch of the page without some intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).
Maybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as "cool looking" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.
FWIW, there’s also an official frontend-design skill for CC [1]. A while back I incorporated some of the more relevant guidance from WCAG into it [2].
[1] - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
[2] - https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag
https://github.com/airowe/claude-a11y-skill
https://mcpmarket.com/tools/skills/accessibility-checker
Tldr I would expect different outcomes with 4.7 with not being specific.
For reference, in the .claude/settings.local.json
In other words, I've found people like the above to think of LLMs as fairly static, as if we couldn't change their behavior with a simple sentence, instead of complaining about it. It's strange, to me at least.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary
Another possibility (although I’ve never actually tried this myself) is an MCP server that someone built specifically to connect to Lighthouse, which includes accessibility testing as part of its benchmarks.
https://github.com/priyankark/lighthouse-mcp
I use these tools myself and they just build upon the awesome work from the open source community
Those of us who care that technology be accessible to as many people as possible, such as low vision users, find it relevant. You can ignore it if you wish.
See Rawls 'Original Position' on why you should care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
But, context of how they were raised
That comment was wild
Because Western society functions for the common good. We are not animals fighting for survival in the wilderness.
And because a web site not being accessible is a liability. Target was sued and had to pay millions for having your attitude.
Now if only there were an ADA for website performance...
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
Your hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.
You brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. You brought this problem upon others. People won't care about your problems. Why should they, when you didn't care about theirs?
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Accessibility is legally required and not difficult to add.
Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people? Refusing to provide accessibility in your service is no different. You are actively discriminating in a way which could be illegal and certainly is unethical and amoral.
It's not even about age.
You can twist an ankle playing basketball and need accessibility features like ramps and grab bars.
You can get hit in the eye by a bit of debris when your toy drone crashes, and need help reading a screen while it heals.
People who don't think they need accessibility only have to wait. Everyone gets their turn.
Bad analogy, as none of those traits require any accomodation in a website or app.
Not that I disagree with the premise. Almost everyone will eventually have trouble reading small, low contrast text or details on their phone or screen, if nothing else.
You will.
Accessibility that can be had on client side should not be a concern on server side.
“Don’t have bad vision if you didn’t want to be technical!”
(came across that way)
It also doesn't solve the issue if somebody is browsing your site on a mobile phone where the extension might not even work properly.
WCAG is not difficult - but it does require some modicum of effort.
…right now, today. But they might consider “build a world for ‘old’ you”
Stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it yourself.
Just get some concrete and some lumber, and build that wheelchair ramp.
You can even hire a contractor to follow you around town all day building them as needed.
the wheelchair is not built into the site, and only requires a few hooks or the odd helping hand to work.
mapping back to software, and especially websites, your user agent is your user agent. it should render websites in the way you want to see them, regardless of what colours the designer chose.
an AI accessibility browser is more like a wheel chair than a ramp
Besides, the idea of paying 200$/month to have the privilege of using ai in my side projects… it’s just stupid for me
It is also very fun to tackle hard engineering problems.
I enjoy both, and tend to oscillate between wanting to do a lot of one, or a lot of the other. I do recognize that I've been coding for so long that it's much more exciting to be solving "product problems" rather than "engineering problems", I suspect mostly because it's the area I've explored the least (of the two).
And there is a LOT to learn about a domain while you're working on the problem, even without even looking at the code.
I was surprised to realize that some of my friends don't share this sentiment. They take very little pleasure from being product developers, and instead really just enjoy being engineers who work on the code and the architecture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just found it very surprising. To be honest, I guess perhaps what I found the most surprising is that I am not one of those people?
And when you get your product in the hands of users can finally get that direct feedback line to/from them and can start working on the problems they find and thinking of product (not necessarily engineering) solutions for them? Man, that's so satisfying. It's like falling in love with coding all over again.
I have a long list of projects that I have thought about but never implemented because of lack of time and energy. LLMs have made that happen.
I like designing programming languages and developing parsers/compilers and virtual machines. But the steps beyond type-checking are so incredibly boring (and I don't like using C or LLVM as targets) that I have done the front end 15-20 times over the last couple of decades and the back end only 3-4 times.
This time, I spent two weeks developing a spec for the VM, including concurrency, exception handling and GC. And I led the AI through each subsystem till I was satisfied with the result. I now have a VM that is within 8x of C in tight loops. Without JIT. It is incredible to be able to allocate arrays of 4B elements and touch each element at random, something that would make python cry.
Working on the compiler now.
