Yeah, and the trade-off here is that it takes time. In the same way, you can write insightful blog posts or work emails using AI if you maintain creative control, but all of sudden, you're not moving at 100x speed. You're moving a lot closer to human speed.
This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.
I mean, one part of the trade-off is that you can be a designer without having gone to design school. If you can use the tools you can iterate on the averageness of all these professions and fill all those shoes.
Choose 1:
A UX-designer with that outputs design with AI at the speed of a UX-designer without AI
A programmer that can output designs with AI at the same speed, and make your database, and make your helpdesk, and make your social media, booking systems, etc.
AI can do an awesome job at UI and come up with really nice look but I feel like there’s a lot of psychology behind UX that AI cannot necessarily pick up on the human element.
> Most times I'll grab ideas from multiple places, combine them, and endlessly iterate on them until I get to something I'm happy with.
The "designer" happens to not to be human. At that point it just sounds like going to a website template store and scrolling endlessly through options until you find a template you'd say "meh, this will do".
Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.
This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).
It looks like a lot of their early attemps are early gpt outputs or claude design outputs, which have a lot of the same smell. People are discounting how good image->html flows are these days though.
I had gemini describe this webpage as prompts, then fed it into an image -> code pipeline. Note that this is with 0 input from me:
This is with Opus 5.5 building it out on low effort, and yes the spec was already made from the original site, but 0->1 that doesn't result in purple gradients or claude brown is very much possible now.
This is the kind of creative work that I think will always need to be guided by human taste and vision but can be vastly enabled by AI. I really hope to see more people using AI to improve quality instead of velocity.
It definitely does. Particularly under the hero imo.
Doing this is really time-consuming so certainly there were some corners cut -- need to also focus on product after all!
Particularly after we changed a lot of the messaging (after this post was written) I slacked off a bit. Keen to hear what's most annoying to you though, always looking for feedback.
The website is simple enough that any design decicion could just as well ahve been done by a real human.
The em-dashes, and the gradients were always egregious because they're strong opinionated decisions. This is just a straighforward, clean, tasteful website (really what most sites should aim for).
I love this because, it reminds me that when people hate AI, They hate low effort AI slop.
This website demonstrates a tremendous amount of human effort, and it walks through the iterative design process that led to the final result. Taking inspiration, trying out ideas, tinkering—that's design.
So because of the article's premise, I'm going to be a bit of a dickhead. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, because it's not a judgement on the developers. I have also shipped way worse vibecoded frontends and this is coming from a UI guy, so it's not about being an AI hater or anything.
Your site looks like an AI made it.
Now there is an actually easy fix: just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic. And then I could buy that it was human-designed, at which point, it basically was. And just AI-coded.
Yeah that's the only parts of the design that I could identify as being clearly AI generated, or at least is ai-coded, if it was human designed. Including the panels for demo, pricing, etc.
The rest of the design kind of reminds me of stardew valley's site, which is quite cute.
Hope you don't take this as evil criticism, overall I'm a big fan.
edit: it's not even AI coded, more like incohesive, and with the context of the article...but a simple fix and overall well done ;)
i'm not going to argue with you about aesthetics. taste and all that. but to me there are clearly divergent aesthetics with the rest of the site, and some elements. my suggestion is to just align them, and it will be more cohesive.
OP, you accidentally invented the design process that they teach in design school. You can officially call yourself a designer.
1) have a high level functional goal
2) be inspired and think of a motif
3) go wide within that motif and explore
4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate
5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.
That sounds like basic project management
I have never heard this, but I like it a lot.
Yeah, and the trade-off here is that it takes time. In the same way, you can write insightful blog posts or work emails using AI if you maintain creative control, but all of sudden, you're not moving at 100x speed. You're moving a lot closer to human speed.
This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.
The fact it takes time is not a trade-off. It is an actual design work.
You forget that in any given blog post, work is bad, unless it's the kind of work the blog author does, then it's valuable
I mean, one part of the trade-off is that you can be a designer without having gone to design school. If you can use the tools you can iterate on the averageness of all these professions and fill all those shoes.
