Obviously this is a personal preference, but the multiple layers of beveled grey on the Qt UI is not something I like, as it forces a lot of grouping on the eye where it doesn't serve any purpose.
I would go with the original, Apple or the Win11 one. Material would be good, what's with the lavender shades?
I always try to reduce the palette: say two background shades max, no drop shadows, only as many foreground colors as needed and if it seems to bland, add more bells and whistles.
This is mostly the fault of the model, a lot of them have been trained to generate HTML in a specific style. Claude's is pretty distinct for example, I think the new DeepSeek copies it. Some of them can generate more humanlike HTML like Kimi K2 IIRC, which I feel is the model with the least amount of post-training in general.
It's necessary if you don't want it to generate HTML with images and other assets you don't have of course, that's why they use emojis or meticulously handcrafted SVGs, or WebAudio synthesized sound which pretty much no humans did before.
Qt is heavily represented in training data. Qt has existed for decades and the model has likely seen Qt tutorials, screenshots, source code, discussions, etc. As a result, "Qt application" is a highly coherent concept in the latent space. "Qt app" is almost like a named distribution.
If you're just having fun with it, there are a whole bunch of other things that produce interesting options, like asking it to theme according to a movie (think Clockwork Orange, Backrooms, anything with a strong aesthetic), or throw screenshots and photos at it and use it as a "design system" (magazine/print layouts can work well with this on stronger models).
Only a small anecdote, but I'm 2 projects into telling Claude to "make it look like Google podcasts" and getting satisfactory results. Still smells like llm in parts, but overall it is not screaming low effort.
When making small tools for myself, I just tell it to use Svelte and then wrap it up using Tauri - no graphical cues whatsoever. And they usually comes out pretty good by my taste.
That's just the "original" they mentioned here without a prompt (https://envs.net/~volpe/projects/ai-design.html) but these ofen are easily identified as AI generated. I don't think it's too bad but it's definitely a tell.
Can you quantify what it is you don’t like? Like, to my eyes ‘original’ is fine - and it’s very similar to ‘QT’ expect with rounded corners and brighter colours.
I find it such a hard thing to quantify, I know it's not helpful but you can just feel the slop seep through.
I'm not sure if it's because I've iterated through so many sites that LLMs have produced that "slop" is instantly recognisable and it just feels soulless.
Not like web pages ever had a soul, but it's not there on the generic LLM generated sites.
I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop. The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop. AI is just amplifying it.
This one works well. I think it's because there's no shine to it, it's just the data, what you need, right there without trying to fluff it all out with rounded edges and superfluous stuff.
My experience with this is 180 degrees opposite. It's been really easy to create really nice UIs for all kinds of one-off apps I've made for myself with AI. In fact, it has been one of the most fun parts of this whole AI thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This has also been my experience. I do find it takes a review pass with a direction including things like "make sure text isn't overlapping." "Make sure text isn't overflowing out of buttons" - I find that's a really common one.
Even the example apps in the post seemed like AI slop to me. Common markers are too noisy/busy (mainly repeated or rephrased information). Text being a bit too big (Codex-only?).
Yes in my experience, AI designs might look okay on first glance but when you really start to look you start to see strange and inconsistent things. Similar to looking at generated code.
You can have it fix these things. It has the tools to analyze screenshots of the app and correct things like formating, alignment, color, etc.
I've been building a personal app with Opus 4.8 over the past two weeks and the design is excellent. I provided it with screenshots of what I wanted, then had it build out a gallery of functional UI elements (like designers do). Claude built out a tool that would screenshot the app, compare it to the design screenshot and automatically reposition elements or update the styles to match.
You can also provide it with a style guideline prompt and have it double check all the work it produced matches the UI style guidelines before committing.
I think the slop part is just what you get when you inject no opinions and put in no effort to apply taste (which you probably have and/or could develop). No care is put in. It looks generic and sloppy because it is generic and sloppy. You might have preferences over which generic and sloppy style is preferred, but at the end of the day a UI built without effort is going to look like what it is.
But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be opinionated, why do you care?
All of these look quite terrible to my eyes. None of them really resemble the classic AI slop landing page, either (of which this [1] is a decent illustration). I'm no huge fan of that style, but it's at least readable and functional, and thus better than the results you got by a mile.
