I expect most side-projects are being built with AI-assistance now. Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
They're also the ideal place to try out new AI tools that your professional work might not let you experiment with.
(The headline of this piece doesn't really do it justice - it misuses "vibe coded" and fails to communicate that the substance of the post is about visual design traits common with AI-generated frontends, which is a much more interesting conversation to be having. UPDATE: the headline changed, it's now much better - "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look" - it was previously "Show HN submissions tripled and are now mostly vibe-coded")
My biggest issue with LLM‑assisted webpages (Claude Code is especially egregious) is the lack of respect for basic web content accessibility guidelines.
The number of dark‑mode sites I’ve seen where the text (and subtext) are various shades of dark brown or beige is just awful. For reference, you want a contrast ratio between the text and background of at least ~4:1 to be on the safe side.
This isn't even that hard to fix - hell you can add the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to a skill.
I could see that. I’ve found that the more specificity you add to your prompt and less freedom you give Claude Code to kind of just “do its own thing”, the better your results will be.
FWIW, there’s also an official frontend-design skill for CC [1]. A while back I incorporated some of the more relevant guidance from WCAG into it [2].
Something I've noticed when people complain about stuff like accessibility or other things that LLMs do "wrong", it really is a case of "you're holding it wrong." The LLM does indeed know how to do it right and it sometimes does so autonomously but when it doesn't, you can simply ask it to do so.
In other words, I've found people like the above to think of LLMs as fairly static, as if we couldn't change their behavior with a simple sentence, instead of complaining about it. It's strange, to me at least.
The "default" light-mode look of most popular UI frameworks wouldn't have that same issue unless you put a lot of time into customizing your own styling, which most side projects wouldn't bother with (unless that look and feel was the point of the project). There certainly would be poor UI decisions but more likely in layout/placement/navigation, which could still be problematic for accessibility but probably not in a "is this color scheme even readable" kind of way.
Plus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text in every visible inch of the page without some intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).
Maybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as "cool looking" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.
I assume not, but the emphasis here is that a new tool is homogenizing these projects and due to its scale it is more important that this homogenous output is up to a higher standard.
A hundred self-thought devs not implementing accessibility standards is a different problem than a school teaching 100 students lacking these standards in its curriculum.
I think accessibility is a really admirable thing and helpful to society (like ramps or parking). But stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it on your own. Just write a chrome plugin using ai that adjusts css to set contrast ratio of your choice. Can even use a local llm to figure out replacement colors.
Accessibility that can be had on client side should not be a concern on server side.
That's a really terrible option for the vast majority of people who simply lack that kind of tech savviness to be able to do it. And in my opinion, it's kind of selfish.
It also doesn't solve the issue if somebody is browsing your site on a mobile phone where the extension might not even work properly.
WCAG is not difficult - but it does require some modicum of effort.
Obligatory “have Claude write one for you” (in jest of course). All kidding aside, folks have always underestimated how much accessibility helps even those who don’t think they need it.
Right? "Build your own extension" to fix a website's accessibility problems is the equivalent of telling somebody who is disabled to stop complaining about the lack of ramps when they can just modify their wheelchair with a jetpack.
stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it on your own. Just write a chrome plugin using ai that adjusts css to set contrast ratio of your choice. Can even use a local llm to figure out replacement colors.
Stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it yourself.
Just get some concrete and some lumber, and build that wheelchair ramp.
You can even hire a contractor to follow you around town all day building them as needed.
I think it's fine, so long as the intent is to refine the thing after you've validated the product idea and direction. There are a million things to optimize in web pages, and AI can't simply one-shot good decisions yet.
Just chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility and I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
People assume that accessibility is all about some small minority of less abled people who can't "read good", but it's a broad category that affects all users. If you build following the guidelines then you end up with a quality product that can be used by people who stumbled upon it while doom-scrolling instead of enjoying their beach vacation. The best analogy I heard was about drop-kerbs/curb-cuts... people wonder why we're catering for a small minority of wheelchair users everywhere and then they have a kid (or wheel luggage from the airport) and realize how great they are.
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Those of us who care that technology be accessible to as many people as possible, such as low vision users, find it relevant. You can ignore it if you wish.
I care about accessibility, but I agree with your sentiment. There is this recurring pattern people have when trying to detract from AI. They realize that saying they dislike AI for economic reasons is not going to garner any sympathy, so they try to hide behind some noble cause. At one point, it was about water use in datacenters. At another point, they become defenders for megacorporations' copyright. Now, they are trying the "AI doesn't cares about accessibility" angle. They are just trying to find some reason that sticks.
> chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
Your hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.
You brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. You brought this problem upon others. People won't care about your problems. Why should they, when you didn't care about theirs?
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Accessibility is legally required and not difficult to add.
Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people? Refusing to provide accessibility in your service is no different. You are actively discriminating in a way which could be illegal and certainly is unethical and amoral.
> Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people?
Bad analogy, as none of those traits require any accomodation in a website or app.
Not that I disagree with the premise. Almost everyone will eventually have trouble reading small, low contrast text or details on their phone or screen, if nothing else.
That's until you want to fill a form and find out it's dark grey text on a different dark grey background so you don't see what you're typing even with 20/20 sight :)
Accessibility is a broad umbrella of features that enable a ton of really cool stuff for everybody, not just the disabled. Things like agentic computer use is only possible because of "accessibility".
As they say, everyone will eventually become disabled in some form or fashion. When your eyes go due to old age you'll be glad to still be able to use the internet.
I'm blind and accessibility is important to me. It is extremely disrespectful to see someone who just says "fuck you" and feels good about it. Please, at least consider that the world is bigger than you imagine and there is place for everyone in it and there is no need to be purposefully rude.
I don’t expect most side-projects to be built with LLMs now. I would expect LLM uptake to be higher in the workplace (where it’s mandatory and/or people operate on the “the ends justify the means” paradigm), but outside of that there’s a higher likelihood someone is doing it because they enjoy programming and problem-solving as a process, and why outsource something you like to a black box that will regurgitate you an average of volunteer contributions (often non-consensually obtained) for some corporation’s profit?
> Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
It depends what your goals are. All of my side projects were started because I wanted to learn something. Using a "skip to the end" button wouldn't really make sense for me.
The difference between people who want to learn things versus people who just want a finished product is going to be a big dividing line in the post AI world
AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
I don’t know if that’s true, I made a little web app for displaying the schedule for my team based on our billable hours, and I didn’t do any of the scripting myself but I did have to think a lot about what the app would do and what it would look like and what kind of functionality I wanted, tradeoffs between functionality and specific use cases, etc. It just made the scripting part go faster, that’s all.
And even less than someone who wrote an interpreter for the script, less than someone who also chanted times tables while doing it.
More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.
It is a good faith argument, my point is exactly that the actual scripting was not part of the relevant thought any more than the interpreter would have been.
Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
Before, it was like:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)
Now:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.
Even more than validating ideas, I think my personal AI use falls into two categories:
- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't
- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision
> Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
This.
Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.
Not likely. Original thinking in a "side project" is almost never about the code itself, but the ideas and end product implementation. You might be able to invent things like Carmack's BSP implementation, Torvald's Content Addressable Storage, etc. but even things like that can be aided by LLMs at this point, at least in the prototyping/idea phases. AI doesn't prevent you from having good ideas or doing original thinking if that is your goal.
For sure, I'm doing something very similar, asking an AI to make a boring but working web app using an API I'm working on. The API is the interesting part and the web app is basically just to test it.
I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.
Sure... and it might also help you do more original thinking in that domain, and hence help you get a lot more learning value out of the time you have for those side projects.
The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.
