> Asked for frontend work without design direction, Claude Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles, and a general instruction such as "avoid a generic AI look" mostly swaps one default for another. It responds well to instructions that name specific patterns to avoid, as in the following example. Work iteratively: check which styles the first result used instead, and extend the list if needed.
I hardly ever read tips for prompting etc. because things change too quickly, the writeups are kindof big. Glad I read this one, because I often did exactly what they assume users would do. I write "don't make it look like generic ai slop" and that seemed to work nicely. Now I know why there was still a chance of seeing similar styles across apps. I reckon doing some manual work in terms of scouting dribbble/behance for nice layouts will yield better results.
This is relatively useful to know, but I can't help but wonder how people are expected to be able to describe something that they probably have difficulty putting in to words. Maybe it's mostly useful for those who have a design eye, background, or experience.
I'll give you the first 5% of the prompt for free:
"Don't use purple-blue-pink gradients, neon glow, aurora effects, monospace fonts, em-dashes, emojis, over-rounded corners, pill-shaped buttons, random tags and indicators, random sparkles , futuristic grids and orbital lines, centered everything, gradient text on headlines, "how it works" followed by 1.2.3. section, fake testimonials, every paragraph ending in a punchy one-liner, all cap headings, built in rust with rustwebserver and rustxmlparser, built with react on nixos........."
Bishonen88 · · focus · HN ↗
> Asked for frontend work without design direction, Claude Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles, and a general instruction such as "avoid a generic AI look" mostly swaps one default for another. It responds well to instructions that name specific patterns to avoid, as in the following example. Work iteratively: check which styles the first result used instead, and extend the list if needed.
I hardly ever read tips for prompting etc. because things change too quickly, the writeups are kindof big. Glad I read this one, because I often did exactly what they assume users would do. I write "don't make it look like generic ai slop" and that seemed to work nicely. Now I know why there was still a chance of seeing similar styles across apps. I reckon doing some manual work in terms of scouting dribbble/behance for nice layouts will yield better results.
emsixteen · · focus · HN ↗
nananana9 · · focus · HN ↗
"Don't use purple-blue-pink gradients, neon glow, aurora effects, monospace fonts, em-dashes, emojis, over-rounded corners, pill-shaped buttons, random tags and indicators, random sparkles , futuristic grids and orbital lines, centered everything, gradient text on headlines, "how it works" followed by 1.2.3. section, fake testimonials, every paragraph ending in a punchy one-liner, all cap headings, built in rust with rustwebserver and rustxmlparser, built with react on nixos........."