It seems like you were starting with an existing HTML file you asked it to redesign. Generating from scratch with strict guidelines could be more representative.
I've been doing this recently - working with Qt on a local app.
I've had good luck providing a png "design board" with all of the template colors and having the first task be to build out a design gallery with all of the ui widget. Then have the design docs specify which component to use. Ensure that the documents specify to only use pre-existing components and have a list of each component and their intended use cases.
Of course, this learning came after seeing how awful V1 of the app was. Initially, it looked really impressive, but once you started clicking around it became obvious how incoherent the design was.
Claude's new frontend-design plugin is solid for web apps in my testing. My wife and I have been using it to build her an app and her discerning design eye is largely impressed with what it's done.
I thought that AI would at least be good at 2 things: writing (text) and doing UI. It's not good at either. Text it generated reads like slop and UI it creates looks like slop. The way I approach it now is this: for text, I have to write it myself and only use AI to check grammar and catch weirdly phrased passages. For UI, it's like with the rest of the code. You have to stay on the top of it and keep demanding changes to match your vision/architecture/taste until it gets it close to what you want. In both cases, not knowing what "good" looks like is a real problem, because AI definitely has no idea.
This article is purely subjective. I'm sure there are some academics that could explain ways to objectively score usability but this article is purely subjective.
The whole "AI slop" noise is, at its core, human slop. It is people applying a hopefully pejorative label, trying to appeal to other slop aficionados that like whatever the current trendy slur is, in an objectively undefinable way.
In this case this guy likes the way Qt apps, they think it looks better, but it isn't a big trick they are revealing: They made it conform to the style they like, but this doesn't translate to anyone else in any measurable way. I think web apps looking like Qt apps feel like the late 90s and it's just weird, but my taste also is entirely subjective and mine alone.
>> Slop is not a distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many others. Even when I got it to make a page to look like X, it looked like X with slop.
Today, I can visit a website and instantly tell it was generated using LLMs and agents from A to Z:
1. Everything is in blue or mauve gradient, with a white background, and a single JavaScript-heavy page that lags as soon as you scroll a little.
2. There are always a ton of 404 pages.
3. Third, the HTML comments often expose credentials and to-do lists—sometimes even right above the login page (true story...).
This kind of website is a hard pass for me, and I add the company (and its founders) to my personal blacklist of people and companies I’ll never use anything from.
I don't think that is true, in the way that it always wasn't: How would you be able to tell when it's done properly?
Think WordPress installations: Depending on how it's done you can either tell at a glance (probably ~90% of WP installations at some points in time) or you have no clue until you look at the html source.
Of course the option to not do it properly is always alluring and then you can tell.
Makes sense. Slop is basically what you get when there's nothing specific to copy and so the AI it just averages every web style together. Qt works because there's really only one way Qt looks.Modern web has a million versions of everything so you average all that and get slop.
Those aren’t “slop”, those are exactly what non webdev used to see in the past decade, now that webdevs are seeing it done without them doing it and everywhere, the reality check hit them hard. Gtk/qt UI feels like duct tape toys even before AI, material is so tasteless but years ago it was the “de facto” in any design or icons set, most front end ui/ux are literally copy paste of the same template and components, even before AI. Imo only some old apple and windows vista where the UI was actually pleasant to see and interact with.
I had to read the post about five times and still didn't see the link to the actual examples - I actually had to view source to see the URL.
I like the idea - all of the designs are pretty meh though. If I had to pick one, I'd pick the HIG one (apart from that cursed glass effect on scroll) and then probably the Win11 one.
I mean, no these don't look like AI slop. At worst they are 'web slop'. But even with that said a site that looks like this is what I expect these days from most businesses. I'm not looking at these companies for their far out web design capabilities, in fact a site that's somewhat standardized and has things where we expect them is far more useful.
auth0 does get close to slop. If I were them I'd definitely change things up. Devcycle and Datadog are nothing like generated slop. I haven't seen Fable websites yet - supposedly a lot better - but Opus and GPT can't design anything even close to those two. They can implement it if you give them a screenshot, but that's not designing something. Micro.com shows me a domain sale page.
