The AI Aesthetic • Hacker News Board

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#131

Post by yakkomajuri » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #127

yakkomajuri wrote: post #99

Interestingly, I've found that AI has actually made me more interested in design because I'm now able to actually do some things, whereas before I couldn't get my creative visions built. As an example, I recently built my company's website and I'm really happy with the result. I wanted it to have some hints of Rollercoaster Tycoon, and with a lot of experimentation, direction, tinkering, and examples I got to somethi…

Thanks for not shipping your first draft!

Oh yeah I mean check these out:

https://imgur.com/a/kLKTtAz

https://imgur.com/a/9fidnRv

The rollercoaster on the second one was the breakthrough that then eventually led to what I have today

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#132

Post by moritzwarhier » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:03 AM UTC

dd8601fn wrote: post #83

cortesoft wrote: post #16

Is the "'shimmering text' for waiting" thing really that recent? I feel like that is a bit older, but maybe I am wrong. I have more and more difficulty remembering how long things have been around as I get older.

Me too, but I suppose something had to be somewhat popular for llms to regularly put it in design artifacts, now.

It wasn't shimmering, but the "hey I'm your computer and this is what I'm doing, oh watch, now I'm doing this" paradigm, was popular in loading screens, installers, and the explicitly personal / anthropomorphized language was on the rise for a long time.

Starting with addressing users personally instead of using neutral language like with labels in physical tools.

Also the "drawing attention" part I think mimics chat interfaces, e.g. Windows installer since Win 8.

But still no shimmering text there. Indeed interesting who started to come up with this.

Other similar, earlier trends I found:

iOS Slide-to-Unlock text!

And the shimmering of loading skeletons is also similar, although they're not text.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#133

Post by ludamn » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:27 AM UTC

lynndotpy wrote: post #91

Retr0id wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'd clock the ramen one as AI, if not for the main image being AI generated.

I'd clock this as an AI website with no question whatsoever. Everything comes in punchy threes. I don't need to know what "早い・旨い・熱い" means in order to smell it for what it is.

[dead]

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#134

Post by ben_w » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:37 AM UTC

jjcm wrote: post #10

> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well,…

> The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well, which means you get consistent designs. You end up aligning on a generic mean because of it, which is often why you see these repeated aesthetics.

I think this is more due to temperature (while the LLM is producing a design) rather than consistency. Consistency means it'll be yes-and-ing all the way once it starts, but that initial seed? You meet one instance of Claude 5, you've met them all. Ditto ChatGPT-x or Gemini-y.

Because each blank context window starts the same, the only initial seed of variation is the user prompt. If the users don't mention style, then 5000 people all prompting for "single page web app to do X" will get very close to the same result.

Most humans keep asking for the same, and the output is therefore analogous to Simon Willison's pelican on a bike, where the output is overwhelmingly facing to our right, and to the extent that the bike is functional and would actually e.g. steer, it's a standard bike rather than recumbent, cargo, or tandem.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#135

Post by jwr » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:55 AM UTC

I think the bigger problem here is not AI, but the increasing tendency for designers and designers-groups to look at one another's work and copy it. It almost seems like every designer has an inferiority complex where they look at others and think, "I'm not as good as them, therefore I have to mimic what they do."

This results in everyone copying Apple, for example, even their bad decisions.

Somebody noticed a while ago that all the AI company logos look like anuses — and they are right! They do!

Even product design decisions are not immune to this. Look at cars for example; Tesla started designing non-circular steering wheels and everybody followed. There is absolutely no reason to do this. A non-circular steering wheel in a road car is worse in every respect than a circle shape, yet everybody does it until the trend passes (hopefully soon).

If you look around, you will find plenty other examples.

Similarly here, I think that all AI apps have small icons not because they are AI apps, but because the design groups copy each other's work.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#136

Post by flemhans » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #128

jjcm wrote: post #10

> There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well,…

> LLMs are trained to write consistent code You are absolutely right, that's the load bearing assumption and it earns its keep. Personally, I didn't mind when a lot of sites looked like the default Bootstrap theme (because that's what they used), because generally it made sense. I think that LLMs, both in regards to prose and the code and UIs they produce, could have lead to an age of decent - where things would be j…

Haha, spot on, but I'm still wondering how specifically "earns it keep" became such a thing. I think it's a Claude specific phenomenon for me.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#137

Post by IsTom » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

gitgud wrote: post #84

Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones, which means they endure, are copied, and eventually become the implied standard UX… some examples of this are; the hamburger menu, tiny icons and auto-scroll for streaming text

I might be an old man yelling at cloud, but for things coming after win98 era this feels demonstrably false in many cases.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#138

Post by flemhans » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

qwery wrote: post #97

> Some patterns are very specific to the interactions inherent to the nature of AI as a technology. For example: streaming text. This is a pattern made for and refined by chat interfaces, so it may not have tons of utility for reuse across other software interaction paradigms. I'm used to the software industry being isolated (vice versa) from the games industry, but I'm a bit surprised by this point because "streamin…

So slowness was is the reason for both old games and LLMs to use the streaming text method. Makes sense!

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#139

Post by Planktonne » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

john01dav wrote: post #52

blfr wrote: post #46

I think that most early AI aesthetic will go the way of bootstrap and become associated with ultra utilitarian software where no one thought about intentionally making a design. Fable can easily generate something like a design system for itself from whatever starting point you give it. So if you want different aesthetic, you can bang out the aesthetic first in Claude Design and then serve it to Claude Code to follow…

I disagree because they communicate different things (to me). Seeing Bootsrap for some custom software at my university pre-llm: "I think that a programmer made this and didn't have a designer helping them so they just used a library" Seeing vibe-coded frontend: "This app may be entirely vibe coded so I am deeply suspicious of it, or it could be a programmer who didn't have a designer helping them and thus used Boots…

Basic bootstrap means 'the developer did not care much about design'.

Vibe-coded frontend means 'the creator didn't care about design or potentially any aspect of this'.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#140

Post by BrenBarn » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

The article doesn't mention what I think is one of the most notable AI aesthetic tropes, which is lists of bullet points where the bullets are emojis. Admittedly these mostly occur in documents (especially AI-generated repo readmes) rather than UIs, but they've become ubiquitous and I find them rather gross.