Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio

As someone that has hired designers before I'm far more impressed by this than a portfolio.

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It’s interesting, I’ll give you that, but feels entirely like the wrong approach.

I opened the page before reading your post, and what immediately jumped out at me is that you say you’re a graphic designer but then you’re copying someone else’s old design which isn’t even that good.

The second thing I noticed was the obvious AI icon for the login, and that hovering on it makes it move weirdly. I haven’t used Windows XP in over two decades but don’t remember it doing that. It looks like an error.

At that point, I started losing confidence. You are supposed to be a graphic designer but are obviously using AI to design graphics and I assumed you would be doing the same for the code.

The resume as a fake PDF is cramped and zooming in feels like a poor solution.

Same thing with your projects, I can’t view them properly because they’re shoved in a tiny window for no reason. Plus, two of them are just loading animations, and it’s hard to understand if they’re broken or will ever load.

Then I finally read your post. You say you had no coding experience and used AI agents and “every decision was human”, but if you don’t know how to code, most of the decisions will have been made by the LLM even if you instructed it in particular ways. Do you feel confident regarding what you ostensibly learned and that you’d be able to reimplement most of the project yourself from scratch?

Again, it is interesting and a cool project, but it’s not particularly well-made or original¹ and I feel that as a portfolio actually does you a disservice by showcasing your skills in the worst possible light.

¹ https://win32.run

It’s very neat but I’m sorry, you can’t advertise yourself as a designer while prominently showcasing very obviously AI-generated graphics. The wallpaper and the avatar immediately undermine everything else, I can’t take you seriously seeing those

As a design showcase it is odd to basically trademark/copyright infringe all the visuals.

In university design classes they made it pretty clear we should take care choosing sources for assets we used, even as a base for our work. At least back in the early oughts. Maybe it's different now that crime is legal.