YHK - yet another hacker news clone

How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it

41 points yakkomajuri 1 hour ago 25 comments

chmod775 1 hour ago | parent

Answer: because a human designed it in an iterative process. LLMs just wrote the code.

phoronixrly 1 hour ago | parent

And it still carries some of the cliche features of LLM-'designed' sites.

yakkomajuri 1 hour ago | parent

It definitely does. Particularly under the hero imo.

Doing this is really time-consuming so certainly there were some corners cut -- need to also focus on product after all!

Particularly after we changed a lot of the messaging (after this post was written) I slacked off a bit. Keen to hear what's most annoying to you though, always looking for feedback.

bob1029 55 minutes ago | parent

The way the body content animates at page load is pretty annoying.

preommr 55 minutes ago | parent

like what?

The website is simple enough that any design decicion could just as well ahve been done by a real human.

The em-dashes, and the gradients were always egregious because they're strong opinionated decisions. This is just a straighforward, clean, tasteful website (really what most sites should aim for).

ananmays 1 hour ago | parent

A designer did make it! The process you undertook is called design!

arecsu 1 hour ago | parent

Literally yes

Gualdrapo 53 minutes ago | parent

> Most times I'll grab ideas from multiple places, combine them, and endlessly iterate on them until I get to something I'm happy with.

The "designer" happens to not to be human. At that point it just sounds like going to a website template store and scrolling endlessly through options until you find a template you'd say "meh, this will do".

SV_BubbleTime 36 minutes ago | parent

I had this out with one of my employees, they were giving me shit for using Claude Design, and just how many iterations it took to get what I wanted.

I explained that exactly what design is I just lack the skills to do it in illustrator and Photoshop but yes, no one gets it right the first time.

OzzyB 21 minutes ago | parent

We need to make ppl understand this!

uncivilized 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, if the designer was named Claude or Astra, then it does indeed look like that designer created it.

thefourthchime 56 minutes ago | parent

I love this because, it reminds me that when people hate AI, They hate low effort AI slop.

This website demonstrates a tremendous amount of human effort, and it walks through the iterative design process that led to the final result. Taking inspiration, trying out ideas, tinkering—that's design.

slopinthebag 55 minutes ago | parent

So because of the article's premise, I'm going to be a bit of a dickhead. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, because it's not a judgement on the developers. I have also shipped way worse vibecoded frontends and this is coming from a UI guy, so it's not about being an AI hater or anything.

Your site looks like an AI made it.

Now there is an actually easy fix: just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic. And then I could buy that it was human-designed, at which point, it basically was. And just AI-coded.

Otherwise it's quite cool, and well done.

yakkomajuri 52 minutes ago | parent

This makes sense yeah, I guess following a similar approach used on the buttons for the tabs as well. Point taken!

slopinthebag 49 minutes ago | parent

Yeah that's the only parts of the design that I could identify as being clearly AI generated, or at least is ai-coded, if it was human designed. Including the panels for demo, pricing, etc.

The rest of the design kind of reminds me of stardew valley's site, which is quite cute.

Hope you don't take this as evil criticism, overall I'm a big fan.

edit: it's not even AI coded, more like incohesive, and with the context of the article...but a simple fix and overall well done ;)

yakkomajuri 48 minutes ago | parent

Not at all! I agree with what you said

preommr 46 minutes ago | parent

> just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic.

Where is this glass?

Is it the lighter green cards on the home page? That's not really glass, that's just a different a lighter color scheme. The tabs also look fine.

slopinthebag 41 minutes ago | parent

i'm not going to argue with you about aesthetics. taste and all that. but to me there are clearly divergent aesthetics with the rest of the site, and some elements. my suggestion is to just align them, and it will be more cohesive.

fiatpandas 53 minutes ago | parent

OP, you accidentally invented the design process that they teach in design school. You can officially call yourself a designer.

1) have a high level functional goal

2) be inspired and think of a motif

3) go wide within that motif and explore

4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate

5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.

socializer 9 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, and the trade-off here is that it takes time. In the same way, you can write insightful blog posts or work emails using AI if you maintain creative control, but all of sudden, you're not moving at 100x speed. You're moving a lot closer to human speed.

This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.

agilek 4 minutes ago | parent

The fact it takes time is not a trade-off. It is an actual design work.

bardackx 21 minutes ago | parent

it feels vibecoded though, it still has LLMisms

Bradappz 7 minutes ago | parent

for sure

jjcm 12 minutes ago | parent

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:

https://html.non.io/railcode-example

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.

zeroonetwothree 8 minutes ago | parent

Honestly looks better than the original