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- Hacker News
- The most important thing I learned when graduating from "bad musician" to "passable musician" (passable enough to have listeners and fans, at least) was that there's no one single big trick that turns a song from bad to good: there's 100 tiny small tricks that add up. And you need to have experience to know what they are. A trained listener might be able to say "the midrange is too compressed", "there's too much high end", "the drum transients are't punching through", but a normal, casual listener is just going to say, "I dunno, it just doesn't sound right."
This UI slop is the same deal. A slightly misaligned dot off the timeline, color choices which don't really make sense given the website as a whole, using LLMism text. Nothing in here is an obviously major problem on its own. But when you add up 50 of these on a website, users get hit with that "this is slop" feeling.
The details matter. In isolation they seem irrelevant, but as a whole it's what elevates something from the AI slop garbage pile to something actually good.
by mjr00 - An "inactive" student is one who is enrolled but is not currently attending classes.
This is a super useful article but a lot of these complaints about things like alignments are also the natural outcome of me, a non-frontend person, building any kind of web frontend at all. So I wouldn't sweat it too much.
by tptacek - I start with these rules, then adjust as I want...
EMPHASIZE:
- *Summary.* First paragraph like newspaper (who, what, where, when, how, why).
- *Benefits.* Focus on the benefits for the reader.
- *Why this matters* Focus on what it adds to the reader.
NO:
- *No tech stack.* Do not say the tech implementation; covered elsewhere.
- *No counts.* Do not say page counts, part counts, chapter counts, etc.
- *No special formatting.* Do not bold, not italic, not bullet lists.
- *No "if".* Do not say "If you do X then Y"; instead use positive.
- *No run-on sentences.* Do not use many clauses nor too many words.
- *No passive voice.* Do not use passive, or non-subject, sentences.
by jph - This is similar to the rapid early adoption of the Bootstrap CSS framework. A lot of people were annoyed by the sudden spike of websites that looked and felt the same, but I think this was a tremendous step forward in usability and accessibility, and well worth the initial wave of cookie cutter websites.by zinoc
- Love this blog mentioning the issue of implementation detail in prose. Likely my biggest irk of vibe coded apps.
Much of this is it's a simple problem to solve - just prompt agent of choice "Put all user visible text into a translation file for i10n" and then go through and edit said prose as a human.
by vallerie - At least some of these are just for lack of caring. I vibe coded this landing page recently https://tui2web.com/ and fought off a lot of the defaults the LLM came up with after a few hours of iteration. Feel free to roast it, I'm not really attached, but I thought it did a reasonably good job.by czhu12
- I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is that is happening when the robot writes stuff like “3 campuses, one app” example, I’m glad the author was able to identify it as chat context leaking through.
The other version of it is the robot over-indexing on some part of the prompt and leaving comments places. An example is I ask it to prefer integration tests using TestContainers, it starts adding comments to every new test saying “Real services, no mocks” or something.
And yes, I have a line in my *.MD saying not to do that.
by weakfish - Earlier this year I used Claude to design a screen for an Unreal game I work on. At first I thought wow, what a great layout, this is a game changer and gives me a huge advantage.
Less than a year later I am embarrassed how Claude it looks - blinking dot in the corner, double // separating header text, the font choices... now I see the same patterns everywhere, and I'm sure the audience is picking up on it too.
I still use Claude in my work, but a lot more sparingly; I ask for color scheme and font suggestions (no Rajdhani or Share Tech Mono!), but they're mostly for inspiration and I'm not blindly copying them. It feels like I'm being smarter about it, but maybe in a year I'll realize I still haven't climbed out of the trap :)
by tlahtinen