Comment by jjcm
4 days ago
Here's another test of a cyberpunk ramen shop website.
One thing I've found LLMs have a lot of difficulty with is angular cuts / elements that aren't easily representable with CSS. Cyberpunk aesthetics are generally a great test of that, since they have a lot of microglyphs / window decoration.
Design source of truth: https://image.non.io/9d5fed20-b476-49d3-841b-37eb553fb88e.we...
Opus 5 build: https://html.non.io/neonRamen/
Thoughts: It does a really, REALLY good job at these angular cuts / microglyphs. The responsiveness is off, but I'm very impressed at how well it did here. One way I think of it is "how close to a finished product did this get me?". Opus gets you like 90% there.
Several other commenters have disparaging the design seemingly mostly due to its AI-generated nature, or maybe they actually do dislike cyberpunk.
Personally, I think being able to have these design languages be easily prototypable is fucking awesome. Great tests! (But a tad low-performance/janky, somehow). Though, I also like the cyberpunk aesthetic. Very on-brand(?) that AI generates it, hah.
Just leaving this for anyone that says a design like this doesn't work: https://riceboxed.com/
This is a good version of that design style though
Wish more web looked like this really. Has distinct character.
[dead]
God damn, we are living in the future.
I love this so much.
Designs like this would never have seen the light of day in the cellphone incrementalism / corporate memphis era of tech. Now people can be weird and awesome again.
This is 1980's cyberpunk / late-90's Matrix / early-00's sci-fi UI. Great ideas that died to frutiger aero (which isn't a bad design aesthetic) and flat design (which is).
This is fun and it's got great colors and I love it.
It's so refreshing to see this.
AI rules. This is the best timeline.
What do you mean designs like this? This is 2016-cyberpunk-neon-era inspired by video game interfaces, these are not uncommon at all. Google something like "discord cyberpunk theme" or "cyberpunk rice site:reddit.com/r/unixporn" and you'll find endless examples. This isn't suprising at all obviously.
I'd say the only thing it's a newish aesthetic for is web UI that isn't implemented in Flash, but even then there's been periodic resurgences. Command and Conquer, Starcraft 2, I'm sure there are tons of examples I'm unaware of.
The only recent novel addition—I'd speculate—is the specific influence of Cyberpunk the game with its shiny surfaces and pink highlights, but even then it's hardly new.
Uncommon in commercial products - they all use the same flat, bland design language.
I feel that AI has deeply diminished my ability to be weird and awesome, because my weird and awesome takes time and the results I can share with others are outshined by the machine.
IMO what makes things awesome is human hours invested.
The ramen shop website above is pretty, but it's a veneer. It's not weird and awesome, it's just a representation of a site. I spent about... 7 minutes of my life making it. It's a tech demo, nothing more.
If someone actually poured their heart and soul into a vision for a cyberpunk themed ramen cart, and happened to use this because they didn't have the capabilities or funds to do a proper design, suddenly it becomes less of a veneer, and more just a component in the wider vision of that individual. Their human hours poured into the wider thing that's the business becomes what matters.
Ideally what AI does is it amplifies the hours we do pour into things that are weird and awesome, it doesn't replace them.
Strongly agree, I feel like my passion for development as a whole has waned away as AI has gotten more prevalent.
We do things to achieve some end result but it's the journey there that is the most cathartic to me. The "skilled crafts" element of development where careful deliberation and hours of tinkering to get any kind of appreciable output you can admire has been replaced with a one stop dopamine button that skips the whole process that I could find myself getting lost in.
I've taken up carpentry/metal working as a result. Maybe someday we'll have live in robots that do the same for those hobbies that AI did for programmers but I can't see it happening any time soon.
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You should have seen some of the Flash sites people made in the mid 90s early aughts. They all seemed to be straight up screenshots of the desired website and then buttons stapled on random portions.
They were an accessibility nightmare, but you use what you got. I tried so hard as a kid to understand flash, but had to settle on MS Frontpage to publish my first RPG page.
What's old is new again.
Designs are here if you want to play with em: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/68c5bb3d-467e-4841-b49d-c008e72...
This was just from a prompt "A cyberpunk themed ramen food cart website. Should feature menu, locations, and an ability to put in an order for pickup. Simple and clean website with angular cyberpunk microglyphs, pink/teal colors."
This comment resonated with me so much, and it seems to be a minority view (at least on this website).
I have found myself empowered by AI to tackle all sorts of things that would have too high of a barrier to entry for me to want to spend my limited time on as a busy father who is also working at a small startup.