For me it wouldn’t make sense to use ai. Like I work on personal projects because they are fun: it’s fun to think about a problem, to solve it, to implement a solution, to learn new things and to fantasise about what if it gets popular and useful. If I can use AI to flip my fingers and make it happen, well wheres the fun? I have my day to day job to use AI for mundane things
Besides, the idea of paying 200$/month to have the privilege of using ai in my side projects… it’s just stupid for me
Fun is not always about finding up the exact look or design of something - you might be having it for your own particular reason - and by the time a website has to present it might have shifted already. That's why these land and why we might be confused about the process
To me, it is incredibly fun to work in "product/idea space" and have the LLM do the gruntwork of coding for you.
It is also very fun to tackle hard engineering problems.
I enjoy both, and tend to oscillate between wanting to do a lot of one, or a lot of the other. I do recognize that I've been coding for so long that it's much more exciting to be solving "product problems" rather than "engineering problems", I suspect mostly because it's the area I've explored the least (of the two).
And there is a LOT to learn about a domain while you're working on the problem, even without even looking at the code.
I was surprised to realize that some of my friends don't share this sentiment. They take very little pleasure from being product developers, and instead really just enjoy being engineers who work on the code and the architecture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just found it very surprising. To be honest, I guess perhaps what I found the most surprising is that I am not one of those people?
And when you get your product in the hands of users can finally get that direct feedback line to/from them and can start working on the problems they find and thinking of product (not necessarily engineering) solutions for them? Man, that's so satisfying. It's like falling in love with coding all over again.
It depends if the interesting part of the solution is the website for you. Maybe it is and that’s fine but for others it isn’t. Maybe they’ve got a cool backend thing and the ui isn’t the key part.
If it helps compare, you might have a full desire to manage a tricky server and all the various parts of it. It’d be removing the fun to just put a site on GitHub pages rather than hosting it on a pdp11. But if you want to show off your demo scene work you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed out on the fun just putting things up on a regular site.
You can still have fun with your side projects. AI helps, but if you want to build something nice, you still need to provide most of the intellectual input, while AI can help with the more tedious things. I have a personal project that I abandoned because it was becoming too much for me, and there were parts that I didn't enjoy doing.
I anticipate that people with a builder spirit and strong technical background are going to be able to build awesome things in the future. What the Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack of today will be able to build?
It doesn't work like that. AI is not a Jinn. You cannot simply command it and have it produce an entire project from thin air. You get to have fun: do the thinking part, and let it do the boring stuff.
I have a long list of projects that I have thought about but never implemented because of lack of time and energy. LLMs have made that happen.
I like designing programming languages and developing parsers/compilers and virtual machines. But the steps beyond type-checking are so incredibly boring (and I don't like using C or LLVM as targets) that I have done the front end 15-20 times over the last couple of decades and the back end only 3-4 times.
This time, I spent two weeks developing a spec for the VM, including concurrency, exception handling and GC. And I led the AI through each subsystem till I was satisfied with the result. I now have a VM that is within 8x of C in tight loops. Without JIT. It is incredible to be able to allocate arrays of 4B elements and touch each element at random, something that would make python cry.
Personally, I'm using side projects to test what a basic agentic setup can achieve, i.e. not paying for anything but the electricity bill. Reaching that state is the real side project.
(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)
It doesn't have to be like this. For me one 20$ acc with another one for backup I rarely use, is more than enough. I leverage this tool simply as a typist - it can't think so it mustn't, it can't architect since it's merely a "guess the next word" game with many extra steps, but boy can it type fast. I just make sure it types exactly what I would have typed and nothing else, this way I get to enjoy both worlds - improve my throughput and not produce slop.
The one caveat I have with this is that the underlying project might be fun but the website/write-up might be a chore. Hence AI for the chore bit.
I don't think this is overwhelmingly the reason though - I think many are just all AI, but if the project is technically interesting it might be sufficient to get me to grimace through it.
I wouldn't use it because one of the reasons that I do side projects is to enjoy myself and learn new things, and these tools tend to do much of the stuff that I enjoy and learn from.
I also expect that most side projects that are made with ai end up abandoned within 3 months and contribute next to nothing to the user's personal development and that the use of ai prevented them from the kind of deliberate practice that could have led to durable skill growth which ultimately will lead to much better work (side or main projects).
It depends on the project, I think. If your side project is a thing you hope it will make you a millionaire, sure, AI all the way. But if your side project is a just a cool thing or a learning experience, I would say the exact opposite. I would expect $JOB to be very time-constrained and vibecoding-friendly (maybe even too friendly) whereas your side-project should be all artisanal free-range code.
I'm primarily a backend developer. Most of my work has been in serving json or occasionally xml. Spring Shell in Java is something that I'm closer to working with than a GUI. When I've done web work, the most complimentary thing that was said about my design is "spartan".
So, if I was to have a web facing personal project... would black text on a white background with the default font and clunky <form> elements be ok? I know we are ok with it on the HN Settings page. They work... but they don't meet what I perceive other people have as minimum standards for web facing interfaces today.
And so... if I was to have some web facing project that I wanted to show to others, I'd probably work with some AI tooling to help create a gui, and it would very likely have the visual design traits that other AI generated front ends have.
Because generally speaking, stuff that is AI generated is largely devoid of value. If it’s AI generated anyone can prompt it into existence, so the likely hood that someone will find value in and use what you made is approximately zero. What you made is likely low quality, since you vibe coded it with little effort and that always shows. Lastly you don’t even get to experience the joy of solving problems yourself or the pride of having built something with your own skill.
Using some AI to build something is fine, it’s when it’s used so much that it’s immediately obvious on the packaging - the show hn post, the readme, the code itself.
I've been coding for 20 years now, almost every single afternoon.
I've never met someone who has spent more time coding than me (although for sure such people exist). I love writing code, I consider it an art form. I don't mind spending days optimizing a function until the code is beautiful (at least to me).
I also have dozens of projects in mind that I don't have time to go through; cue the meme of "I bought another domain that will sit empty for years", I have like 60 of those right now.
AI assistance/vibecoding, whatever you call it, has been a massive win for me because now I can sketch out those projects in a weekend, put them out and then, if I decide they're worth spending more time on, tradcode the parts that I really care about. As it is for many others, AI is another tool in my toolbox. It's the pencil and paper I use to draft stuff.
It's tricky because I do get that we all want to get rid of low-value AI slop, but also, it wouldn't be fair to me, and people like me, to have authentic projects discredited just because you used AI in the creative process; not just as part of it, but perhaps even to write ALL of the code. And then, why would that be a bad thing?
What difference does it make if it was me writing functionally identical code letter-by-letter instead of writing a comprehensive prompt and guiding AI to do as I wish?
This fact, which i do believe to be true, has completely killed my interest in almost all of other peoples projects.
My interest in a project has always been rooted in the idea that its interesting to see other knowledgable people or people learning to attack a problem for themselves. I have really never cared about the "thing that it does." I liked reading the code, dissecting attempts and really learning about the person that wrote it through their line by line decisions.
That is now all gone. The "noise ratio" of slop projects which have none of the previously interesting thought and intentionality have drowned out the "rigorous projects."
It's actually very sad for me, it was something I previously really enjoyed. I am looking for a board that aggregates projects that still have that interesting "human factor" i would subscribe in a heartbeat.
Yes, it's the September That Never Ended again. It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
It doesn't feel like more ideas are explored, it feels like more variants of the same old things are produced. Ideas have always been hard and AI doesn't help with that.
It feels like people are more willing to give their agent a prompt than search the web for existing solutions.
I've noticed a crazy amount of clearly AI coded projects that do a small subset of an already existing and very trusted open source project. Comments usually point this out, and the OP never responds. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but the whole thing feels like a waste of time for everybody involved.
> It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
This is a manipulative combination of condescension, gaslighting and emotionalization.
"It's fun to complain" trivializes and dismisses a valid observation about the content being submitted as self-indulgent whining.
"I'd rather face the world" implies that people who want to see carefully constructed projects and human-written articles about them are refusing to face the world, i.e. delusional.