Choose 1:
A UX-designer with that outputs design with AI at the speed of a UX-designer without AI
A programmer that can output designs with AI at the same speed, and make your database, and make your helpdesk, and make your social media, booking systems, etc.
AI can do an awesome job at UI and come up with really nice look but I feel like there’s a lot of psychology behind UX that AI cannot necessarily pick up on the human element.
A designer did make it! The process you undertook is called design!
We need to make ppl understand this!
I had this out with one of my employees, they were giving me shit for using Claude Design, and just how many iterations it took to get what I wanted.
I explained that exactly what design is I just lack the skills to do it in illustrator and Photoshop but yes, no one gets it right the first time.
Literally yes
> Most times I'll grab ideas from multiple places, combine them, and endlessly iterate on them until I get to something I'm happy with.
The "designer" happens to not to be human. At that point it just sounds like going to a website template store and scrolling endlessly through options until you find a template you'd say "meh, this will do".
Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.
This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).
Thanks for writing!
It looks like a lot of their early attemps are early gpt outputs or claude design outputs, which have a lot of the same smell. People are discounting how good image->html flows are these days though.
I had gemini describe this webpage as prompts, then fed it into an image -> code pipeline. Note that this is with 0 input from me:
https://html.non.io/railcode-animated
This is with Opus 5.5 building it out on low effort, and yes the spec was already made from the original site, but 0->1 that doesn't result in purple gradients or claude brown is very much possible now.
Honestly looks better than the original
This is the kind of creative work that I think will always need to be guided by human taste and vision but can be vastly enabled by AI. I really hope to see more people using AI to improve quality instead of velocity.
Answer: because a human designed it in an iterative process. LLMs just wrote the code.
And it still carries some of the cliche features of LLM-'designed' sites.
It definitely does. Particularly under the hero imo.
Doing this is really time-consuming so certainly there were some corners cut -- need to also focus on product after all!
Particularly after we changed a lot of the messaging (after this post was written) I slacked off a bit. Keen to hear what's most annoying to you though, always looking for feedback.
The way the body content animates at page load is pretty annoying.
like what?
The website is simple enough that any design decicion could just as well ahve been done by a real human.
The em-dashes, and the gradients were always egregious because they're strong opinionated decisions. This is just a straighforward, clean, tasteful website (really what most sites should aim for).
it feels vibecoded though, it still has LLMisms
for sure
Cute but why are the people on the coaster standing and why are there people standing on the tracks
a dime a dozen
Yes, if the designer was named Claude or Astra, then it does indeed look like that designer created it.
I love this because, it reminds me that when people hate AI, They hate low effort AI slop.
This website demonstrates a tremendous amount of human effort, and it walks through the iterative design process that led to the final result. Taking inspiration, trying out ideas, tinkering—that's design.
So because of the article's premise, I'm going to be a bit of a dickhead. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, because it's not a judgement on the developers. I have also shipped way worse vibecoded frontends and this is coming from a UI guy, so it's not about being an AI hater or anything.
Your site looks like an AI made it.
Now there is an actually easy fix: just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic. And then I could buy that it was human-designed, at which point, it basically was. And just AI-coded.
Otherwise it's quite cool, and well done.
This makes sense yeah, I guess following a similar approach used on the buttons for the tabs as well. Point taken!
Yeah that's the only parts of the design that I could identify as being clearly AI generated, or at least is ai-coded, if it was human designed. Including the panels for demo, pricing, etc.
The rest of the design kind of reminds me of stardew valley's site, which is quite cute.
Hope you don't take this as evil criticism, overall I'm a big fan.
edit: it's not even AI coded, more like incohesive, and with the context of the article...but a simple fix and overall well done ;)
Not at all! I agree with what you said
> just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic.
Where is this glass?
Is it the lighter green cards on the home page? That's not really glass, that's just a different a lighter color scheme. The tabs also look fine.
i'm not going to argue with you about aesthetics. taste and all that. but to me there are clearly divergent aesthetics with the rest of the site, and some elements. my suggestion is to just align them, and it will be more cohesive.