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Comment by codegladiator | Hacker News Reader

Why does LLM generated websites feel so "LLM generated".

Its like a bootstrap css just dropped. People still giving "minimum effort" into their vibe code/eng projects but slap a domain on top. Is this to save token cost ?

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To be honest if it were my software I'd probably give it a "Prof. Dr." style page and call it a day, then get called out on Hackernews with "haven't you heard of CSS? It's 2025, you actually want to entice people to use your software, don't you?" or similar.

Apparently Prof. Dr. style is the aesthetic name for pages with no custom styling of any kind, common at universities in the 01990s: https://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

they feel like that because people building them are not generally designers and they don't care about novelty or even functionality as long as it looks pleasing to the eye. Most of them probably include "make it look pretty" etc in the prompt and LLMs will naturally converege to a common idea for what is "pretty" and apparently that is purple gradients in everything and if you don't have taste, you can't tell any better, beacuse you're doing a job you don't fundamentally understand.

This skill demonstrates how to tell an agent to make a non-generic website [1].

These are the money lines:

    NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families
    (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes
    (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable
    layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks
    context-specific character.
    
    Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel genuinely
    designed for the context. No design should be the same. Vary between
    light and dark themes, different fonts, different aesthetics. NEVER
    converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for example) across
    generations.

[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

Because their goal isn’t to build a website, but to promote and share their product. Why would anyone invest more time than necessary in a tangential part of the project?

Fair enough. I did not see this as a promotion of the product and more of as a show experimental side project. But if they really want to promote the product, the llm design isnt helping giving any confidence. A blog post would have sufficed.

It's because LLM tools have design guidelines as a part of the system prompt which makes everything look the same unless you explicitly tell it otherwise.

To give an example that annoys me to no end, Google's Antigravity insists on making everything "anthropomorphic", which gets interpreted as overtly rounded corners, way too much padding everywhere, and sometimes even text gradients (huge no-no in design). So, unless you instruct it otherwise, every webpage it creates looks like a lame attempt at this: https://m3.material.io/

I'd hazard a guess that it's based on what the LLM can "design" without actually being able to see it or have taste and it still reliably look fine to humans.

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