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")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
_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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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."
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)?
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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... ;))
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
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
"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"
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...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
Were/Are human-generated side projects better in this respect?
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I've genuinely had solid results from telling Claude "... and make sure it has good accessibility".
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I think this is a second order thing when you are building a side project.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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
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>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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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?
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
I agree. The problem is the noise ratio, not how the platform was implemented.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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Appreciate the feedback, just updated the title to be more clear.
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
Getting a McDonald's saves time too
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
_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.
This optimism, I like it.
(Still plenty of scary stuff, but I should feel like you at least some of the time, healthy balance.)
Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects
(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
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.
You're absolutely right (as they say) - https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
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
Look at the website you're on
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (425 comments)
Why so many defensive comments? A good visual design has some personality.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Here's what it found if you want to see: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/given-these-how-can-we-crea...
> 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.
so, n=1 plus Baader-Meinhof? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
Would love if we could get a tool that performed the same analysis on an arbitrary site as the author's playwright test setup.
There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.
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."
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.
I wrote a post about it (https://pscanf.com/s/352/) if you're interested in the details.
Ask a llm for a code review along code duplication, encapsulation and sequential coupling as quality axes and the difference should show up readily
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)?
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.
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.
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I always ask it to use tailwind with shadcn. Then you get a generic UI which will not pass as AI generated.
> 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
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.
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.
A "you built it, you fix it" policy would be lovely in this situation.
That sounds maddening.
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.
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.
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... ;))
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
I guess I was bucking the trend with https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/.
I used a colored left-border on my blog and thought it looked pretty fresh. I didn't realize that was an AI pattern.
> 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
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.
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.
[0]: https://dallasexpress.com/state/zerogpt-flags-1836-texas-dec...
time to add plugins to hn, automated measure of ai comments and submissions to be the first ;)
I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.
> 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
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
"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.
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
> 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.
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?
This is great, now we can better disguise slopware!
These designs are now the trend, though. So they will influence how human designed/built websites also look.
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.
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.
Love the idea. Let me get to this over the weekend and open-source it, then ping you via email.
"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"
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...
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.
It will be replaced with private networks soon. Last step of anonymous internet.
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.)
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.
Average is all you need
And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.
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.
> 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?).
The UI framework is called shadcn/ui.
Reminded me of this https://stallman-copypasta.github.io/
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.
Why is that a problem? Reality will filter out the projects that are poorly developed just like it always has.
Sure, but what greatness do we lose in the interim as it gets silenced by unending noise?
In a marketplace with infinite low-quality supply and limited attention, it doesn’t really matter how good the good offerings are.
Even his blog has the Claude vibe to it.
https://www.adriankrebs.ch/about
> The site is built with Astro. Design inspired by Paul Stamatiou.
https://paulstamatiou.com
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.
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.
very interesting
Unless it is AI slop, I don't mind reading submissions that can be genuinely helpful.
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.
did you even read and edit the title of this post?
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