I anticipate that people with a builder spirit and strong technical background are going to be able to build awesome things in the future. What the Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack of today will be able to build?
If it helps compare, you might have a full desire to manage a tricky server and all the various parts of it. It’d be removing the fun to just put a site on GitHub pages rather than hosting it on a pdp11. But if you want to show off your demo scene work you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed out on the fun just putting things up on a regular site.
(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)
I don't think this is overwhelmingly the reason though - I think many are just all AI, but if the project is technically interesting it might be sufficient to get me to grimace through it.
It depends what your goals are. All of my side projects were started because I wanted to learn something. Using a "skip to the end" button wouldn't really make sense for me.
Then chances are it’ll be subpar either way. Every type of cheese, in six hours? The CSS isn’t the bottleneck there, it’s information hierarchy and the information itself. You can’t possibly learn about the history of cheeses and summarise it and organise it for a website in that amount of time. Writing the website code isn’t the lengthy part.
> That people choose to not to learn about topics they don't find interesting because they'd rather learn about topics they do find interesting, doesn't automatically make them dumber than you.
Why so rough? I don’t see any judgement of character or intelligence in the comment you’re replying to.
Going off of the two screenshots in the OP, neither of those were about frontend.
So if the choice is spending time designing a more human frontend or spending more time on the core product, I don’t fault people for choosing the latter.
Now if the core product also stinks, that’s a different issue.
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
More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.
Before, it was like:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)
Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.
- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't
- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision
I've enjoyed using AI for both cases.
git worktrees as an example.
This.
Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.
I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.
The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.
Because generally speaking, stuff that is AI generated is largely devoid of value. If it’s AI generated anyone can prompt it into existence, so the likely hood that someone will find value in and use what you made is approximately zero. What you made is likely low quality, since you vibe coded it with little effort and that always shows. Lastly you don’t even get to experience the joy of solving problems yourself or the pride of having built something with your own skill.
Using some AI to build something is fine, it’s when it’s used so much that it’s immediately obvious on the packaging - the show hn post, the readme, the code itself.
It's easy to prompt some stuff into existence over a weekend. It is hard to polish it, fix bugs, have tidy UX, and so on. There's this meme going around (maybe from that Silicon Valley show?) where the grey-beard says he is valued for his taste and his conviction in that taste. This is -- fortunately or not -- reality.
Vision and taste won't get you the whole way, but they are a huge part of the equation. This is why Apple, for example, was so successful under Jobs: he had vision, and he had good taste.
Why would you put forth anything but this line?
The only side projects I do is contributing to an existing project. You can’t use AI for it because of provenance matters. But why would I want to? I want to program.
For private side projects this makes sense if you want the outcome more than the process. But even then I am skeptical. There is the benign effect of learning things: the more you know the more you desire to to know because you get more and more aware of the infinite horizon of not-knowing. I haven’t experienced this myself for “building”, but based on anecdotes I’m not psyched about the psychological profile of getting everything for free (in terms of programming). Some people seem to get manic about it. What’s the point of realizing your desires if that just means producing more of them? And the key to satiating that unsatiable desire is to put tokens into the alienation machine.
For side projects that you publicize (show hn) this makes less sense. There is a freaking glut of “I built this” with the predictable feedback around the Net, in these times: why the F would I take the time to test what you have “built” when I can “build” the same thing and get exactly what I want?
What is the urgency in completing side projects? Commercial projects are usually the ones where you have some urgency.
I wouldn't use it because one of the reasons that I do side projects is to enjoy myself and learn new things, and these tools tend to do much of the stuff that I enjoy and learn from.
My interest in a project has always been rooted in the idea that its interesting to see other knowledgable people or people learning to attack a problem for themselves. I have really never cared about the "thing that it does." I liked reading the code, dissecting attempts and really learning about the person that wrote it through their line by line decisions.
That is now all gone. The "noise ratio" of slop projects which have none of the previously interesting thought and intentionality have drowned out the "rigorous projects."
It's actually very sad for me, it was something I previously really enjoyed. I am looking for a board that aggregates projects that still have that interesting "human factor" i would subscribe in a heartbeat.
Getting a McDonald's saves time too
Ethical concerns, environmental concerns, political concerns and legal concerns.
Does your idea stand out? Then AI can get ~50% done, and you still have to fill in the gaps. People who do that right will not look very LLM-assisted unless you dig through the commits. That's how it should be done, imo.
because I value the process of learning by doing
There could be many reasons to not use ai in a case like this, eg: retaining more control, breaking some new ground, because it’s fun, because it’s personal, etc.
