Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly share the same vibe-coded look
by hubraumhugo on 4/22/2026, 2:44:32 PM
https://www.adriankrebs.ch/blog/design-slop/
Comments
by: simonw
I expect <i>most side-projects</i> are being built with AI-assistance now. Side projects are typically time constrained - if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it?<p>They're also the ideal place to try out new AI tools that your professional work might not let you experiment with.<p>(The headline of this piece doesn't really do it justice - it misuses "vibe coded" and fails to communicate that the substance of the post is about visual design traits common with AI-generated frontends, which is a much more interesting conversation to be having. UPDATE: the headline changed, it's now much better - "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look" - it was previously "Show HN submissions tripled and are now mostly vibe-coded")
4/22/2026, 3:03:34 PM
by: sunir
Yes, it's the September That Never Ended again. It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.<p><a href="http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a><p>The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.<p>I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
4/22/2026, 3:50:46 PM
by: vintagedave
Is the data (or scoring of each site) available?<p>It’s entirely possible a Show HN I posted is included and I’d love to know how it scored.
4/22/2026, 4:55:04 PM
by: xantronix
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.<p>When the surface dwellers have become crazed by disease and war, and their lands contaminated with the detritus of broken promises of innovation and heavy metals, we must build a new Eden.<p>As much as I adore Gemini as a concept, I yearn to express myself in the visual medium. Dillo might honestly be enough to render something beautiful within its constraints. With Wireguard meshes as the transport, and invitations offered and withdrawn by personal trust, perhaps we can have a place where our ideas could once again flourish without being amplified and distilled into mediocrity by the great monoliths looming like thunderous currents on the horizon.
4/22/2026, 3:46:32 PM
by: dematz
Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects <a href="https://correctarity.com/roundedrects" rel="nofollow">https://correctarity.com/roundedrects</a><p>(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)
4/22/2026, 3:03:53 PM
by: onetimeusename
I've looked at some Show HN submissions initially feeling impressed and finding it's either not even working code or it's obvious AI code someone is trying to take credit for writing themselves. If GitHub is used now as a resume builder but AI can do all the work, the signal is basically gone.
4/22/2026, 3:18:16 PM
by: jerf
The problem is people want to use 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.<p>In 2016, if I saw 10,000 lines of code, that carried a certain proof-of-work with it. They probably couldn't help but give the code some testing as they were working up to that point. We know there has to have been a certain amount of thought in it. They've been living with it for some months, guaranteed.<p>In 2026, 10,000 lines of code means they spent a minimum amount of money on tokens. 10,000 lines can be generated pretty quickly in a single task, if it's something like "turn this big OpenAPI spec into an API in my language". It's entirely possible 90%+ of the project hasn't actually been tested, except by the unit tests the AI wrote itself, which is a great start, but not more than that for code that hasn't ever actually run in any real scenario from the real world.<p>Nothing about any of that in intrinsically wrong. But the standards have to be shifted. While the bar for a "Show HN" should perhaps not be high, it should probably be higher than "I typed a few things into a text box". And that not because that's necessarily "bad" either, but because of the mismatch between valuable human attention and the cheapness of being able to make a draw on it.<p>It's kind of a bummer in some sense... but then again, honestly, the space of things that can be built with an idea and a few prompts to an AI was frankly fairly well covered even <i>before</i> AI coding tools. Already I had a list of "projects we've already seen a lot of so don't expect the community to shower you with adulation" for any language community I've spent any significant time in. AI has grown the list of "projects I've seen too many times" a bit, but a lot of what I've seen is that we're getting an even larger torrent of the same projects we already had too many of before.
4/22/2026, 3:49:43 PM
by: nottorp
If we speak of design, most tech project sites, from "solo founder SAAS" to "we got 2 billion from YC" have looked the same to me for years.<p>We can hope the LLMs hallucinate slightly different CSS once in a while now...
4/22/2026, 3:48:59 PM
by: figassis
I think HN is the crowd that values MVPs. And LLMs are the best tool to quickly materialize an idea. So I think we should judge these submissions on merit and not on our collective rejection of reality. If they succeed I’m sure (or hope) their user facing app won’t remain vibe coded.
4/22/2026, 4:15:36 PM
by: michaelcampbell
> A designer recently told me that “colored left borders are almost as reliable a sign of AI-generated design as em-dashes for text”, so I started to notice them on many pages.<p>so, n=1 plus Baader-Meinhof? (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion</a>)
4/22/2026, 3:14:24 PM
by: fooker
Given that the ones that surfaced on the frontpage were pretty interesting, vibe coded or not, I’d say the voting mechanism is working as a good filter.
