8 ms·
From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026. 98% of the time wh
by walrus01 6d ago
From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
- jbs789 6d agoYeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately. Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
- walrus01 6d agoNew proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
- zrail 6d agoI haven't tried it personally but my understanding from friends is that Pangram is very accurate, at least for now. https://www.pangram.com/ https://www.pangram.com/
- walrus01 6d agoAs a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium. Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
- _joel 6d agoIronic that site looks like it's AI generated too
- koito17 6d agoIt looks close to the kind of documentation artifacts GPT 5.6 Sol would generate for me. That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
- runarberg 6d agoPlease, do not use LLMs to do actual statistics. They suck at doing actual statistics (like they suck at everything else). Use proven traditional statistical methods like supervised learning for this. You can use traditional (not large) language models to tokenize the content and then a supervised learning trained on the most popular models to detect if those models generated the content.
- Retr0id 6d agoI could tell from the HN submission title + domain name.
- BarryMilo 6d agoFrom a content point of view, this could've been a tweet (or a toot).
- boringg 6d agoCant generate ad content
- password4321 6d agoWhy can't anyone just run it through one of the "make this not appear so clearly LLM-generated" obfuscation utilities open sourced on GitHub, or something similar just with prompts. The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
- walrus01 6d agoIn the spirit of not speedrunning towards the dead internet theory, then what we need is a slop-detector that detects things that have been run through a script to "make this obviously not look like slop", in a recursive looping battle royale until the heat death of the universe.
- dkarl 6d agoI appreciate the obviousness of it. Isn't it a good thing if the lack of effort jumps out in seconds?
- jcalx 6d agoThis is good! Taste still remains a differentiator so far in our tokenmaxxing era.
- dgellow 6d agoIf you create content that people like, with a distinct style, one can direct their LLM to it and copy the style. The more content you have out there the better the copy will be. I don’t think it’s really a differentiation you can rely upon
- Larrikin 6d agoThe world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft. I think there will be a reset and hopefully content producers like Mr Beast will lose out. But, I do not think people, similar to the original participants on the Internet, will refuse to make anything. I expect a return to Live journal similar content where we get actual opinions even if we sadly lose out on long tail content/production because people do not want to work hard for free. The return of the hobby style Internet isn't necessarily bad.
- blitzar 6d agoThese LLM generated comments about LLM content are getting a little tiresome.
- walrus01 6d agoI assure you that I am a meat based mammal that engages in normal human activities such as respiration and generation of saliva. I also enjoy consuming calories and watching branded entertainment products.
- bensyverson 6d agoThe stock /frontend-design skill really loves an all-caps mono caption
- ticulatedspline 6d agoLooks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time. I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it. I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated. There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
- subtlejellyfish 6d agoI can understand that its tiresome, but its also not new. Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites. I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
- echelon 6d agoHonestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again. I'm excited by that. And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc. It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
- shevy-java 6d agoGeocities had some nice websites back in its peak days. LLM is just AI slop spam. To even want to compare it to geocities is weird. Have you been around back then actually? To claim LLMs are similar to an independent web is also weird.
- binary0010 6d agoInteresting, as someone who started making sites on geocities I don't find this anything the same. I remember learning tons about weird little niche hobbies and making little learning sites and stuff with my own brand of weird Photoshop graphics. An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
- faefox 6d agoThis couldn't be further from the truth. The indie web was exciting because it was the product of distinct human voices. LLMs only speak in one voice (with subtle differences between the major models but similar "tells"). This is why so many people have such an immediate and visceral negative reaction to AI slop. It is distinctly lacking the human spark and it is uncanny and off-putting in that way.
- hallole 6d ago"honestlyranked.com" Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
- sixtyj 6d agoTypography of these LLM-generated sites is bad. Design is a question of taste, I am not commenting it. But yes, you are right that we get tired of these sites as they are indistinguishable. Have anyone tried to print or switch page to browser’s reader mode? Here starts hell :)
- aba_cz 6d agoAlso the dark theme is something not everybody likes. Especially with red-green inside. Think of color-blind people. My eyes are in pain from just trying to focus.
- bocytron 6d agoi'm curious, would a white background with green/red figures be any better?
- oefrha 6d agoThat's the surprising part. It's pretty obviously spit out by /frontend-design, the tells are too obvious because Claude has built me too many of these, but /frontend-design by default will give you both a dark and a light theme and make it adapt to system theme with no prompting at all, so why would someone build a lazy stock /frontend-design but override that specifically?
- dylan604 6d agoAn old co-worker used a term to describe sites with similar eye strain issues: OSHA violation.
- duckmysick 6d agoWould something like that be better? https://jsfiddle.net/hs03xbuo/ https://jsfiddle.net/hs03xbuo/ I deleted the stylesheet, removed the duplicate FAQ section, and reworded a few sentences.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- dofm 6d agoVery very small fonts is one of the things that annoys me most; truly a sign that design-based post-training is in the hands of the young and inexperienced. Far too many AI-generated site designs look like a teenage fan site designer trying to do “corporate”
- truthnukerino 6d agothe nick gerr ification of the web
- colingauvin 6d agoI am for more sick of reading people complain about it than I am seeing it. The page is a table. It was fine.
- dylan604 6d agoI'm surprised that with the complaints that companies trained on everything that it results in the LLM having aesthetic preferences. With all of the templates available on sites like Wix or Squarespace, you'd think generated sites would have more variety. Then again, I have no idea what the prompts are that generate these sites to know if there's something that gives the generator the notion the style is the one people want.
- traviswingo 6d agoI’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired. And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked. Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts? The content is what’s interesting, and it is. Edit to clarify: I read the comment as the issue being the look and feel of the site being AI generated - as in, “this website looks AI generated. It sucks.” NOT the content itself being AI generated. Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support. My stance: An AI generated website with the authors original thoughts is fine to me. I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it serves its purpose.
- ragall 6d ago> Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Good people do.
- Arubis 6d agoI wish we could get past this debate. Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect other people. There is space for nuance: If you're spitting out raw LLM output and not looking at or reading it and requiring other people to use it as-is, while representing it as your own original work, you are treating your own time and attention as more valuable than that of others. You can expect a reaction based on this. If you're blanket-dismissing someone else's work because they used one or more specific tools, regardless of how much of their own time and attention they put into it before sharing it in a place where you were able to see it -- or perhaps you're doing that dismissal without even seeing it -- you are treating their time and attention as superficial and a rounding error compared with their choice of tools. You can expect a reaction based on this. In between, there is a _whole_ lot of room for different take and opinions, and we're collectively figuring out what's acceptable and what isn't. We'll never fully get there and that is Okay. But we can at least try to calibrate on "are we treating other people respectfully" instead of a shitty proxy for it.
- dismalaf 6d ago> From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026. Versus the same WP template or the same Jekyll template? I agree though, using an LLM to do the same old is a waste.
- kelseyfrog 6d agoIs there a way to turn off these comments? Contact the owner and send the message there instead. https://honestlyranked.com/contact/ https://honestlyranked.com/contact/