Thread

How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it

137 points · 77 comments · yakkomajuri

jjcm · 1790726436 · focus · HN ↗
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:
<a href="https://html.non.io/railcode-animated" rel="nofollow">https://html.non.io/railcode-animated
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.
1. zeroonetwothree · 1790726713 · focus · HN ↗
  Honestly looks better than the original
  1. seizethecheese · 1790731290 · focus · HN ↗
    Disagree, the colors are harsh
    queenkjuul · 1790745846 · focus · HN ↗
    The green is too bright but the animations are way better
    spoiler · 1790747129 · focus · HN ↗
    The animation is more dense and busy. Not sure I'd qualify it as better necessarily.
    But this thread is a bit like the "I could have drawn that" comment you hear from Average Joe saying about a Mondrian painting. Yes, you can mimic something (with or without AI) but you wouldn't have made _this_.
    Don't get me wrong the 0->1 copycat site is impressive, but it lacks a lot of attention to detail the original has.
    The art and engineer snob voice in me is also causing a bit of cognitive dissonance about this though. C'est la vie, funny times we live in
    queenkjuul · 1790772756 · focus · HN ↗
    The original animation has people being run over by the roller coaster train... And this one's movement attempts to approximate real physics, the original doesn't. It was a lack of attention to detail in the original animations that stood out the most to me...
    spoiler · 1790805484 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, I meant the site design as a whole when I talked about attention to detail, not the animation specifically
    As for the animations...
    The second animation is a bit more... High fidelity in some areas? I don't know what to even call it. The clash of different pixel art styles is what I find jarring[^1].
    But I guess my point was that neither animation is even _good_... Like both of them barely pass a cursory glance; there's lot of nonsense going on in both of them, that wouldn't get past any animator. So, I wouldn't say one is better or worse; they just different
    [^1]: Edit for context, I used and even made _a lot_ of pixel art in primary school and my teens lol

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