Conversation turns to prevention strategies and remaining open questions
5 Sep 27 12:15 PM · 1d ago · 8 comments · 1 source · development 5 of 5
uxhacker asked how to prevent slop UI generation and described experiments with forcing LLMs through a structured design process (brand guidelines → wireframes → integration). nacozarina noted that prompting LLMs for correct UI remains time-consuming compared to server-side code generation. jd7h expressed frustration that brutalism—a previously niche design aesthetic—has been absorbed into AI defaults.
“More guidance is needed on how to efficiently prompt an LLM to generate a correct UI. Describing the appearance, placement and behavior of UI elements for this is quite time-consuming.”
nacozarinatheanonymousone Developer and essay authorminimaxir Hacker News commentertensor Hacker News commenterzinoc Hacker News commenter
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 21 voices · verbatim
-
The most important thing I learned when graduating from "bad musician" to "passable musician" (passable enough to have listeners and fans, at least) was that there's no one single big trick that turns a song from bad to good: there's 100 tiny small tricks that add up. And you need to have experience to know what they are. A trained listener might…
-
N
10 Tells of a Slop UI: https:// hereticpleb.vercel.app/blog/10 -tells-of-slop Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9867038
-
This is why I spent a lot of time building a design system first, that I can then re-use in my projects. My system is built out of properly CSS tokenized and organized Vue components, and the agent has instructions that it cannot create HTML that isn't made of components - and that if it needs a different UX (which I will have designed with it)…
-
Earlier this year I used Claude to design a screen for an Unreal game I work on. At first I thought wow, what a great layout, this is a game changer and gives me a huge advantage.Less than a year later I am embarrassed how Claude it looks - blinking dot in the corner, double // separating header text, the font choices... now I see the same…
-
I start with these rules, then adjust as I want...EMPHASIZE:- *Summary.* First paragraph like newspaper (who, what, where, when, how, why).- *Benefits.* Focus on the benefits for the reader.- *Why this matters* Focus on what it adds to the reader.NO:- *No tech stack.* Do not say the tech implementation; covered elsewhere.- *No counts.* Do not say…
-
Maybe I'm just too defeatist or depressed, but I feel like any somewhat-reliable tells of AI are going to be so transient that it's almost not worth the effort to identify and write about AI "tells", since they'll be "fixed" or avoided so quickly by a future iteration or prompt. (This obviously excludes the increasingly important work of people…
-
That rings so true!I'm vibe-coding an app to practice german, I want the most bare-bones possible, just something for myself. In the sign-in page, the clanker added SEVEN slogans and catch-phrases:- A more human way to learn - Find your words. Then make them yours. - Good conversations make a language stick. Start where you are, and build from…
-
Another example (not from this app, just in general) that I don’t see people talking about is: “Your files never leave your browser/device”.Any vibe coded site that deals with files and works client-side feels an INCESSANT need to inform you of this fact.Definitely seems like the same kind of context leakage. “I don’t want to spin up a server, can…
-
Really? I'm more surprised when I see a large company still have design standards. It seems it's all the rage to fire all your UX people and have your devs wipe up a UI because "UI is so easy."Follow design standards? Fuck no, we need to STAND OUT instead. If you find the design hard to use as a result of not following standards your just an old…
-
This doesn’t strike me as substantially different from the homogenization of the web that happened ~2013, with the rise of the Bootstrap CSS framework.My opinion is pretty much the same, too: it’s better than what came before it, and I appreciate having a consistent design language across disparate sites even if I don’t don’t find it to be…
-
An "inactive" student is one who is enrolled but is not currently attending classes.This is a super useful article but a lot of these complaints about things like alignments are also the natural outcome of me, a non-frontend person, building any kind of web frontend at all. So I wouldn't sweat it too much.
-
As someone who didn't like the UI trends pre-LLM either, I simply shrug. Trading one crap for another.Sure, a good designer could whip up a great UI. 95% of sites[1] didn't have a great (or even good) designer. I'm not sure the AI UIs are worse than the median that was out there.[1] Including mine.
-
This is similar to the rapid early adoption of the Bootstrap CSS framework. A lot of people were annoyed by the sudden spike of websites that looked and felt the same, but I think this was a tremendous step forward in usability and accessibility, and well worth the initial wave of cookie cutter websites.
-
So what is the best way of stopping this to happen?I am doing some experiments in forcing the LLM to use a process.Start with a brand guidelines, followed by building wireframes, followed by merging the two together.Think of it like chain of thought but for something visual.
-
Just like we lost em-dash and bullet point lists, we're going to lose cards, pills, and small caps subheadings.It sucks that LLMs took things that were good when used in human-authored content, and ruined it by vomiting back overused cargo-culted versions of it.
-
I just used Opus 5.5 for something other than coding, and after about a dozen chat messages (some of which were genuinely amazing), it got LLM brainrot, and started suggesting dumb, irrelevant stuff, ignoring previously established facts, and talking in PR doublespeak.
-
lol what are you talking about? Cloudflare fucking sucks. If this is cause or consequence of being a multi-billion dollar company, I cannot tell.Their UI being bad is the least of their problems.
-
My bugbears are narration - where the page tells me how to use it, or is labelling things in a way that a human would not use. "Choose a ..." where ... would be better as a heading.
-
Cloudflare WARP suffered a similar downgrade recently when it went from a nifty menubar app on macOS to a vibecoded window built with flutter
-
1st major tell: the website was released in 2025 or later.Pretty much all websites these days use AI to make them now.
-
Huh, I guess when when AI leaders talk about their AI being unaligned, they meant the divs.
All 5 developments of Developer catalogs design flaws in AI-generated "slop UI" →
Hacker NewsNewswiresMastodon