"Find the joy in it" reduces the whole discussion to the question of self-imposed mindset, as if there is no possible rational reason to be unhappy about what's going on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim (<-- this is what many accounts without much HN history now see, and it's responsible for the downtick to the right on OP's chart)
Cards have been in vogue for a while and I can’t recall the last time I saw super hard corners on a design system. It’s been a thing since at least Apple filing that patent on rounded corners.
I don't think it's just the base rate of rounded corners though, these posts feel like the AI tends to spit out a bullet point list of features, like you'd see on an AI readme where each feature has a tangential emoji, then for a website puts them in a grid of rounded rects
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.
When the surface dwellers have become crazed by disease and war, and their lands contaminated with the detritus of broken promises of innovation and heavy metals, we must build a new Eden.
As much as I adore Gemini as a concept, I yearn to express myself in the visual medium. Dillo might honestly be enough to render something beautiful within its constraints. With Wireguard meshes as the transport, and invitations offered and withdrawn by personal trust, perhaps we can have a place where our ideas could once again flourish without being amplified and distilled into mediocrity by the great monoliths looming like thunderous currents on the horizon.
I've looked at some Show HN submissions initially feeling impressed and finding it's either not even working code or it's obvious AI code someone is trying to take credit for writing themselves. If GitHub is used now as a resume builder but AI can do all the work, the signal is basically gone.
The problem is people want to use 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.
In 2016, if I saw 10,000 lines of code, that carried a certain proof-of-work with it. They probably couldn't help but give the code some testing as they were working up to that point. We know there has to have been a certain amount of thought in it. They've been living with it for some months, guaranteed.
In 2026, 10,000 lines of code means they spent a minimum amount of money on tokens. 10,000 lines can be generated pretty quickly in a single task, if it's something like "turn this big OpenAPI spec into an API in my language". It's entirely possible 90%+ of the project hasn't actually been tested, except by the unit tests the AI wrote itself, which is a great start, but not more than that for code that hasn't ever actually run in any real scenario from the real world.
Nothing about any of that in intrinsically wrong. But the standards have to be shifted. While the bar for a "Show HN" should perhaps not be high, it should probably be higher than "I typed a few things into a text box". And that not because that's necessarily "bad" either, but because of the mismatch between valuable human attention and the cheapness of being able to make a draw on it.
It's kind of a bummer in some sense... but then again, honestly, the space of things that can be built with an idea and a few prompts to an AI was frankly fairly well covered even before AI coding tools. Already I had a list of "projects we've already seen a lot of so don't expect the community to shower you with adulation" for any language community I've spent any significant time in. AI has grown the list of "projects I've seen too many times" a bit, but a lot of what I've seen is that we're getting an even larger torrent of the same projects we already had too many of before.
> 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.
That's basically the entire AI landscape atm.
I keep seeing people do things like spend a weekend building a product then charging ridiculous prices for it with the justification that it's what those products would've cost a few years ago.
For some reason, it doens't click for them that those prices were a reflection of the effort it took to get to that point and that the situation has changed.
Really apt comment, and I think it applies to a broader domain than just coding. People want others to judge their super fancy slide deck or new branding by that same 2016 standard, essentially fabricating accomplishment for themselves.
Yea, I mean we've had so many phases.. Bootstrap, Web 2.0, Tailwind, "Material" UI, etc.. with random frameworks, from Rails to NextJS..
There's always a trend and everyone follows them in Software. Now it's AI.. let's not pretend cutting corners is anything new in our industry.
I guess you can always gloat about your artisan code but people who use Software for business never cared about that to begin with.
Plus, wasn't the entire philosophy of CS was that "everyone can code" ? Opposing licensing requirements, etc ? Well.. there you have it, code is a commodity now and the barrier to entry is next to none.
Given that the ones that surfaced on the frontpage were pretty interesting, vibe coded or not, I’d say the voting mechanism is working as a good filter.
Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting. If you're instead into learning from projects based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, they're utterly boring...
I find that I just don't learn anything new from Show HN vibe-coded side projects, and I can often replicate them in a couple of hundred of dollars, so why bother looking at them? Also why bother sharing one in the first place, since it doesn't really show any personal prowess, and doesn't bring value to the community due to it being easy to replicate?
This assumes that pre-LLM projects were based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, and not just boilerplated framework code, copying the design trends of the week.
I'd challenge the lack of personal prowess argument. Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill, even if you're not hand-crafting CSS and SQL.
I liken it to those who tune cars, who buy cars made in a factory, install parts made by someone else, using tools that are all standardized. In the middle somewhere is the human making decisions to create a final result, which is where the talent exists.
> Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting.
There's a lot of ways things can be of interest. The problem being solved, how it's being solved, the UI, UX, etc.
THAT it is vibe coded may or may not be interesting to some, but finding it un-interesting because it's vibe coded is no better than finding that it is.
Yes, I find looking at vibe coded stuff interesting when they solve a worthy problem.
No amount of denial will roll back the technology that millions can use now, that makes it realistic to produce in a day software that would take at least months five years ago.
> A designer recently told me that “colored left borders are almost as reliable a sign of AI-generated design as em-dashes for text”, so I started to notice them on many pages.
I think HN is the crowd that values MVPs. And LLMs are the best tool to quickly materialize an idea. So I think we should judge these submissions on merit and not on our collective rejection of reality. If they succeed I’m sure (or hope) their user facing app won’t remain vibe coded.
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.
At least in the field I work in (ecommerce/retail), design is often what separates one brand from another when presenting their products. Maybe it won't happen on the web as much in the future, but I suspect it will still be important when it comes to visually communicating to consumers
Indeed, and I don't think there's any reliable signal other than the author saying so that something is "vibe coded" vs. "I used an LLM for some aspect of it."
I recently ran an experiment where I tried to use _quantitative signals_ (and not _qualitative_ ones) to tell whether something is vibe-coded or not.
My idea was that, if I see that your project is growing 10k LOC per week and you're the only developer working on it, it's most likely vibe-coded.
I analyzed some open-source projects, but unfortunately it turns out not to be so clear cut. It's relatively easy to estimate the growth rate of a project, but figuring out how much time developers worked on it is very error prone, which results in both false positives and false negatives.
The biggest signal is not the code itself but whether the thing is actively and continually developed for more than a few weeks.
And then look through the commits -- were they only adding new features, or did the author(s) put effort into improvements on engineering fundamentals (benchmarking, testing, documentation, etc)?
Perhaps a year ago “vibe coding” was indicative of a low quality product.
It seems many have not updated their understanding to match today’s capabilities.
I am vibe coding.
That does not mean I am incompetent or that the product will be bad. I have 10 years of experience.
Using agentic AI to implement, iterate, and debug issues is now the workflow most teams are targeting.
While last year chances were slim for the agent to debug tricky issues, I feel that now it can figure out a lot once you have it instrument the app and provide logs.
It sometimes feels like some commenters stick with last year’s mindset and feel entitled to yell about ‘AI slop’ at the first sign of an issue in a product and denigrate the author’s competence.
> Is this bad? Not really, just uninspired. After all, validating a business idea was never about fancy design, and before the AI era, everything looked like Bootstrap.
In a sense it shows that the creator didn’t care enough to make their UI/presentation unique which causes some like me to question exactly how much effort they bothered to put in at all.
As part of our code security review we have a “sloppification” score. Higher numbers have been reliably usable by people like me as indicators of what to focus my pentesting efforts on.
Before the usual suspects get snarky: Does that mean AI only generates slop? No. But it is an indicator of effort and oversights.
There will be more and more as the coding agents advance. However, I think it'll reach a point where the people currently building the "vibe-coded" products get a better understanding of what they are actually building and the rest (vast majority) wont even bother to try coding at all, even with AI's assistance.
