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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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-example
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.