Tailwind is the answer. Always pure Tailwind, not custom classes + utilities. It makes a massive difference vs. stylesheets. The LLM is able to actually reason about your UI in discrete chunks with a semantic layer over the styling, vs. bouncing back and forth between CSS/HTML and trying to reason about custom classes generated on the fly.
Does anyone have good examples of well designed web applications - not landing pages or peoples tech blogs, which are often listed here on HN. But like actual applications that do a complex task with the user using it as a tool.
On the matter of being without taste -- which I assume the author is using as a self-derogatory descriptor for not having skill in UI design -- the styling of links on this page could use some change. The link color is so close to the body color that I initially thought there weren't any links, and scrolled trying to find the examples. You can't both remove the underline and have such a low contrast font color, it's bad UX.
(For the record, even though I don't mind qt, I think this particular example still comes across as slop because of the overuse of gradients on buttons and headings. In general, a lot of these suffer from overuse of gradients, but OP appears to just be averse to border-radius)
This seems to be a new iteration of what IMO made frontend work somewhat painful for almost the entire time I've been building software. It used to take the form that people did something with html that it wasn't designed to do. That thing looked cool and so everyone wanted it. This lead to pain and the perception that the tool is inadequate. So we eventually got CSS. And it continued there. Someone figured out a way to get cool dropshadows and rounded corners. These were cumbersome to implement. And so on.
Obviously this is a personal preference, but the multiple layers of beveled grey on the Qt UI is not something I like, as it forces a lot of grouping on the eye where it doesn't serve any purpose.
I would go with the original, Apple or the Win11 one. Material would be good, what's with the lavender shades?
I always try to reduce the palette: say two background shades max, no drop shadows, only as many foreground colors as needed and if it seems to bland, add more bells and whistles.
I liked GTK and WIn11.
This is mostly the fault of the model, a lot of them have been trained to generate HTML in a specific style. Claude's is pretty distinct for example, I think the new DeepSeek copies it. Some of them can generate more humanlike HTML like Kimi K2 IIRC, which I feel is the model with the least amount of post-training in general.
It's necessary if you don't want it to generate HTML with images and other assets you don't have of course, that's why they use emojis or meticulously handcrafted SVGs, or WebAudio synthesized sound which pretty much no humans did before.
Qt is heavily represented in training data. Qt has existed for decades and the model has likely seen Qt tutorials, screenshots, source code, discussions, etc. As a result, "Qt application" is a highly coherent concept in the latent space. "Qt app" is almost like a named distribution.
This begs for a modern version of https://csszengarden.com/, where the CSS is generated by different LLMs and prompts.
that'd be awesome
If you're just having fun with it, there are a whole bunch of other things that produce interesting options, like asking it to theme according to a movie (think Clockwork Orange, Backrooms, anything with a strong aesthetic), or throw screenshots and photos at it and use it as a "design system" (magazine/print layouts can work well with this on stronger models).
Only a small anecdote, but I'm 2 projects into telling Claude to "make it look like Google podcasts" and getting satisfactory results. Still smells like llm in parts, but overall it is not screaming low effort.
I donno. They all look ugly.
When making small tools for myself, I just tell it to use Svelte and then wrap it up using Tauri - no graphical cues whatsoever. And they usually comes out pretty good by my taste.
That's just the "original" they mentioned here without a prompt (https://envs.net/~volpe/projects/ai-design.html) but these ofen are easily identified as AI generated. I don't think it's too bad but it's definitely a tell.
Is that a problem?
Can you quantify what it is you don’t like? Like, to my eyes ‘original’ is fine - and it’s very similar to ‘QT’ expect with rounded corners and brighter colours.
I find it such a hard thing to quantify, I know it's not helpful but you can just feel the slop seep through.
I'm not sure if it's because I've iterated through so many sites that LLMs have produced that "slop" is instantly recognisable and it just feels soulless.
Not like web pages ever had a soul, but it's not there on the generic LLM generated sites.
Imagine you get this original version from a frontend guy pre AI , would you still see slop seep through ?
I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop. The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop. AI is just amplifying it.
Continuing in that vein, it'd be interesting to see a Win98 version.
Edit: https://retr0.id/stuff/deslop/
I use to make whole websites using system colors. The colors kept getting worse and eventually everyone hated it including myself.
I really wish CSS added an option to set font antialiasing and hinting. Would make all these old windows style websites look 1000x better.