Interesting post. I'm notoriously bad at noticing the common characteristics in AI writing, but once they were pointed out, I realized I've been seeing them everywhere in websites.
I try to submit short (tech related) stories (https://github.com/jaronilan/stories) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))
The best design is invisible - most (web)sites are designed for text based reading / watching - primary modality. Maybe we will see more inspired design - with voice, video or agent scanners using which one can talk to an agent via an assistant
What missing from the article is that they didn't use the same "slop score" to measure Show HN posts from <2023. Nor they released this script so the readers can verify it against known human-made landing pages.
Why? Let me guess: because these patterns were frequently seen in human-made sites too, but that won't fit the narrative.
Remember, several AI detectors claimed Declaration Of Independence was AI-generated[0]. Keep this info in mind when someone (like the author of this article) proudly shows you their home-made AI detector.
Can we have a list of the "clean" ones please? Actually, if you give me a list of the IDs for all 3 categories, I'll make URLs for each that people can browse.
If the community feels that the division is useful, then we can maybe take you up on your offer to open-source the project, and perhaps find a way to use it on HN itself.
The UI of Electric Minds Reborn (Amsterdam Web Communities System) was not AI-generated. At most, it was AI translated, as I used Claude to help turn old clunky 2006-era HTML into modern styling with Tailwind CSS. See also https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/.
> Barely passing body-text contrast in dark themes
This has been killing me recently. Apparently I need slightly higher contrast than some people, and these vibe coded UIs are basically unreadable to my eyes
yeah lots of these are used by AI because they're good. i use Space Grotesk for headings on my current project, rotheme, with Instrument Sans in the body, and my link shortener project uses Geist.
What this article calls AI design traits are design patterns that were already very common before AI: gradients, centered hero, stat banner, all-caps heading, purple accent, etc. You can blame most of them on TailwindUI and shadcn.
Are we going to call 'AI slop' everything that doesn't reinvent design from zero for a marketing page?
Well summarized. Especially the design routines are quite obvious.
There is a longterm phenomenon, that quite a lot of pages are presented here, and not existent anymore after 12 months or so... This was already the case before the whole ai slop flodded in... But since then the rate just grew massively.
It's particularly annoying, when there is an actually useful service or app, you sign up, after a couple of months all is gone...
"Please read this page and make sure to remember everything in it, when I ask you to vibe code something, do the exact opposite so it doesn't look like slop. Please remember this"
Dead Internet theory is not only not wrong, we are now actively entering a time when it is finally driving the seeds of the human collectives that will define the future underground.
The coding tools raise the bar and muddy the waters. If "Show HN" submissions can just as easily be done by myself in a weekend, I don't pay attention. The signal-noise ratio just gets destroyed and the forum will just be ignored.
Likewise, the issue is often that many of these projects show no evidence of long term maintenance. That might be the new signal we watch for?
There also used to be a sense in the tech community of "if you build it they will come" and that has been basically completely lost at this point. Between the discussion earlier this week of people's fraudulent GH stars, and this topic, and the wave of submissions I see on e.g. r/rust, it's just hard to imagine how -- as a pure "tech nerd" -- to get eyes or assistance on projects these days.
I have projects I've held off on "Show HN" for years because I felt I wasn't ready for the flood of users or questions and criticisms. Maybe the jokes on me. (Of course like everyone else these days, I've used AI to work on them, but much of them predate agentic tools.)
The ongoing tragedy of the commons has made the state of the commons uncommonly tragic, and it will become a wasteland. You are right to identify the problem, but yeah, “getting eyes on my slop” in a public forum just isn’t realistically going to happen any more when there’s an infinite ocean of supply of slop and ever-dwindling available interest in picking through it looking for ever fewer gems. The future is underground.
Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days. I don’t think that by itself is going to be a good validation of AI slop because it’s a common stack with the Vercel next.js base. And it lets you do a lot of customization so you don’t need to reinvent the wheels on things like accordions and dropdowns.
The problem is not vibe coding itself. The problem is that certain untrained people do not have or perhaps do not care to learn the necessary skills to refine the result into something novel, or clear / precise, something which communicates (clearly) the idea they are trying to convey to others (who are hoping to learn something new).
In a climate where it seems like VC are woefully bereft of the same skills, there's an impetus to just slop garbage up for any vague idea, without taking the care or time to polish it into something which has that intangibly human sense of greatness and clarity.
I see, you've done something -- but why? If you continue to ask this question, you will arrive at good science ... but many submissions are not aimed at that level of communication or stop far ahead of the point at which the question becomes interesting.
There's that phrase: "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" which strikes as poignant, except it seems like the audience today are also fools ... the inmates are running the asylum.
Funny, because as far as 'vibecoded colors', it's not the Tailwind purple anymore, I would say recently it's more of the same beige scheme this very blog post is using.
This is cynical. Listen if you want to put time into a project then show it to the Internet to collectively shit on it, then kudos to you. You went on a journey and gained experience through it.
Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.
i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions.
Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at.
But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.
I expect most side-projects are being built with AI-assistance now. Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
They're also the ideal place to try out new AI tools that your professional work might not let you experiment with.
(The headline of this piece doesn't really do it justice - it misuses "vibe coded" and fails to communicate that the substance of the post is about visual design traits common with AI-generated frontends, which is a much more interesting conversation to be having. UPDATE: the headline changed, it's now much better - "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look" - it was previously "Show HN submissions tripled and are now mostly vibe-coded")
My biggest issue with LLM‑assisted webpages (Claude Code is especially egregious) is the lack of respect for basic web content accessibility guidelines.
The number of dark‑mode sites I’ve seen where the text (and subtext) are various shades of dark brown or beige is just awful. For reference, you want a contrast ratio between the text and background of at least ~4:1 to be on the safe side.
This isn't even that hard to fix - hell you can add the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to a skill.
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
I've genuinely had solid results from telling Claude "... and make sure it has good accessibility".
I could see that. I’ve found that the more specificity you add to your prompt and less freedom you give Claude Code to kind of just “do its own thing”, the better your results will be.
FWIW, there’s also an official frontend-design skill for CC [1]. A while back I incorporated some of the more relevant guidance from WCAG into it [2].
[1] - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
[2] - https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag
There are accessibility skills as well:
https://github.com/airowe/claude-a11y-skill
https://mcpmarket.com/tools/skills/accessibility-checker
Something I've noticed when people complain about stuff like accessibility or other things that LLMs do "wrong", it really is a case of "you're holding it wrong." The LLM does indeed know how to do it right and it sometimes does so autonomously but when it doesn't, you can simply ask it to do so.
In other words, I've found people like the above to think of LLMs as fairly static, as if we couldn't change their behavior with a simple sentence, instead of complaining about it. It's strange, to me at least.
Were/Are human-generated side projects better in this respect?
The "default" light-mode look of most popular UI frameworks wouldn't have that same issue unless you put a lot of time into customizing your own styling, which most side projects wouldn't bother with (unless that look and feel was the point of the project). There certainly would be poor UI decisions but more likely in layout/placement/navigation, which could still be problematic for accessibility but probably not in a "is this color scheme even readable" kind of way.
Plus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text in every visible inch of the page without some intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).
Maybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as "cool looking" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.
I assume not, but the emphasis here is that a new tool is homogenizing these projects and due to its scale it is more important that this homogenous output is up to a higher standard.
A hundred self-thought devs not implementing accessibility standards is a different problem than a school teaching 100 students lacking these standards in its curriculum.
I think this is a second order thing when you are building a side project.
I think accessibility is a really admirable thing and helpful to society (like ramps or parking). But stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it on your own. Just write a chrome plugin using ai that adjusts css to set contrast ratio of your choice. Can even use a local llm to figure out replacement colors.
Accessibility that can be had on client side should not be a concern on server side.
>stop shoving your wants
“Don’t have bad vision if you didn’t want to be technical!”
