HN Reader

Someone didn't live through peak Bootstrap and it shows. :p What's old is new again.

(also I think you can get far more variety from LLM-designed website with just a tiny bit of inspiration in your prompts)

    This website uses cookies, localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB, WebSQL, browser fingerprinting, canvas fingerprinting, and probably your mom's maiden name to track literally everything you do. We share this data with 847 trusted partners including but not limited to: advertisers, data brokers, that sketchy startup in the Caymans, and anyone willing to pay $0.003 per record.

    By clicking "Accept All" you agree to let us sell your data. By clicking "Reject All" you agree to let us sell your data anyway. By clicking "Customize" you get to pretend you have a choice while we still sell your data.

    Someone asked where the cookie banner was. Here you go.

Perfect

I vibe coded the site for pxehost - https://pxehost.com

The text content is largely hand written but the style/structures/etc are vibes.

Codex CLI on the $20 plus plan

The first shot was remarkably similar to the end result, but there was lots of tweaking and testing.

Are LLM’s capable of time travel because it looks it also created all these cookie cutter websites in 2013

You forgot to include some vulnerabilities. It just doesn't feel complete to me.

Jokes aside, I'm not mentioning who, but right on the front page of a popular vibe coding platform you can see a bunch of promoted real-world projects and almost all of them have some gaping security hole - and I'm not referring to the click-jacking kind.

I run a design agency and I've invested a lot of time and energy into a general design prompt that puts out some decently unique looking sites.

We offer this as our "Mini" package at a very affordable price ($99/mo, no setup fee) for clients who don't want (or need) a fully custom design.

I'm not sure you can call this "vibe coding" as much as "vibe engineering" because the resulting code closely models the heavily customized components and styling patterns of our other 60+ custom websites, but the following website designs were very heavily "vibe-derived", from a design sense:

- https://thedalaijavacdga.com/

- https://crossroadsflx.com/

- https://privateertattoolounge.com/

These alleged vibe coded websites look identical to all the tech startup websites of the 2010s. Hmm I wonder where the LLM got the idea to make all websites look this way.

The whole thrust of anti-vibe UI sentiments remind me of when Twitter Bootstrap came out. The unlocks were huge because suddenly people who didn't know how to make nice looking UI didn't have to do much more than drop in a stylesheet link and add some classes. Despite that, everyone complained all web sites started looking the same.

And, sure, that was valid. However, eventually everyone started figuring out how to get a unique look out of Bootstrap while still enjoying the benefits. All our modern frontend component frameworks can trace their lineage back to Bootstrap.

We'll see something similar with vibe UIs. Just a matter of time.

It's funny and this timing is perfect - just today two (mostly non-technical) friends, unprompted, sent me two different "projects" they just launched. Both have the same identical and unmistakable AI design with pills and tags and highlights and icons and all that. Both are bland, don't really offer anything deeply novel, but are unmistakably real and perhaps even usable.

On the one hand - I'm actually psyched that mostly nontechnical people have successfully launched their ideas into the world. This would have eaten up time and at least several $thousand previously.

On the other hand, they are both super blah projects.

Date I say it: The AI Slop Web App era has arrived in full force.

I just KNEW it would be purple. This was funny. will share with others.

Where’s the cookie banner

Better mobile support than lots of real web pages though...

Not enough tailwind. 6/10.

A lot of houses also look the same, but different people live in them. Makes you appreciate the designs that are truly unique, or contemporary, or classic, but most people would rather have any house versus none at all. So to me if a person vibe codes a web site that they otherwise don’t have the time or money to create and the website serves a purpose or brings joy, then cool.

Its ok but i'd be more convinced if instead of real icons it had hallucinated+bespoke SVGs that made me uncomfortable to look at for reasons I can't discern and don't quite look like anything in particular

Man you would have hated the 90s when websites were text and hyperlinks. They all looked the same!

Is the issue that all vibe-coded sites look the same, or that everyone uses the same Bootstrap or Material components? This site does indeed look like every other vibe-coded site, but so does any site using the same component libraries.

"Navigation" is so fast what I discovered what this is a single page web-site only after a minute or two.

The hunter2 joke makes me miss bash.org again

Why should making a static brochure website involve coding skill?

I tried sending you and email but even your email address is vibe code :(

The LLM does seem to default to a certain style. I made an “improvisational web server” that plans and generates a site based on a path, but after hosting it and looking at a few hundred generated sites, they all kind of look the same. Which I guess is expected? But it will be interesting to see if human designers take pains to differentiate.

https://github.com/jasonthorsness/ginprov

https://ginprov.com

No proper parody of an LLM-autocompleted website is complete without a bunch if broken or misdirected links.

I assume your project directory also looks like this if you used Claude…

index.html

index-working.html

index-revised.html

index-revised-2.html

debug-site-on-mobile-issue.sh

index-backup-2.html

DEBUGGING-RESULTS.md

CLAUDE.md

INSTALLATION-INSTRUCTIONS.md

I do love the random stream of pics at the end.

There’s a streak of meanness in this which is very unappealing.

Aha, a todsacerdoti post. The rule continues to hold!

Even before vibe coding, most modern sites were doing the same tailwind aesthetic.

I think my vibe coded website is for real good! MIDAO.org

Not nearly enough gradient for a vibe coded site :)

Not enough purple gradients

At the very least it's normal HTML in the browser and not some jumbled bundled minified mess :/

That one in the GDPR pop-up makes me laugh :

By clicking "Accept All" you agree to let us sell your data. By clicking "Reject All" you agree to let us sell your data anyway.

page looks like vibe-coded. is it?

This is the most passive aggressive website I've ever seen

I've vibe-coded a website about vibe coding websites. I used GPT-5 and it inserted an easter egg that was found by a human front-end dev, to my amusement. Easter eggs must be in-distribution!

(No I am not sharing the link as I was downvoted for it before - search for it. Hint: built with vibe)

I mean the joke should be that this actually the best website design because this is basically where response design peaked.

Convince me a human can actually do better than this. It’s unclear what more is actually required from a website other than this. They point out things like not understanding authentication is bad, but at least the AI won’t develop a fundamentally incorrect idea about it like a human would.

Nobody ever got fired for checking ChatGPT for something that they didn’t know, but plenty of people without it have just made mistakes carefully read documentation and misinterpreting it.

I mean...

Vibe coding is just the next dreamweaver....

I would rather have the web be somewhat boring than go back to geocities and myspace style atrocities.

We can thank Bootsprap and Tailwind for that

The prompt should have included "Make it look like Vercel"

Survivorship bias at its best

You seem angry.

This is missing shadcn ui lib for it to truly be the vibe coded slop we see these days.

Guilty.

I vibe coded a non-serious website for my vibe coded OSS project. But I had fun. :)

https://pluqqy.com