I'm primarily a backend developer. Most of my work has been in serving json or occasionally xml. Spring Shell in Java is something that I'm closer to working with than a GUI. When I've done web work, the most complimentary thing that was said about my design is "spartan".
So, if I was to have a web facing personal project... would black text on a white background with the default font and clunky <form> elements be ok? I know we are ok with it on the HN Settings page. They work... but they don't meet what I perceive other people have as minimum standards for web facing interfaces today.
And so... if I was to have some web facing project that I wanted to show to others, I'd probably work with some AI tooling to help create a gui, and it would very likely have the visual design traits that other AI generated front ends have.
I've never met someone who has spent more time coding than me (although for sure such people exist). I love writing code, I consider it an art form. I don't mind spending days optimizing a function until the code is beautiful (at least to me).
I also have dozens of projects in mind that I don't have time to go through; cue the meme of "I bought another domain that will sit empty for years", I have like 60 of those right now.
AI assistance/vibecoding, whatever you call it, has been a massive win for me because now I can sketch out those projects in a weekend, put them out and then, if I decide they're worth spending more time on, tradcode the parts that I really care about. As it is for many others, AI is another tool in my toolbox. It's the pencil and paper I use to draft stuff.
It's tricky because I do get that we all want to get rid of low-value AI slop, but also, it wouldn't be fair to me, and people like me, to have authentic projects discredited just because you used AI in the creative process; not just as part of it, but perhaps even to write ALL of the code. And then, why would that be a bad thing?
What difference does it make if it was me writing functionally identical code letter-by-letter instead of writing a comprehensive prompt and guiding AI to do as I wish?
(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
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
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim (<-- this is what many accounts without much HN history now see, and it's responsible for the downtick to the right on OP's chart)
Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300329 - March 2026 (515 comments)
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (425 comments)
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.
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.
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.
We can hope the LLMs hallucinate slightly different CSS once in a while now...
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.
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.)
The other issue of HN being inundated with AI bots is related, but a kind of different problem.
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?
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.
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.
> Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill
The LLM outputs this out of the box? Where's the skill?
I don't believe the comparison to car tuners benefits your thesis here. The spectrum of people I know who tune their cars varies from utter idiots to professional engineers. You cannot state as a fact that anyone who does it has insight or even natural talent. The bar is so low that anyone who has enough money can do it (just like coding with LLMs). In fact one can say that most people are incompetent, and by tuning their cars to varying degrees they endanger themselves and others, enlarge their running/maintenance costs, lower their car's resale value, and harm the environment.
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.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
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.
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.
Each clause you've highlighted has a nugget of truth, but that nugget is not inherently negative, it's just a different perspective which you aren't picking up on.
(Still plenty of scary stuff, but I should feel like you at least some of the time, healthy balance.)
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/) if you're interested in the details.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
so, n=1 plus Baader-Meinhof? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
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?
Also, would be good to show trends over time rather than just a one-time pie chart showing breakdown into arbitrary categories.
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”
Great job to everyone who has created something
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.
But good thing is, it will now include those accessibility items, too. Personally I have misokinesia and migraines so I get it.
Here's what it found if you want to see: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/given-these-how-can-we-crea...
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
Why? Let me guess: because these patterns were frequently seen in human-made sites too, but that won't fit the narrative.
Remember, several AI detectors claimed Declaration Of Independence was AI-generated[0]. Keep this info in mind when someone (like the author of this article) proudly shows you their home-made AI detector.
[0]: https://dallasexpress.com/state/zerogpt-flags-1836-texas-dec...
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.
at my workplace the phrase in status/report-out meetings "I built" now means "I asked claude to build"
All of a sudden managers, architects (who haven't written code in a decade), and directors are all building tools
so now we're debugging the tools "they built" and why our product isn't working with them.
I 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.
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/.
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
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
maybe i'm an LLM too
It’s entirely possible a Show HN I posted is included and I’d love to know how it scored.
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.
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.
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?
Shadcn works for Vercel, but is actually a human being (I think?).
The UI framework is called shadcn/ui.
Are we going to call 'AI slop' everything that doesn't reinvent design from zero for a marketing page?
- all designs are going to be AI generated and look the same
- well unless you ask your agent to make it look different
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.
> The site is built with Astro. Design inspired by Paul Stamatiou.
https://paulstamatiou.com
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.
I'm much more critical of closed-source, subscription, wrappers over open source software of simple prompts.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.