I think that these things I've seen that are tells of a slop UI are when people without discernment (not as an insult!) don't do a pass over a UI. I'm working on a dumb little app to help me sequence photos for a book[0], and I'm building it with Claude (Opus 5.5, medium effort). The first pass was really sloppy, but I was surprised at how far I could get with some directed iterating.
This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.
The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.
[0]: <a href="https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/" rel="nofollow">https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/ (very much a work in progress, feedback welcome)
Ever tested it on mobile? There’s some cut off text in the top right nav, the “start by adding photos” text isn’t vertically centered in its container, and the page size/settings container is also cutting off content on the sides.
yes and no (thanks for looking); I know it still loads on mobile, but I know it's pretty garbage. I haven't thought of a way to make the UI work ergonomically on mobile without a totally different fork (lots of moving around depends on having a mouse or a track pad), but I also don't have the heart to have a "your device isn't supported" overlay because I want to daydream about it.
bichiliad · · focus · HN ↗
This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.
The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.
[0]: <a href="https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/" rel="nofollow">https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/ (very much a work in progress, feedback welcome)
demibabs · · focus · HN ↗
Nice aesthetic tho
bichiliad · · focus · HN ↗