(came across that way)
That's a really terrible option for the vast majority of people who simply lack that kind of tech savviness to be able to do it. And in my opinion, it's kind of selfish.
It also doesn't solve the issue if somebody is browsing your site on a mobile phone where the extension might not even work properly.
WCAG is not difficult - but it does require some modicum of effort.
Obligatory “have Claude write one for you” (in jest of course). All kidding aside, folks have always underestimated how much accessibility helps even those who don’t think they need it.
Right? "Build your own extension" to fix a website's accessibility problems is the equivalent of telling somebody who is disabled to stop complaining about the lack of ramps when they can just modify their wheelchair with a jetpack.
They might not need it
…right now, today. But they might consider “build a world for ‘old’ you”
stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it on your own. Just write a chrome plugin using ai that adjusts css to set contrast ratio of your choice. Can even use a local llm to figure out replacement colors.
Stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it yourself.
Just get some concrete and some lumber, and build that wheelchair ramp.
You can even hire a contractor to follow you around town all day building them as needed.
right, so in this analogy i should be legally required to have wheelchair accessibility in my house?
"legal" is distinct from "moral" which is distinct from "polite".
I think it's fine, so long as the intent is to refine the thing after you've validated the product idea and direction. There are a million things to optimize in web pages, and AI can't simply one-shot good decisions yet.
Just chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility and I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
People assume that accessibility is all about some small minority of less abled people who can't "read good", but it's a broad category that affects all users. If you build following the guidelines then you end up with a quality product that can be used by people who stumbled upon it while doom-scrolling instead of enjoying their beach vacation. The best analogy I heard was about drop-kerbs/curb-cuts... people wonder why we're catering for a small minority of wheelchair users everywhere and then they have a kid (or wheel luggage from the airport) and realize how great they are.
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Those of us who care that technology be accessible to as many people as possible, such as low vision users, find it relevant. You can ignore it if you wish.
Just chiming in to say that the idea someone would "not care at all about accessibility" (and openly state as much) is bewildering to me.
If nothing else, as a web developer, accessibility is an interesting challenge and satisfying to do well!
I care about accessibility, but I agree with your sentiment. There is this recurring pattern people have when trying to detract from AI. They realize that saying they dislike AI for economic reasons is not going to garner any sympathy, so they try to hide behind some noble cause. At one point, it was about water use in datacenters. At another point, they become defenders for megacorporations' copyright. Now, they are trying the "AI doesn't cares about accessibility" angle. They are just trying to find some reason that sticks.
> chiming in to say I don't care at all about accessibility
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
Your hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.
You brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. You brought this problem upon others. People won't care about your problems. Why should they, when you didn't care about theirs?
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Accessibility is legally required and not difficult to add.
Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people? Refusing to provide accessibility in your service is no different. You are actively discriminating in a way which could be illegal and certainly is unethical and amoral.
> Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people?
Bad analogy, as none of those traits require any accomodation in a website or app.
Not that I disagree with the premise. Almost everyone will eventually have trouble reading small, low contrast text or details on their phone or screen, if nothing else.
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
It's not even about age.
You can twist an ankle playing basketball and need accessibility features like ramps and grab bars.
You can get hit in the eye by a bit of debris when your toy drone crashes, and need help reading a screen while it heals.
People who don't think they need accessibility only have to wait. Everyone gets their turn.
There's a whole industry around suing website owners who have websites that aren't accessible. It's kind of messed up. The WSJ did a story on it a while back: https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/small-business...
Ironically this is perhaps the main motivation why a lot of companies force accessibility requirements internally. "We don't want an ADA lawsuit"
Now if only there were an ADA for website performance...
That's until you want to fill a form and find out it's dark grey text on a different dark grey background so you don't see what you're typing even with 20/20 sight :)
Consider not being bewildered that people care about things you don't care about.
Accessibility is a broad umbrella of features that enable a ton of really cool stuff for everybody, not just the disabled. Things like agentic computer use is only possible because of "accessibility".
Accessibility is the only way we have access to any settings on the iPhone
As they say, everyone will eventually become disabled in some form or fashion. When your eyes go due to old age you'll be glad to still be able to use the internet.
This seems very weirdly exclusionary to me. Don’t you care at all about the users trying to use your site?
I'm blind and accessibility is important to me. It is extremely disrespectful to see someone who just says "fuck you" and feels good about it. Please, at least consider that the world is bigger than you imagine and there is place for everyone in it and there is no need to be purposefully rude.
If they happen to read this comment I would love to know, well it’s too invasive…
But, context of how they were raised
That comment was wild
TIL slibhb will be young forever
I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Because Western society functions for the common good. We are not animals fighting for survival in the wilderness.
And because a web site not being accessible is a liability. Target was sued and had to pay millions for having your attitude.
I don’t expect most side-projects to be built with LLMs now. I would expect LLM uptake to be higher in the workplace (where it’s mandatory and/or people operate on the “the ends justify the means” paradigm), but outside of that there’s a higher likelihood someone is doing it because they enjoy programming and problem-solving as a process, and why outsource something you like to a black box that will regurgitate you an average of volunteer contributions (often non-consensually obtained) for some corporation’s profit?
> Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
It depends what your goals are. All of my side projects were started because I wanted to learn something. Using a "skip to the end" button wouldn't really make sense for me.
The difference between people who want to learn things versus people who just want a finished product is going to be a big dividing line in the post AI world
It's also a nice opportunity to learn while getting something out!
>if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
I don’t know if that’s true, I made a little web app for displaying the schedule for my team based on our billable hours, and I didn’t do any of the scripting myself but I did have to think a lot about what the app would do and what it would look like and what kind of functionality I wanted, tradeoffs between functionality and specific use cases, etc. It just made the scripting part go faster, that’s all.
That's still less thinking overall that someone who thought about all of that and thought about the scripting would have done.
And even less than someone who wrote an interpreter for the script, less than someone who also chanted times tables while doing it.
More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.
That's not a good-faith argument; obviously we're talking about relevant thought, rather than distraction (which, in context, would be less thought).
It is a good faith argument, my point is exactly that the actual scripting was not part of the relevant thought any more than the interpreter would have been.
Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
Before, it was like:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)
Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.
Even more than validating ideas, I think my personal AI use falls into two categories:
- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't
- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision
I've enjoyed using AI for both cases.
> Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
This.
Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.
Not likely. Original thinking in a "side project" is almost never about the code itself, but the ideas and end product implementation. You might be able to invent things like Carmack's BSP implementation, Torvald's Content Addressable Storage, etc. but even things like that can be aided by LLMs at this point, at least in the prototyping/idea phases. AI doesn't prevent you from having good ideas or doing original thinking if that is your goal.
But I might want some cool original project with a boring but working web UI, so that other people can actually try out what I have created.
For sure, I'm doing something very similar, asking an AI to make a boring but working web app using an API I'm working on. The API is the interesting part and the web app is basically just to test it.
I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.
Sure... and it might also help you do more original thinking in that domain, and hence help you get a lot more learning value out of the time you have for those side projects.
The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.
For me it wouldn’t make sense to use ai. Like I work on personal projects because they are fun: it’s fun to think about a problem, to solve it, to implement a solution, to learn new things and to fantasise about what if it gets popular and useful. If I can use AI to flip my fingers and make it happen, well wheres the fun? I have my day to day job to use AI for mundane things
Besides, the idea of paying 200$/month to have the privilege of using ai in my side projects… it’s just stupid for me
Fun is not always about finding up the exact look or design of something - you might be having it for your own particular reason - and by the time a website has to present it might have shifted already. That's why these land and why we might be confused about the process
To me, it is incredibly fun to work in "product/idea space" and have the LLM do the gruntwork of coding for you.
It is also very fun to tackle hard engineering problems.
