After all the post ends with "This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good"
Much of this is it's a simple problem to solve - just prompt agent of choice "Put all user visible text into a translation file for i10n" and then go through and edit said prose as a human.
> It looks kinda cool till it gets overused and then you start hating it.
> This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho.
This sounds like more of a no true scotsman/elitist argument rather than an indictment of AI use in UI. The author doesn't seem to have a problem with AI UI, other than whatever they decided doesn't vibe with their somewhat contrarian taste.
"Slop" just means something is low-quality and of poor craftsmanship, irrespective of who or what made it. If it's slop, you don't need to look for tells, you can just tell it's slop. Sure, AI is prone to specific types of mistakes, and humans are prone to other types of mistakes, and you can often tell whether a specific poorly-crafted UI is man-made or machine-made, but bad is bad is bad.
> Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.
> This is seen in vibe-coded UI without a vision. Vibe-coded UI can look great when done right, but most don’t. And it makes the apps look cheap and unappealing to use.
Those are paragraphs 3 and 4.
The closing words of the post are "And it’s not even that I am against vibecoding. This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho. It’s just that these people don’t put ANY effort into making it even look mildly good."
Misaligned stuff is the prompter's fault. Those should be caught by the human. they're the types of tasks that are fast/cheap to verify.
The implementer is not paid by the end-user and they have no reason to care about the user’s opinion - the only thing that matters is to minimise cost and maximise profit.
The client doesn’t care as long as it’s cheap and technically works. The career prospects of the “project lead” on the client side are likely not affected in any way if the result is poor, so they won’t care much either.
There need to be consequences for negative feedback, which would make people strive for a better result. Otherwise people just don’t care.
The people (that count, i.e. that has disposable income) has started to notice when it comes to AI images, I'm pretty sure the same will start happening when it comes to web design. It just reeks of cheapness, of not caring, i.e. of slop.
Not just emoji, icons in general, in both website generation and image generation.
AI use seems to mostly show what people care about. If something matters, you'll work carefully on it. If it doesn't have chatgpt do it.
The other version of it is the robot over-indexing on some part of the prompt and leaving comments places. An example is I ask it to prefer integration tests using TestContainers, it starts adding comments to every new test saying “Real services, no mocks” or something.
And yes, I have a line in my *.MD saying not to do that.
Formally, it's a student who's in the system, but isn't currently enrolled in classes.
Informally, it's pretty much every undergrad who ever lived.
> This website is vibe coded; it looks cute tho.
I'm not sure using a Fraktur-esque font for headers could ever be described as cute.
[Genuine shoutout to that jQuery accordion, that thing is a web cockroach. I think it will probably outlive us all]
Something missing from the list of tells is overuse (or even any use at all) of the middle dot (·).
Wrote a bit about my process in a blog post [1]. Obviously my designs are far from perfect but I'm really happy with my company's website.
the font is hard to read my fav is "unap-pealing".
the theme toggle is only on top.
the images are set to 0.85 opacity ?
Now they explicitly train people to use the clipboard. Clownflare.
I find the most consistent tells are often just excessive descriptive text and a lack of visual hierarchy. It makes sense given these are language models.
Also, I find models are really quite good once given some design context to work from. Slop UI is lazy at this point, not a reflection of model quality.
People are also weirdly defensive about their use of all-caps.
Added “bonus” points if it’s overused small caps. Related (not all need be in caps): header, “eyebrow”, h1, description, footer all saying the same thing.
Don't forget carousels! And scroll hijacking!
Don't like abuse of serif fonts? "NEVER use serif fonts."
Don't like the gaudy color palettes? "Use this color palette with a white-dominant background"
Don't like the marketing fluff? "Remove all non-salient text from this app."
You're encouraged to be picky.
Huh. I've been committing this professional faux pas for years without consequences. There are simply a lot of bad designers out there.
I'm not sure I agree with this particular point, but, the rest of your comment I wholeheartedly agree with.
But on the styling, there's just no good solution. I use things like https://katagami.ai to find inspiration and nudge it into a style direction but I still have to hand edit paddings and buttons and visual separation.
For example copying the Sumi prompt [0] and applying it onto my keyboard app landing page [1] ended up with something visually pleasant and informative. I would have spent way too many days doing animations and deciding on the theme.
But I still wish I could take an LLM and train it on my already human made websites and copy and get something that can follow a design language and writing style.
[0] https://katagami.ai/art-styles/en-019efd5c-2d50-7162-b204-31...
The reality is that users enjoy familiarity and find familiar interfaces and design trends comfortable and easier to use.
Shoot. I use those in my portfolio and didn't know they were using them everywhere.
Developing good UI/UX is hard, like really hard. Very few people are good at it and if you're not good at it, what makes you think you're able to recognize a good UI when you see it? So much thought and and foresight goes into a good UI that it requires a serious amount of prompting. When I've worked with actual UX/UI designers, my job has been that of the LLM. The designer spends ages on planning and understanding, then prompts the developer to create the actual UI and iterated endlessly.
Industry most hasn't cared about UI/UX since the 1990s and even if it started to cared now, employment is fairly safe, because it was always mostly research, labs and prompting. It's just that now we can iterate faster because prompting the LLM is faster than prompting your five .Net developers hidden away on the second floor, in the office behind customer service.
ronbenton•46m ago