Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

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.

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.

This is mostly the fault of the model, a lot of them have been trained to generate HTML in a specific style. Claude's is pretty distinct for example, I think the new DeepSeek copies it. Some of them can generate more humanlike HTML like Kimi K2 IIRC, which I feel is the model with the least amount of post-training in general.

It's necessary if you don't want it to generate HTML with images and other assets you don't have of course, that's why they use emojis or meticulously handcrafted SVGs, or WebAudio synthesized sound which pretty much no humans did before.

I donno. They all look ugly.

When making small tools for myself, I just tell it to use Svelte and then wrap it up using Tauri - no graphical cues whatsoever. And they usually comes out pretty good by my taste.

If you're just having fun with it, there are a whole bunch of other things that produce interesting options, like asking it to theme according to a movie (think Clockwork Orange, Backrooms, anything with a strong aesthetic), or throw screenshots and photos at it and use it as a "design system" (magazine/print layouts can work well with this on stronger models).

Only a small anecdote, but I'm 2 projects into telling Claude to "make it look like Google podcasts" and getting satisfactory results. Still smells like llm in parts, but overall it is not screaming low effort.

I kinda liked the Original, HIG and Windows 11 versions the most. When I think "AI slop" (in terms of web design), I think dark theme, rich purples and vibrant hues, huge headings, etc. The SaaS one kind of has that with the purples and vibrant hues; it easily looks the "sloppiest" to my eye.

Can't for personal preferences I suppose.

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.

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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?

All of these look quite terrible to my eyes. None of them really resemble the classic AI slop landing page, either (of which this [1] is a decent illustration). I'm no huge fan of that style, but it's at least readable and functional, and thus better than the results you got by a mile.

It seems like you were starting with an existing HTML file you asked it to redesign. Generating from scratch with strict guidelines could be more representative.

[1]: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/

I thought that AI would at least be good at 2 things: writing (text) and doing UI. It's not good at either. Text it generated reads like slop and UI it creates looks like slop. The way I approach it now is this: for text, I have to write it myself and only use AI to check grammar and catch weirdly phrased passages. For UI, it's like with the rest of the code. You have to stay on the top of it and keep demanding changes to match your vision/architecture/taste until it gets it close to what you want. In both cases, not knowing what "good" looks like is a real problem, because AI definitely has no idea.

>> 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.

I think the slop part is just what you get when you inject no opinions and put in no effort to apply taste (which you probably have and/or could develop). No care is put in. It looks generic and sloppy because it is generic and sloppy. You might have preferences over which generic and sloppy style is preferred, but at the end of the day a UI built without effort is going to look like what it is.

But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be opinionated, why do you care?

I had to read the post about five times and still didn't see the link to the actual examples - I actually had to view source to see the URL.

I like the idea - all of the designs are pretty meh though. If I had to pick one, I'd pick the HIG one (apart from that cursed glass effect on scroll) and then probably the Win11 one.

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?

Makes sense. Slop is basically what you get when there's nothing specific to copy and so the AI it just averages every web style together. Qt works because there's really only one way Qt looks.Modern web has a million versions of everything so you average all that and get slop.

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.

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.

on the other hand steve jobs would've called Qt human-slop

guess it's a matter of taste

Those aren’t “slop”, those are exactly what non webdev used to see in the past decade, now that webdevs are seeing it done without them doing it and everywhere, the reality check hit them hard. Gtk/qt UI feels like duct tape toys even before AI, material is so tasteless but years ago it was the “de facto” in any design or icons set, most front end ui/ux are literally copy paste of the same template and components, even before AI. Imo only some old apple and windows vista where the UI was actually pleasant to see and interact with.

On the matter of being without taste -- which I assume the author is using as a self-derogatory descriptor for not having skill in UI design -- the styling of links on this page could use some change. The link color is so close to the body color that I initially thought there weren't any links, and scrolled trying to find the examples. You can't both remove the underline and have such a low contrast font color, it's bad UX.

(For the record, even though I don't mind qt, I think this particular example still comes across as slop because of the overuse of gradients on buttons and headings. In general, a lot of these suffer from overuse of gradients, but OP appears to just be averse to border-radius)

design.md

[dead]

TLDR: Once a design gets old enough that LLMs can reproduce them, they are now "slop".