I enjoy both, and tend to oscillate between wanting to do a lot of one, or a lot of the other. I do recognize that I've been coding for so long that it's much more exciting to be solving "product problems" rather than "engineering problems", I suspect mostly because it's the area I've explored the least (of the two).
And there is a LOT to learn about a domain while you're working on the problem, even without even looking at the code.
I was surprised to realize that some of my friends don't share this sentiment. They take very little pleasure from being product developers, and instead really just enjoy being engineers who work on the code and the architecture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just found it very surprising. To be honest, I guess perhaps what I found the most surprising is that I am not one of those people?
And when you get your product in the hands of users can finally get that direct feedback line to/from them and can start working on the problems they find and thinking of product (not necessarily engineering) solutions for them? Man, that's so satisfying. It's like falling in love with coding all over again.
It depends if the interesting part of the solution is the website for you. Maybe it is and that’s fine but for others it isn’t. Maybe they’ve got a cool backend thing and the ui isn’t the key part.
If it helps compare, you might have a full desire to manage a tricky server and all the various parts of it. It’d be removing the fun to just put a site on GitHub pages rather than hosting it on a pdp11. But if you want to show off your demo scene work you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed out on the fun just putting things up on a regular site.
You can still have fun with your side projects. AI helps, but if you want to build something nice, you still need to provide most of the intellectual input, while AI can help with the more tedious things. I have a personal project that I abandoned because it was becoming too much for me, and there were parts that I didn't enjoy doing.
I anticipate that people with a builder spirit and strong technical background are going to be able to build awesome things in the future. What the Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack of today will be able to build?
It doesn't work like that. AI is not a Jinn. You cannot simply command it and have it produce an entire project from thin air. You get to have fun: do the thinking part, and let it do the boring stuff.
I have a long list of projects that I have thought about but never implemented because of lack of time and energy. LLMs have made that happen.
I like designing programming languages and developing parsers/compilers and virtual machines. But the steps beyond type-checking are so incredibly boring (and I don't like using C or LLVM as targets) that I have done the front end 15-20 times over the last couple of decades and the back end only 3-4 times.
This time, I spent two weeks developing a spec for the VM, including concurrency, exception handling and GC. And I led the AI through each subsystem till I was satisfied with the result. I now have a VM that is within 8x of C in tight loops. Without JIT. It is incredible to be able to allocate arrays of 4B elements and touch each element at random, something that would make python cry.
Working on the compiler now.
Personally, I'm using side projects to test what a basic agentic setup can achieve, i.e. not paying for anything but the electricity bill. Reaching that state is the real side project.
(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)
It doesn't have to be like this. For me one 20$ acc with another one for backup I rarely use, is more than enough. I leverage this tool simply as a typist - it can't think so it mustn't, it can't architect since it's merely a "guess the next word" game with many extra steps, but boy can it type fast. I just make sure it types exactly what I would have typed and nothing else, this way I get to enjoy both worlds - improve my throughput and not produce slop.
The one caveat I have with this is that the underlying project might be fun but the website/write-up might be a chore. Hence AI for the chore bit.
I don't think this is overwhelmingly the reason though - I think many are just all AI, but if the project is technically interesting it might be sufficient to get me to grimace through it.
> Side projects are typically time constrained
What is the urgency in completing side projects? Commercial projects are usually the ones where you have some urgency.
If you only have a few hours a week and you want to actually finish a project the speed with which you can build is extremely important.
Only if you think finishing your side-projects is extremely important.
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
I wouldn't use it because one of the reasons that I do side projects is to enjoy myself and learn new things, and these tools tend to do much of the stuff that I enjoy and learn from.
I also expect that most side projects that are made with ai end up abandoned within 3 months and contribute next to nothing to the user's personal development and that the use of ai prevented them from the kind of deliberate practice that could have led to durable skill growth which ultimately will lead to much better work (side or main projects).
If AI saves you time, why not use it on your main projects too? All other things equal, should users care about whether AI was used?
It depends on the project, I think. If your side project is a thing you hope it will make you a millionaire, sure, AI all the way. But if your side project is a just a cool thing or a learning experience, I would say the exact opposite. I would expect $JOB to be very time-constrained and vibecoding-friendly (maybe even too friendly) whereas your side-project should be all artisanal free-range code.
On the visual design traits...
I'm primarily a backend developer. Most of my work has been in serving json or occasionally xml. Spring Shell in Java is something that I'm closer to working with than a GUI. When I've done web work, the most complimentary thing that was said about my design is "spartan".
So, if I was to have a web facing personal project... would black text on a white background with the default font and clunky <form> elements be ok? I know we are ok with it on the HN Settings page. They work... but they don't meet what I perceive other people have as minimum standards for web facing interfaces today.
And so... if I was to have some web facing project that I wanted to show to others, I'd probably work with some AI tooling to help create a gui, and it would very likely have the visual design traits that other AI generated front ends have.
I agree. The problem is the noise ratio, not how the platform was implemented.
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
Getting a McDonald's saves time too
Appreciate the feedback, just updated the title to be more clear.
> if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?
Because generally speaking, stuff that is AI generated is largely devoid of value. If it’s AI generated anyone can prompt it into existence, so the likely hood that someone will find value in and use what you made is approximately zero. What you made is likely low quality, since you vibe coded it with little effort and that always shows. Lastly you don’t even get to experience the joy of solving problems yourself or the pride of having built something with your own skill.
Using some AI to build something is fine, it’s when it’s used so much that it’s immediately obvious on the packaging - the show hn post, the readme, the code itself.
I've been coding for 20 years now, almost every single afternoon.
I've never met someone who has spent more time coding than me (although for sure such people exist). I love writing code, I consider it an art form. I don't mind spending days optimizing a function until the code is beautiful (at least to me).
I also have dozens of projects in mind that I don't have time to go through; cue the meme of "I bought another domain that will sit empty for years", I have like 60 of those right now.
AI assistance/vibecoding, whatever you call it, has been a massive win for me because now I can sketch out those projects in a weekend, put them out and then, if I decide they're worth spending more time on, tradcode the parts that I really care about. As it is for many others, AI is another tool in my toolbox. It's the pencil and paper I use to draft stuff.
It's tricky because I do get that we all want to get rid of low-value AI slop, but also, it wouldn't be fair to me, and people like me, to have authentic projects discredited just because you used AI in the creative process; not just as part of it, but perhaps even to write ALL of the code. And then, why would that be a bad thing?
What difference does it make if it was me writing functionally identical code letter-by-letter instead of writing a comprehensive prompt and guiding AI to do as I wish?
This fact, which i do believe to be true, has completely killed my interest in almost all of other peoples projects.
My interest in a project has always been rooted in the idea that its interesting to see other knowledgable people or people learning to attack a problem for themselves. I have really never cared about the "thing that it does." I liked reading the code, dissecting attempts and really learning about the person that wrote it through their line by line decisions.
That is now all gone. The "noise ratio" of slop projects which have none of the previously interesting thought and intentionality have drowned out the "rigorous projects."
It's actually very sad for me, it was something I previously really enjoyed. I am looking for a board that aggregates projects that still have that interesting "human factor" i would subscribe in a heartbeat.
Yes, it's the September That Never Ended again. It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
It doesn't feel like more ideas are explored, it feels like more variants of the same old things are produced. Ideas have always been hard and AI doesn't help with that.
It feels like people are more willing to give their agent a prompt than search the web for existing solutions.
I've noticed a crazy amount of clearly AI coded projects that do a small subset of an already existing and very trusted open source project. Comments usually point this out, and the OP never responds. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but the whole thing feels like a waste of time for everybody involved.
> It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
This is a manipulative combination of condescension, gaslighting and emotionalization.
"It's fun to complain" trivializes and dismisses a valid observation about the content being submitted as self-indulgent whining.
"I'd rather face the world" implies that people who want to see carefully constructed projects and human-written articles about them are refusing to face the world, i.e. delusional.