Wow, that's immediately so much better than the others to the point its kind of sad.
We've really went behind in terms of UX as an industry.
This one works well. I think it's because there's no shine to it, it's just the data, what you need, right there without trying to fluff it all out with rounded edges and superfluous stuff.
For some balance in the replies, I must say I find this rather hideous. To each their own, I suppose.
i love this so much it's unreal
Unironically the best one out of the lot. Man, we digressed so far from where we were...
That's refreshingly usable and not-slop-looking, nice additional style.
My experience with this is 180 degrees opposite. It's been really easy to create really nice UIs for all kinds of one-off apps I've made for myself with AI. In fact, it has been one of the most fun parts of this whole AI thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This has also been my experience. I do find it takes a review pass with a direction including things like "make sure text isn't overlapping." "Make sure text isn't overflowing out of buttons" - I find that's a really common one.
Any chance you could share screenshots?
Even the example apps in the post seemed like AI slop to me. Common markers are too noisy/busy (mainly repeated or rephrased information). Text being a bit too big (Codex-only?).
Yes in my experience, AI designs might look okay on first glance but when you really start to look you start to see strange and inconsistent things. Similar to looking at generated code.
You can have it fix these things. It has the tools to analyze screenshots of the app and correct things like formating, alignment, color, etc.
I've been building a personal app with Opus 4.8 over the past two weeks and the design is excellent. I provided it with screenshots of what I wanted, then had it build out a gallery of functional UI elements (like designers do). Claude built out a tool that would screenshot the app, compare it to the design screenshot and automatically reposition elements or update the styles to match.
You can also provide it with a style guideline prompt and have it double check all the work it produced matches the UI style guidelines before committing.
I think the slop part is just what you get when you inject no opinions and put in no effort to apply taste (which you probably have and/or could develop). No care is put in. It looks generic and sloppy because it is generic and sloppy. You might have preferences over which generic and sloppy style is preferred, but at the end of the day a UI built without effort is going to look like what it is.
But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be opinionated, why do you care?
All of these look quite terrible to my eyes. None of them really resemble the classic AI slop landing page, either (of which this [1] is a decent illustration). I'm no huge fan of that style, but it's at least readable and functional, and thus better than the results you got by a mile.
It seems like you were starting with an existing HTML file you asked it to redesign. Generating from scratch with strict guidelines could be more representative.
[1]: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/
I've been doing this recently - working with Qt on a local app.
I've had good luck providing a png "design board" with all of the template colors and having the first task be to build out a design gallery with all of the ui widget. Then have the design docs specify which component to use. Ensure that the documents specify to only use pre-existing components and have a list of each component and their intended use cases.
Of course, this learning came after seeing how awful V1 of the app was. Initially, it looked really impressive, but once you started clicking around it became obvious how incoherent the design was.
Claude's new frontend-design plugin is solid for web apps in my testing. My wife and I have been using it to build her an app and her discerning design eye is largely impressed with what it's done.
I thought that AI would at least be good at 2 things: writing (text) and doing UI. It's not good at either. Text it generated reads like slop and UI it creates looks like slop. The way I approach it now is this: for text, I have to write it myself and only use AI to check grammar and catch weirdly phrased passages. For UI, it's like with the rest of the code. You have to stay on the top of it and keep demanding changes to match your vision/architecture/taste until it gets it close to what you want. In both cases, not knowing what "good" looks like is a real problem, because AI definitely has no idea.
as someone with little to no design background they all look the same to me except the bloated sass which is clearly inferior
is there a way to quantifiably measure how much better one design would be from another?
This article is purely subjective. I'm sure there are some academics that could explain ways to objectively score usability but this article is purely subjective.
No. It's completely subjective.
The whole "AI slop" noise is, at its core, human slop. It is people applying a hopefully pejorative label, trying to appeal to other slop aficionados that like whatever the current trendy slur is, in an objectively undefinable way.
In this case this guy likes the way Qt apps, they think it looks better, but it isn't a big trick they are revealing: They made it conform to the style they like, but this doesn't translate to anyone else in any measurable way. I think web apps looking like Qt apps feel like the late 90s and it's just weird, but my taste also is entirely subjective and mine alone.