4/22/2026, 3:00:44 PM
by: jameslk
> On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.<p>At least in the field I work in (ecommerce/retail), design is often what separates one brand from another when presenting their products. Maybe it won't happen on the web as much in the future, but I suspect it will still be important when it comes to visually communicating to consumers
4/22/2026, 3:51:04 PM
by: julia-kafarska
There's a big difference between vibe-coder and engineer who uses ai to speed up their work.
4/22/2026, 2:54:17 PM
by: curious1008
There will be more and more as the coding agents advance. However, I think it'll reach a point where the people currently building the "vibe-coded" products get a better understanding of what they are actually building and the rest (vast majority) wont even bother to try coding at all, even with AI's assistance.
4/22/2026, 3:41:07 PM
by: jaronilan
I try to submit short (tech related) stories (<a href="https://github.com/jaronilan/stories" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jaronilan/stories</a>) and never get any traction. (Might be time to write one about a vibe coder... ;))
4/22/2026, 3:50:06 PM
by: mercurialsolo
The best design is invisible - most (web)sites are designed for text based reading / watching - primary modality. Maybe we will see more inspired design - with voice, video or agent scanners using which one can talk to an agent via an assistant
4/22/2026, 3:53:52 PM
by: amysox
I guess I was bucking the trend with <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720333</a>, which points to <a href="https://electricminds.org" rel="nofollow">https://electricminds.org</a>.<p>The UI of Electric Minds Reborn (Amsterdam Web Communities System) was <i>not</i> AI-generated. At most, it was AI <i>translated,</i> as I used Claude to help turn old clunky 2006-era HTML into modern styling with Tailwind CSS. See also <a href="https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://erbosoft.com/blog/2026/04/07/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/</a>.
4/22/2026, 3:58:33 PM
by: flexagoon
> Slop fonts: Space Grotesk, Instrument Serif, Geist, Syne, Fraunces<p>Nooo please don't ruin great fonts by associating them with low effort vibecoding<p>They may be somewhat overused but they are popular for a reason
4/22/2026, 4:23:43 PM
by: cammasmith
Interesting post. I'm notoriously bad at noticing the common characteristics in AI writing, but once they were pointed out, I realized I've been seeing them everywhere in websites.
4/22/2026, 2:55:28 PM
by: computerphage
> Barely passing body-text contrast in dark themes<p>This has been killing me recently. Apparently I need slightly higher contrast than some people, and these vibe coded UIs are basically unreadable to my eyes
4/22/2026, 3:54:22 PM
by: fusslo
off topic AI-related anecdote:<p>at my workplace the phrase in status/report-out meetings "I built" now means "I asked claude to build"<p>All of a sudden managers, architects (who haven't written code in a decade), and directors are all building tools<p>so now we're debugging the tools "they built" and why our product isn't working with them.
4/22/2026, 3:57:35 PM
by: raincole
What missing from the article is that they didn't use the same "slop score" to measure Show HN posts from <2023. Nor they released this script so the readers can verify it against known human-made sites.<p>Why? Let me guess: because these patterns were frequently seen in human-made sites too, but that won't fit the narrative.
4/22/2026, 4:30:13 PM
by: cushycush
This’ll become the norm. You’ll see better results from seasoned engineers, but most code won’t be written by people anymore. Agents like Opus 4.6 are getting too good. Engineers will stick around to guide the agents, but learning to code looks to be similar to learning to write cursive now.
4/22/2026, 3:14:38 PM
by: xnx
"vibe code" now just means "coded with AI" which should not be anymore of an insult than "IDE coded".<p>I'm much more critical of closed-source, subscription, wrappers over open source software of simple prompts.
4/22/2026, 3:16:49 PM
by: elevaet
This is great, now we can better disguise slopware!
4/22/2026, 3:42:04 PM
by: lschueller
Well summarized. Especially the design routines are quite obvious.<p>There is a longterm phenomenon, that quite a lot of pages are presented here, and not existent anymore after 12 months or so... This was already the case before the whole ai slop flodded in... But since then the rate just grew massively.<p>It's particularly annoying, when there is an actually useful service or app, you sign up, after a couple of months all is gone...