"Find the joy in it" reduces the whole discussion to the question of self-imposed mindset, as if there is no possible rational reason to be unhappy about what's going on.
This optimism, I like it.
(Still plenty of scary stuff, but I should feel like you at least some of the time, healthy balance.)
Well, I went straight to perp deep to ask how to ensure my cc sessions don't create websites that look like that. LOL.
But good thing is, it will now include those accessibility items, too. Personally I have misokinesia and migraines so I get it.
Here's what it found if you want to see: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/given-these-how-can-we-crea...
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim (<-- this is what many accounts without much HN history now see, and it's responsible for the downtick to the right on OP's chart)
Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300329 - March 2026 (515 comments)
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (425 comments)
Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects
(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
Cards have been in vogue for a while and I can’t recall the last time I saw super hard corners on a design system. It’s been a thing since at least Apple filing that patent on rounded corners.
You're absolutely right (as they say) - https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
I don't think it's just the base rate of rounded corners though, these posts feel like the AI tends to spit out a bullet point list of features, like you'd see on an AI readme where each feature has a tangential emoji, then for a website puts them in a grid of rounded rects
Look at the website you're on
I guess I should say on a new design system. HN doesn’t update all that much (and in this context that’s a good thing)
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.
When the surface dwellers have become crazed by disease and war, and their lands contaminated with the detritus of broken promises of innovation and heavy metals, we must build a new Eden.
As much as I adore Gemini as a concept, I yearn to express myself in the visual medium. Dillo might honestly be enough to render something beautiful within its constraints. With Wireguard meshes as the transport, and invitations offered and withdrawn by personal trust, perhaps we can have a place where our ideas could once again flourish without being amplified and distilled into mediocrity by the great monoliths looming like thunderous currents on the horizon.
I've looked at some Show HN submissions initially feeling impressed and finding it's either not even working code or it's obvious AI code someone is trying to take credit for writing themselves. If GitHub is used now as a resume builder but AI can do all the work, the signal is basically gone.
The problem is people want to use 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.
In 2016, if I saw 10,000 lines of code, that carried a certain proof-of-work with it. They probably couldn't help but give the code some testing as they were working up to that point. We know there has to have been a certain amount of thought in it. They've been living with it for some months, guaranteed.
In 2026, 10,000 lines of code means they spent a minimum amount of money on tokens. 10,000 lines can be generated pretty quickly in a single task, if it's something like "turn this big OpenAPI spec into an API in my language". It's entirely possible 90%+ of the project hasn't actually been tested, except by the unit tests the AI wrote itself, which is a great start, but not more than that for code that hasn't ever actually run in any real scenario from the real world.
Nothing about any of that in intrinsically wrong. But the standards have to be shifted. While the bar for a "Show HN" should perhaps not be high, it should probably be higher than "I typed a few things into a text box". And that not because that's necessarily "bad" either, but because of the mismatch between valuable human attention and the cheapness of being able to make a draw on it.
It's kind of a bummer in some sense... but then again, honestly, the space of things that can be built with an idea and a few prompts to an AI was frankly fairly well covered even before AI coding tools. Already I had a list of "projects we've already seen a lot of so don't expect the community to shower you with adulation" for any language community I've spent any significant time in. AI has grown the list of "projects I've seen too many times" a bit, but a lot of what I've seen is that we're getting an even larger torrent of the same projects we already had too many of before.
> 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.
That's basically the entire AI landscape atm.
I keep seeing people do things like spend a weekend building a product then charging ridiculous prices for it with the justification that it's what those products would've cost a few years ago.
For some reason, it doens't click for them that those prices were a reflection of the effort it took to get to that point and that the situation has changed.
Really apt comment, and I think it applies to a broader domain than just coding. People want others to judge their super fancy slide deck or new branding by that same 2016 standard, essentially fabricating accomplishment for themselves.
If we speak of design, most tech project sites, from "solo founder SAAS" to "we got 2 billion from YC" have looked the same to me for years.
We can hope the LLMs hallucinate slightly different CSS once in a while now...
Yea, I mean we've had so many phases.. Bootstrap, Web 2.0, Tailwind, "Material" UI, etc.. with random frameworks, from Rails to NextJS..
There's always a trend and everyone follows them in Software. Now it's AI.. let's not pretend cutting corners is anything new in our industry.
I guess you can always gloat about your artisan code but people who use Software for business never cared about that to begin with.
Plus, wasn't the entire philosophy of CS was that "everyone can code" ? Opposing licensing requirements, etc ? Well.. there you have it, code is a commodity now and the barrier to entry is next to none.
Given that the ones that surfaced on the frontpage were pretty interesting, vibe coded or not, I’d say the voting mechanism is working as a good filter.
Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting. If you're instead into learning from projects based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, they're utterly boring...
I find that I just don't learn anything new from Show HN vibe-coded side projects, and I can often replicate them in a couple of hundred of dollars, so why bother looking at them? Also why bother sharing one in the first place, since it doesn't really show any personal prowess, and doesn't bring value to the community due to it being easy to replicate?
This assumes that pre-LLM projects were based on the author's unique insight, experience and research, and not just boilerplated framework code, copying the design trends of the week.
I'd challenge the lack of personal prowess argument. Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill, even if you're not hand-crafting CSS and SQL.
I liken it to those who tune cars, who buy cars made in a factory, install parts made by someone else, using tools that are all standardized. In the middle somewhere is the human making decisions to create a final result, which is where the talent exists.
> Interesting? I'd say they were interesting if you find looking at vibe-coded stuff interesting.
There's a lot of ways things can be of interest. The problem being solved, how it's being solved, the UI, UX, etc.
THAT it is vibe coded may or may not be interesting to some, but finding it un-interesting because it's vibe coded is no better than finding that it is.
Yes, I find looking at vibe coded stuff interesting when they solve a worthy problem.
No amount of denial will roll back the technology that millions can use now, that makes it realistic to produce in a day software that would take at least months five years ago.
I used a colored left-border on my blog and thought it looked pretty fresh. I didn't realize that was an AI pattern.
> A designer recently told me that “colored left borders are almost as reliable a sign of AI-generated design as em-dashes for text”, so I started to notice them on many pages.
so, n=1 plus Baader-Meinhof? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
Is the data (or scoring of each site) available?
It’s entirely possible a Show HN I posted is included and I’d love to know how it scored.
I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.
I think HN is the crowd that values MVPs. And LLMs are the best tool to quickly materialize an idea. So I think we should judge these submissions on merit and not on our collective rejection of reality. If they succeed I’m sure (or hope) their user facing app won’t remain vibe coded.
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.
At least in the field I work in (ecommerce/retail), design is often what separates one brand from another when presenting their products. Maybe it won't happen on the web as much in the future, but I suspect it will still be important when it comes to visually communicating to consumers
There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.
Indeed, and I don't think there's any reliable signal other than the author saying so that something is "vibe coded" vs. "I used an LLM for some aspect of it."
I recently ran an experiment where I tried to use _quantitative signals_ (and not _qualitative_ ones) to tell whether something is vibe-coded or not.
My idea was that, if I see that your project is growing 10k LOC per week and you're the only developer working on it, it's most likely vibe-coded.
I analyzed some open-source projects, but unfortunately it turns out not to be so clear cut. It's relatively easy to estimate the growth rate of a project, but figuring out how much time developers worked on it is very error prone, which results in both false positives and false negatives.
I wrote a post about it (https://pscanf.com/s/352/) if you're interested in the details.
Ask a llm for a code review along code duplication, encapsulation and sequential coupling as quality axes and the difference should show up readily
The biggest signal is not the code itself but whether the thing is actively and continually developed for more than a few weeks.
And then look through the commits -- were they only adding new features, or did the author(s) put effort into improvements on engineering fundamentals (benchmarking, testing, documentation, etc)?