>> Slop is not a distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many others. Even when I got it to make a page to look like X, it looked like X with slop.
Today, I can visit a website and instantly tell it was generated using LLMs and agents from A to Z:
1. Everything is in blue or mauve gradient, with a white background, and a single JavaScript-heavy page that lags as soon as you scroll a little.
2. There are always a ton of 404 pages.
3. Third, the HTML comments often expose credentials and to-do lists—sometimes even right above the login page (true story...).
This kind of website is a hard pass for me, and I add the company (and its founders) to my personal blacklist of people and companies I’ll never use anything from.
I don't think that is true, in the way that it always wasn't: How would you be able to tell when it's done properly?
Think WordPress installations: Depending on how it's done you can either tell at a glance (probably ~90% of WP installations at some points in time) or you have no clue until you look at the html source.
Of course the option to not do it properly is always alluring and then you can tell.
So you can tell for maybe 20% of websites that have been generated by LLMs over the last few months.
Makes sense. Slop is basically what you get when there's nothing specific to copy and so the AI it just averages every web style together. Qt works because there's really only one way Qt looks.Modern web has a million versions of everything so you average all that and get slop.
Those aren’t “slop”, those are exactly what non webdev used to see in the past decade, now that webdevs are seeing it done without them doing it and everywhere, the reality check hit them hard. Gtk/qt UI feels like duct tape toys even before AI, material is so tasteless but years ago it was the “de facto” in any design or icons set, most front end ui/ux are literally copy paste of the same template and components, even before AI. Imo only some old apple and windows vista where the UI was actually pleasant to see and interact with.
I had to read the post about five times and still didn't see the link to the actual examples - I actually had to view source to see the URL.
I like the idea - all of the designs are pretty meh though. If I had to pick one, I'd pick the HIG one (apart from that cursed glass effect on scroll) and then probably the Win11 one.
"You can check some of the results out here" in Qt section
To me the "AI slop" mostly just looks like the last decade of SaaS products.
Do the landing pages of auth0.com, devcycle.com, micro.com, or datadog.com not look like slop to other people?
I mean, no these don't look like AI slop. At worst they are 'web slop'. But even with that said a site that looks like this is what I expect these days from most businesses. I'm not looking at these companies for their far out web design capabilities, in fact a site that's somewhat standardized and has things where we expect them is far more useful.
auth0 does get close to slop. If I were them I'd definitely change things up. Devcycle and Datadog are nothing like generated slop. I haven't seen Fable websites yet - supposedly a lot better - but Opus and GPT can't design anything even close to those two. They can implement it if you give them a screenshot, but that's not designing something. Micro.com shows me a domain sale page.
Tailwind is the answer. Always pure Tailwind, not custom classes + utilities. It makes a massive difference vs. stylesheets. The LLM is able to actually reason about your UI in discrete chunks with a semantic layer over the styling, vs. bouncing back and forth between CSS/HTML and trying to reason about custom classes generated on the fly.
Does anyone have good examples of well designed web applications - not landing pages or peoples tech blogs, which are often listed here on HN. But like actual applications that do a complex task with the user using it as a tool.
https://www.mcmaster.com/ has a reputation
coulve been a pdf file
on the other hand steve jobs would've called Qt human-slop
guess it's a matter of taste
On the matter of being without taste -- which I assume the author is using as a self-derogatory descriptor for not having skill in UI design -- the styling of links on this page could use some change. The link color is so close to the body color that I initially thought there weren't any links, and scrolled trying to find the examples. You can't both remove the underline and have such a low contrast font color, it's bad UX.
(For the record, even though I don't mind qt, I think this particular example still comes across as slop because of the overuse of gradients on buttons and headings. In general, a lot of these suffer from overuse of gradients, but OP appears to just be averse to border-radius)
design.md
TLDR: Once a design gets old enough that LLMs can reproduce them, they are now "slop".
This seems to be a new iteration of what IMO made frontend work somewhat painful for almost the entire time I've been building software. It used to take the form that people did something with html that it wasn't designed to do. That thing looked cool and so everyone wanted it. This lead to pain and the perception that the tool is inadequate. So we eventually got CSS. And it continued there. Someone figured out a way to get cool dropshadows and rounded corners. These were cumbersome to implement. And so on.