4/22/2026, 4:11:51 PM
by: yard2010
"Please read this page and make sure to remember everything in it, when I ask you to vibe code something, do the exact opposite so it doesn't look like slop. Please remember this"
4/22/2026, 3:45:28 PM
by: marcodena
Average is all you need
4/22/2026, 3:47:35 PM
by: nomdep
What this article calls AI design traits are design patterns that were already very common before AI: gradients, centered hero, stat banner, all-caps heading, purple accent, etc. You can blame most of them on TailwindUI and shadcn.<p>Are we going to call 'AI slop' everything that doesn't reinvent design from zero for a marketing page?
4/22/2026, 3:52:36 PM
by: binary132
Dead Internet theory is not only not wrong, we are now actively entering a time when it is finally driving the seeds of the human collectives that will define the future underground.
4/22/2026, 3:36:01 PM
by: cmrdporcupine
The coding tools raise the bar and muddy the waters. If "Show HN" submissions can just as easily be done by myself in a weekend, I don't pay attention. The signal-noise ratio just gets destroyed and the forum will just be ignored.<p>Likewise, the issue is often that many of these projects show no evidence of long term maintenance. That might be the new signal we watch for?<p>There also used to be a sense in the tech community of <i>"if you build it they will come"</i> and that has been basically completely lost at this point. Between the discussion earlier this week of people's fraudulent GH stars, and this topic, and the wave of submissions I see on e.g. r/rust, it's just hard to imagine how -- as a pure "tech nerd" -- to get eyes or assistance on projects these days.<p>I have projects I've held off on "Show HN" for years because I felt I wasn't ready for the flood of users or questions and criticisms. Maybe the jokes on me. (Of course like everyone else these days, I've <i>used</i> AI to work on them, but much of them predate agentic tools.)
4/22/2026, 3:26:25 PM
by: bobthepanda
Shad/cn is a Vercel shipped batteries included framework similar to Bootstrap in the jQuery days. I don’t think that by itself is going to be a good validation of AI slop because it’s a common stack with the Vercel next.js base. And it lets you do a lot of customization so you don’t need to reinvent the wheels on things like accordions and dropdowns.
4/22/2026, 3:24:26 PM
by: cr125rider
And that’s okay. If we have better tools that help more people “hack” on problems, that’s great.
4/22/2026, 3:02:13 PM
by: mccoyb
The problem is not vibe coding itself. The problem is that certain untrained people do not have or perhaps do not care to learn the necessary skills to refine the result into something novel, or clear / precise, something which communicates (clearly) the idea they are trying to convey to others (who are hoping to learn something new).<p>In a climate where it seems like VC are <i>woefully</i> bereft of the same skills, there's an impetus to just slop garbage up for any vague idea, without taking the care or time to polish it into something which has that intangibly human sense of greatness and clarity.<p>I see, you've done something -- but why? If you continue to ask this question, you will arrive at good science ... but many submissions are not aimed at that level of communication or stop far ahead of the point at which the question becomes interesting.<p>There's that phrase: "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt" which strikes as poignant, except it seems like <i>the audience</i> today are also fools ... the inmates are running the asylum.
4/22/2026, 3:24:26 PM
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4/22/2026, 4:15:32 PM
by: monkeynotes
Even his blog has the Claude vibe to it.
4/22/2026, 3:54:44 PM
by: ChrisArchitect
Funny, because as far as 'vibecoded colors', it's not the Tailwind purple anymore, I would say recently it's more of the same beige scheme this very blog post is using.
4/22/2026, 3:43:22 PM
by: homeonthemtn
This is cynical. Listen if you want to put time into a project then show it to the Internet to collectively shit on it, then kudos to you. You went on a journey and gained experience through it.<p>Personally what I think I'm seeing is a breaking down of walls. Now ideas that once would have gone back to the imagination vault finally have a pathway to reality.
4/22/2026, 3:38:47 PM
by: vijgaurav
Unless it is AI slop, I don't mind reading submissions that can be genuinely helpful.
4/22/2026, 3:22:45 PM
by: arnorhs
i wonder if you could use a bayesian classifier, like the first anti-spam measures used, to automatically classify these submissions.<p>Kind of off-topic - but why is there always so much focus amongst AI-bros on how good or whether or not LLMs are good at building UI? My shallow assumptions were that the reason is because that's what LLMs are particularly bad at.<p>But lately I've kind of gotten the sense that a lot of people seem to mostly be building UI stuff with LLMs. Weird.
4/22/2026, 3:45:41 PM
by: sgammon
did you even read and edit the title of this post?
4/22/2026, 3:34:57 PM
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