I kinda liked the Original, HIG and Windows 11 versions the most. When I think "AI slop" (in terms of web design), I think dark theme, rich purples and vibrant hues, huge headings, etc. The SaaS one kind of has that with the purples and vibrant hues; it easily looks the "sloppiest" to my eye.

Can't for personal preferences I suppose.

>> Slop is not a distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many others. Even when I got it to make a page to look like X, it looked like X with slop.

Today, I can visit a website and instantly tell it was generated using LLMs and agents from A to Z:

1. Everything is in blue or mauve gradient, with a white background, and a single JavaScript-heavy page that lags as soon as you scroll a little.

2. There are always a ton of 404 pages.

3. Third, the HTML comments often expose credentials and to-do lists—sometimes even right above the login page (true story...).

This kind of website is a hard pass for me, and I add the company (and its founders) to my personal blacklist of people and companies I’ll never use anything from.

To me the "AI slop" mostly just looks like the last decade of SaaS products.

Do the landing pages of auth0.com, devcycle.com, micro.com, or datadog.com not look like slop to other people?

I had to read the post about five times and still didn't see the link to the actual examples - I actually had to view source to see the URL.

I like the idea - all of the designs are pretty meh though. If I had to pick one, I'd pick the HIG one (apart from that cursed glass effect on scroll) and then probably the Win11 one.

I think the slop part is just what you get when you inject no opinions and put in no effort to apply taste (which you probably have and/or could develop). No care is put in. It looks generic and sloppy because it is generic and sloppy. You might have preferences over which generic and sloppy style is preferred, but at the end of the day a UI built without effort is going to look like what it is.

But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be opinionated, why do you care?

Tailwind is the answer. Always pure Tailwind, not custom classes + utilities. It makes a massive difference vs. stylesheets. The LLM is able to actually reason about your UI in discrete chunks with a semantic layer over the styling, vs. bouncing back and forth between CSS/HTML and trying to reason about custom classes generated on the fly.

Does anyone have good examples of well designed web applications - not landing pages or peoples tech blogs, which are often listed here on HN. But like actual applications that do a complex task with the user using it as a tool.

Makes sense. Slop is basically what you get when there's nothing specific to copy and so the AI it just averages every web style together. Qt works because there's really only one way Qt looks.Modern web has a million versions of everything so you average all that and get slop.

on the other hand steve jobs would've called Qt human-slop

guess it's a matter of taste