Perhaps a year ago “vibe coding” was indicative of a low quality product.
It seems many have not updated their understanding to match today’s capabilities.
I am vibe coding.
That does not mean I am incompetent or that the product will be bad. I have 10 years of experience.
Using agentic AI to implement, iterate, and debug issues is now the workflow most teams are targeting.
While last year chances were slim for the agent to debug tricky issues, I feel that now it can figure out a lot once you have it instrument the app and provide logs.
It sometimes feels like some commenters stick with last year’s mindset and feel entitled to yell about ‘AI slop’ at the first sign of an issue in a product and denigrate the author’s competence.
> Is this bad? Not really, just uninspired. After all, validating a business idea was never about fancy design, and before the AI era, everything looked like Bootstrap.
In a sense it shows that the creator didn’t care enough to make their UI/presentation unique which causes some like me to question exactly how much effort they bothered to put in at all.
As part of our code security review we have a “sloppification” score. Higher numbers have been reliably usable by people like me as indicators of what to focus my pentesting efforts on.
Before the usual suspects get snarky: Does that mean AI only generates slop? No. But it is an indicator of effort and oversights.
There will be more and more as the coding agents advance. However, I think it'll reach a point where the people currently building the "vibe-coded" products get a better understanding of what they are actually building and the rest (vast majority) wont even bother to try coding at all, even with AI's assistance.
Interesting post. I'm notoriously bad at noticing the common characteristics in AI writing, but once they were pointed out, I realized I've been seeing them everywhere in websites.
I try to submit short (tech related) stories (https://github.com/jaronilan/stories) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))
The best design is invisible - most (web)sites are designed for text based reading / watching - primary modality. Maybe we will see more inspired design - with voice, video or agent scanners using which one can talk to an agent via an assistant
What missing from the article is that they didn't use the same "slop score" to measure Show HN posts from <2023. Nor they released this script so the readers can verify it against known human-made landing pages.
Why? Let me guess: because these patterns were frequently seen in human-made sites too, but that won't fit the narrative.
Remember, several AI detectors claimed Declaration Of Independence was AI-generated[0]. Keep this info in mind when someone (like the author of this article) proudly shows you their home-made AI detector.
[0]: https://dallasexpress.com/state/zerogpt-flags-1836-texas-dec...
If the community feels that the division is useful, then we can maybe take you up on your offer to open-source the project, and perhaps find a way to use it on HN itself.
reminds me of a short fun tweets exchange, something like:
- all designs are going to be AI generated and look the same
- well unless you ask your agent to make it look different
I guess I was bucking the trend with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333, which points to https://electricminds.org.
The UI of Electric Minds Reborn (Amsterdam Web Communities System) was not AI-generated. At most, it was AI translated, as I used Claude to help turn old clunky 2006-era HTML into modern styling with Tailwind CSS. See also https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/.
> Barely passing body-text contrast in dark themes
This has been killing me recently. Apparently I need slightly higher contrast than some people, and these vibe coded UIs are basically unreadable to my eyes
> Slop fonts: Space Grotesk, Instrument Serif, Geist, Syne, Fraunces
Nooo please don't ruin great fonts by associating them with low effort vibecoding
They may be somewhat overused but they are popular for a reason
yeah lots of these are used by AI because they're good. i use Space Grotesk for headings on my current project, rotheme, with Instrument Sans in the body, and my link shortener project uses Geist.
maybe i'm an LLM too
off topic AI-related anecdote:
at my workplace the phrase in status/report-out meetings "I built" now means "I asked claude to build"
All of a sudden managers, architects (who haven't written code in a decade), and directors are all building tools
so now we're debugging the tools "they built" and why our product isn't working with them.
That sounds maddening.
"vibe code" now just means "coded with AI" which should not be anymore of an insult than "IDE coded".
I'm much more critical of closed-source, subscription, wrappers over open source software of simple prompts.
What this article calls AI design traits are design patterns that were already very common before AI: gradients, centered hero, stat banner, all-caps heading, purple accent, etc. You can blame most of them on TailwindUI and shadcn.
Are we going to call 'AI slop' everything that doesn't reinvent design from zero for a marketing page?
This is great, now we can better disguise slopware!
These designs are now the trend, though. So they will influence how human designed/built websites also look.
Well summarized. Especially the design routines are quite obvious.
There is a longterm phenomenon, that quite a lot of pages are presented here, and not existent anymore after 12 months or so... This was already the case before the whole ai slop flodded in... But since then the rate just grew massively.
It's particularly annoying, when there is an actually useful service or app, you sign up, after a couple of months all is gone...
"Please read this page and make sure to remember everything in it, when I ask you to vibe code something, do the exact opposite so it doesn't look like slop. Please remember this"
Dead Internet theory is not only not wrong, we are now actively entering a time when it is finally driving the seeds of the human collectives that will define the future underground.
It will be replaced with private networks soon. Last step of anonymous internet.
Average is all you need
The coding tools raise the bar and muddy the waters. If "Show HN" submissions can just as easily be done by myself in a weekend, I don't pay attention. The signal-noise ratio just gets destroyed and the forum will just be ignored.
Likewise, the issue is often that many of these projects show no evidence of long term maintenance. That might be the new signal we watch for?
There also used to be a sense in the tech community of "if you build it they will come" and that has been basically completely lost at this point. Between the discussion earlier this week of people's fraudulent GH stars, and this topic, and the wave of submissions I see on e.g. r/rust, it's just hard to imagine how -- as a pure "tech nerd" -- to get eyes or assistance on projects these days.
I have projects I've held off on "Show HN" for years because I felt I wasn't ready for the flood of users or questions and criticisms. Maybe the jokes on me. (Of course like everyone else these days, I've used AI to work on them, but much of them predate agentic tools.)
The ongoing tragedy of the commons has made the state of the commons uncommonly tragic, and it will become a wasteland. You are right to identify the problem, but yeah, “getting eyes on my slop” in a public forum just isn’t realistically going to happen any more when there’s an infinite ocean of supply of slop and ever-dwindling available interest in picking through it looking for ever fewer gems. The future is underground.
Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days. I don’t think that by itself is going to be a good validation of AI slop because it’s a common stack with the Vercel next.js base. And it lets you do a lot of customization so you don’t need to reinvent the wheels on things like accordions and dropdowns.
> Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days.
Shadcn works for Vercel, but is actually a human being (I think?).
The UI framework is called shadcn/ui.
And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.
The problem is not vibe coding itself. The problem is that certain untrained people do not have or perhaps do not care to learn the necessary skills to refine the result into something novel, or clear / precise, something which communicates (clearly) the idea they are trying to convey to others (who are hoping to learn something new).
In a climate where it seems like VC are woefully bereft of the same skills, there's an impetus to just slop garbage up for any vague idea, without taking the care or time to polish it into something which has that intangibly human sense of greatness and clarity.
I see, you've done something -- but why? If you continue to ask this question, you will arrive at good science ... but many submissions are not aimed at that level of communication or stop far ahead of the point at which the question becomes interesting.
There's that phrase: "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" which strikes as poignant, except it seems like the audience today are also fools ... the inmates are running the asylum.
Why is that a problem? Reality will filter out the projects that are poorly developed just like it always has.
Sure, but what greatness do we lose in the interim as it gets silenced by unending noise?
In a marketplace with infinite low-quality supply and limited attention, it doesn’t really matter how good the good offerings are.
Even his blog has the Claude vibe to it.
Funny, because as far as 'vibecoded colors', it's not the Tailwind purple anymore, I would say recently it's more of the same beige scheme this very blog post is using.
This is cynical. Listen if you want to put time into a project then show it to the Internet to collectively shit on it, then kudos to you. You went on a journey and gained experience through it.
Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.
Unless it is AI slop, I don't mind reading submissions that can be genuinely helpful.
i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions.
Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at.
But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.
did you even read and edit the title of this post?