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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

#91

Post by PaulHoule »

stefan_ wrote: post #82
lherron wrote: post #65

You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!", and this is it? > NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character. > brutally minimal, maximalist chaos, re…

For years I would use free fonts and spend hours picking them out and getting depressed because they all had something wrong with them…. You get what you pay for.

For a recent project I really liked a font which was in the Adobe Fonts collection and when I had to set stuff in that font with Pillow I gladly bought the font from the foundry because it looks great and saves hours of searching for a “free” font, that is “free” as in puppy.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#92

Post by tclancy »

duffycommaryan wrote: post #76
lherron wrote: post #65

You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

The frontend-design skill defeats its own purpose imo. The design equivalent of "it's not x, it's y."

It's load-bearing though.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#93

Post by swiftcoder »

deaux wrote: post #35
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?

auth0 does get close to slop. If I were them I'd definitely change things up. Devcycle and Datadog are nothing like generated slop. I haven't seen Fable websites yet - supposedly a lot better - but Opus and GPT can't design anything even close to those two. They can implement it if you give them a screenshot, but that's not designing something. Micro.com shows me a domain sale page.

sorry, that was meant to be miro.com, before autocorrect struck

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#94

Post by leptons »

viccis wrote: post #85
lherron wrote: post #65

You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

I've had better results with this, when it comes to functional UIs rather than marketing sites: https://github.com/Dammyjay93/interface-design Found it on reddit after Claude produced the lamest looking generic forms for all the pages on a project I had it build. This did a pass over it and basically fixed it all one shot.

>Apply the squint test to your work:

>Blur your eyes or step back >Can you still perceive hierarchy? >Is anything jumping out at you?

Telling an eyeless clanker to "blur your eyes" is just so ridiculous. "Is anything jumping out at you?" That's quite a thing for a machine to reason about, and reads like a waste of tokens. I'm not sure who is writing these things, but they seem rather clueless.

Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user interfaces.

I'm pretty sure I'd have better luck just telling the LLM explicitly what I want, because experience in UI/UX is still better than what an LLM would slop out on its own.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#95

Post by kbelder »

stefan_ wrote: post #82
lherron wrote: post #65

You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!", and this is it? > NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character. > brutally minimal, maximalist chaos, re…

"make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the context."

What is it supposed to do when fed instructions like this?

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#97

Post by contextfree »

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/

It's really funny that it uses the Windows dotted-line focus rectangle as a stylistic signifier of "Windowsy thing" while having no idea what it's for.

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#98

Post by contextfree »

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.

Someone on Twitter dubbed it the "agentic ick"

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#99

Post by Retr0id »

contextfree wrote: post #97
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/

It's really funny that it uses the Windows dotted-line focus rectangle as a stylistic signifier of "Windowsy thing" while having no idea what it's for.

Heh well there was a dashed border in the "original" version and I suppose it just made it the windows-y equivalent. I imagine it wouldn't have done the same if it was prompted from scratch.

("it" being Opus 4.8 btw)

Re: Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end

#100

Post by flo_r »

Tried macOS HIG for the same reason and got similar results, less slop, more structure. I think what's happening is that the model has a very specific grammar to pull from instead of averaging over everything web-related it's ever seen. The SaaS one is interesting as a control, it's essentially asking for the average of all modern web UI, so you get exactly that.
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