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Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

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Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#51

Post by mywittyname »

chorkpop wrote: post #38
itake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance you could share screenshots? Even the example apps in the post seemed like AI slop to me. Common markers are too noisy/busy (mainly repeated or rephrased information). Text being a bit too big (Codex-only?).

Yes in my experience, AI designs might look okay on first glance but when you really start to look you start to see strange and inconsistent things. Similar to looking at generated code.

You can have it fix these things. It has the tools to analyze screenshots of the app and correct things like formating, alignment, color, etc.

I've been building a personal app with Opus 4.8 over the past two weeks and the design is excellent. I provided it with screenshots of what I wanted, then had it build out a gallery of functional UI elements (like designers do). Claude built out a tool that would screenshot the app, compare it to the design screenshot and automatically reposition elements or update the styles to match.

You can also provide it with a style guideline prompt and have it double check all the work it produced matches the UI style guidelines before committing.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#52

Post by ajmurmann »

kstenerud wrote: post #49

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

This seems to be a new iteration of what IMO made frontend work somewhat painful for almost the entire time I've been building software. It used to take the form that people did something with html that it wasn't designed to do. That thing looked cool and so everyone wanted it. This lead to pain and the perception that the tool is inadequate. So we eventually got CSS. And it continued there. Someone figured out a way to get cool dropshadows and rounded corners. These were cumbersome to implement. And so on.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#53

Post by unleaded »

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

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

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#54

Post by unleaded »

Retr0id wrote: post #3
abraxas wrote: post #2

I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop. The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop. AI is just amplifying it.

Continuing in that vein, it'd be interesting to see a Win98 version. Edit: https://retr0.id/stuff/deslop/

I really wish CSS added an option to set font antialiasing and hinting. Would make all these old windows style websites look 1000x better.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#55

Post by solidasparagus »

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

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

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#57

Post by pixl97 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #7

To me the "AI slop" mostly just looks like the last decade of SaaS products. Do the landing pages of auth0.com, devcycle.com, micro.com, or datadog.com not look like slop to other people?

I mean, no these don't look like AI slop. At worst they are 'web slop'. But even with that said a site that looks like this is what I expect these days from most businesses. I'm not looking at these companies for their far out web design capabilities, in fact a site that's somewhat standardized and has things where we expect them is far more useful.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#58

Post by tamimio »

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

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#59

Post by econ »

Retr0id wrote: post #3
abraxas wrote: post #2

I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop. The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop. AI is just amplifying it.

Continuing in that vein, it'd be interesting to see a Win98 version. Edit: https://retr0.id/stuff/deslop/

I use to make whole websites using system colors. The colors kept getting worse and eventually everyone hated it including myself.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#60

Post by econ »

properbrew wrote: post #33
Retr0id wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuing in that vein, it'd be interesting to see a Win98 version. Edit: https://retr0.id/stuff/deslop/

This one works well. I think it's because there's no shine to it, it's just the data, what you need, right there without trying to fluff it all out with rounded edges and superfluous stuff.

The opposite, to change it into the modern version remove all borders and make all backgrounds the same color.

That is how to make it uneasy on the eyes.

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