I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop. The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop. AI is just amplifying it.

Qt is heavily represented in training data. Qt has existed for decades and the model has likely seen Qt tutorials, screenshots, source code, discussions, etc. As a result, "Qt application" is a highly coherent concept in the latent space. "Qt app" is almost like a named distribution.

as someone with little to no design background they all look the same to me except the bloated sass which is clearly inferior

is there a way to quantifiably measure how much better one design would be from another?

My experience with this is 180 degrees opposite. It's been really easy to create really nice UIs for all kinds of one-off apps I've made for myself with AI. In fact, it has been one of the most fun parts of this whole AI thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To me the "AI slop" mostly just looks like the last decade of SaaS products.

Do the landing pages of auth0.com, devcycle.com, micro.com, or datadog.com not look like slop to other people?

I've been doing this recently - working with Qt on a local app.

I've had good luck providing a png "design board" with all of the template colors and having the first task be to build out a design gallery with all of the ui widget. Then have the design docs specify which component to use. Ensure that the documents specify to only use pre-existing components and have a list of each component and their intended use cases.

Of course, this learning came after seeing how awful V1 of the app was. Initially, it looked really impressive, but once you started clicking around it became obvious how incoherent the design was.

Claude's new frontend-design plugin is solid for web apps in my testing. My wife and I have been using it to build her an app and her discerning design eye is largely impressed with what it's done.

Does anyone have good examples of well designed web applications - not landing pages or peoples tech blogs, which are often listed here on HN. But like actual applications that do a complex task with the user using it as a tool.

Tailwind is the answer. Always pure Tailwind, not custom classes + utilities. It makes a massive difference vs. stylesheets. The LLM is able to actually reason about your UI in discrete chunks with a semantic layer over the styling, vs. bouncing back and forth between CSS/HTML and trying to reason about custom classes generated on the fly.

Obviously this is a personal preference, but the multiple layers of beveled grey on the Qt UI is not something I like, as it forces a lot of grouping on the eye where it doesn't serve any purpose.

I would go with the original, Apple or the Win11 one. Material would be good, what's with the lavender shades?

I always try to reduce the palette: say two background shades max, no drop shadows, only as many foreground colors as needed and if it seems to bland, add more bells and whistles.

This begs for a modern version of https://csszengarden.com/, where the CSS is generated by different LLMs and prompts.

Can you quantify what it is you don’t like? Like, to my eyes ‘original’ is fine - and it’s very similar to ‘QT’ expect with rounded corners and brighter colours.

>> Slop is not a distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many others. Even when I got it to make a page to look like X, it looked like X with slop.

Today, I can visit a website and instantly tell it was generated using LLMs and agents from A to Z:

1. Everything is in blue or mauve gradient, with a white background, and a single JavaScript-heavy page that lags as soon as you scroll a little.

2. There are always a ton of 404 pages.

3. Third, the HTML comments often expose credentials and to-do lists—sometimes even right above the login page (true story...).

This kind of website is a hard pass for me, and I add the company (and its founders) to my personal blacklist of people and companies I’ll never use anything from.

design.md