And when I say that, I do NOT mean that I can crank out a bunch of slop and label it as something I produced even though I don't understand the code. I mean that I can do things like go back to college math that I never appreciated at the time and honestly felt too scared of. I mean having an on-demand math tutor that ask clarifying questions to as I struggle through the problem sets.
I have found that it actually accelerates learning how to code in various problem domains because I can tell it to answer my questions at a conceptual level and be a sounding board, but to never actually write code for me. It can review the code I write and gently nudge me without giving away the answers, so that I still struggle through the learning process and actually gain the knowledge.
And finally, for the first time in like 10 years of feeling overwhelmed and daunted by the prospect of learning game development (I have no background in that), I have found Codex to be an incredible boon for learning with the Godot engine. It helps me understand the terminology so that I know what to search for and what documentation to read. It helps me map my computer science knowledge from other domains into the game world, and to understand why things are structured the way they are. And because Godot saves all of the scenes and geometry and lighting and shaders to the file system as text files, Codex can inspect the results of the work I'm doing in the IDE and help me track down things I'm stuck on, and explain what the issue is. For example, why my pre-baked global illumination lightmap is breaking my ambient lighting configuration.
I know it has never been easier to cheat and skip the hard work that results in actually learning something, but for me, personally, I cannot believe the incredible value that $20 a month has provided me. I have never been more excited and eager to dive into tackling hard things I had previously been afraid of or simply too overwhelmed to attempt.
It has never been easier to quickly prototype and get a feel for some idea you have in your head to see if it even has legs. Simply seeing a quick prototype of an idea is often all of the excitement and fuel I need to then take it and make it a real project.
Your approach seems sensible. Especially the part about discussing concepts to gain understanding instead of having output generated for you to avoid having to think. Unfortunately, most people are interested in shortcuts and thinking less and will ultimately deteriorate in their abilities the more they abuse these tools to skip the learning process.
We are going through yet another generational wealth transfer and people are being squeezed to the absolute brim with layoffs and daunting lack of career prospects.
But sure, lets cheer that funky website designs are back on the menu…
I'll add to this...
The "funky" websites of the past were mostly a result of tech immaturity and a lack of profit motive.
Businesses have been able to easily install templates like this for at least a decade. They don't because stuff like this looks cool but isn't very functional.
AI isn't going to make your local restaurant have a funky website, it's just going to make everyone who use to work directly and indirectly for that company unemployable. And even the local restaurant will close down because they can't compete with the multi-national competitor that has automated their kitchen with AI.
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Why don’t you start a movement to fight for equality, and I’ll join you? Why are you still here and not taking actions?
In the mean time, I’ll unashamedly continue to cheer for creativity and innovation. Note: I don’t even like this website design.
Assuming no change from the baseline, I’d rather have one positive thing versus nothing positive.
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The culprit here is capitalism. The system was designed for this. Any technology will be used to squeeze the working class
AI has the merit of showing SWE folks exactly where in the class divide they belong. If you are selling your workforce, and you can't maintain your lifestyle if you stop working, you are in the working class
No we are not living in future. Design is ugly, and immediate put off because it smells AI.
Reading your comment I had to think of that tweet about someone taking a part of a Monet painting and claimed it was AI generated, and people immediately started calling it horrible and soulless and smelling like AI.
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We could say the same for the first factory-made clothes. Not as nice as the hand-tailored ones, looking a bit "off" when people wear them compared to custom-made, but orders of magnitude cheaper and more convenient.
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Then tell it that, and it'll give you the output you desire.
I feel you. I dig this and enjoyed those types of aesthetics. Back in the day this was my bread and butter, designing UI design for games and apps. I just realized AI (Specifically Pi+Ornith) can help with my ideas... So excited.
I'm hella interested in finding out what website builder/diagram app was used. I dig the dark theme/grid.
Youre delusional fella.
The reality is the web is going to turn into a walled garden.
It reminds me of the limitations of early CGA and EGA, which isn't a positive.
It's just remimagined LARPing of ppl who were born late into Postcyberpunk.
The same shit like (pseudoretro?) 'Synthwave', äckshuälly.
Because they're incredibly ugly
It's gorgeous and the world doesn't have enough of it.
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Unrelated question, what’s your favorite flavor of Kool Aid?
The last 10% is gonna take 90% of the time though.
I really like that design. May I ask the name of the website builder/diagram? Is it Relume?
This is my own tool, diffui. Thanks, though I will say I spent like... 7 minutes on this. Feel free to completely lift the design or the implementation.