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Comment by bryanhogan | Hacker News Reader

Please share what you created! I think people have very different views for what is a good interface, or a tolerable one. I think as a front-end developer and designer I notice a lot of problems most people don't care about.

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https://poolometer.com

I built this frontend with Sonnet 4.5 last Fall and I’m about to “launch” it

I used only prompts, but those prompts included ChatGPT’s research on Memphis design ;)

Using codex for front end design is like asking the valedictorian mega nerd to paint your portrait. Gemini and Claude are both artists.

Sorry but this website screams AI slop to me. Very sparse, lots of cards and random icons and rounded corners, looks like a few messages in to a Claude code session

I intended to share the product rather than the marketing page. I mean, I didn't intend to share this at all yet because it's not done, but when I saw people asking for examples..

But yeah, marketing site looks like a marketing site. I'm realizing now that a lot of my app's internal design/flair is missing from the marketing page -- so I appreciate your looking/commenting

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but no, you did not design a website just fine with AI. It’s not even just “good”. It’s average. Painfully average, to the point of it being easily mistaken for a scam.

Very bad results—as expected from an AI.

Nothing to brag about here.

I completely disagree. Making a average website is the goal of most businesses that are selling an actual product. His website looks modern and welcoming and does not distract or take away from the actual content. This exactly what most people should aim for. Some actual constructive criticism is some o the icons in the example log mood look weird on my phone, with really small emojis overlapping the face emoji

Thank you, agreed, I will iterate on this more.

When I shared this I wasn't thinking about the marketing site -- I meant to show the product itself. Given the feedback here I no longer think it's a good representative as-is, especially with the generic SVGs / rounded cards

No one should aim for average, that’s an incredibly defeatist way of looking at it. Besides, design matters. I know HN is frequented mostly by people with very little interest in such topics, but design absolutely matters.

And yes, while the author’s website is perfectly passable, it is by no means “good”. People pick up on that, they might not know they do, but they do. Design wouldn’t be an industry and a school by itself if it didn’t matter and just the average were good enough.

A lot of people don't make websites for a living. If they are a small business and have other things to worry about in terms of actual work, being able to prompt for a clean, professional website frees up their time and means they don't have to use additional funds to hire a developer.

But you can use squarespace/shopify etc for that…

Nah

I can't help but think you and the other commenters reducing this to slop didn't even try the product. I thought it went without saying that I wasn't posting to show a marketing landing page.

Though it's somewhat clear from the use of tiles with the icon colours and the choice of border colours and all, I quite like it. I would have expected the colour theme from the navbar to be repeated because that's a more non standard palette. I would do that, maybe use a different tile layout (use a tile shape resembling a pool tile? Or even a rectangle signifying a typical pool shape) and create some vector icons for them using the navbar colour scheme.

Well it works but it also looks like every other generic bootstrap based website with not even an original palette choice. Great for a project like this, unusable for any client work

Is this a critique of the marketing page or of the product itself?

I didn't intend for this to be about the marketing page -- what you say is true of just about every marketing page. They're prevalent because they are good at distilling information without overwhelming the user. But I agree I can do better and will work on this more, I really appreciate getting this feedback

Most people look at pool chemistry/maintenance as painfully overwhelming, so for everyone to say this looks boring or mundane is a bit validating. No one has (yet!) said they don't understand the product, it's purpose, or it's value :)

The palette looks a lot like the basic colors from Bootstrap is more the thing. Which is what models tend to do a lot of the time, because you know, that's what's been learned.

Also: - why shadows somewhere and not for other cards? - why so many different font sizes with no hyerarchy? - the paddings and margins are inconsistent and don't convey visual rythm. Sometimes there's too much space and sometimes they are too cramped.

ecc...

Is this an ok amateur website you couldn't have made this quick? Yes. Is that a sufficient value proposition to say that Ai has solved frontend? no.

On a side note: Would you pay the actual real price of these models to achieve this same results, if they weren't subsidized by delusional billionaires? Up to you to respond.

I see that you haven't finished the Automatic Sensor Automation. If you need help with that, contact me, I have experience with embedded product development and I like working on interesting projects :)

Why don’t these llm’s just allow you to pick from a set of standardised templates and then allow you to customise it from there in terms of both functionality and design?

What you have got as output is what I also get as output from llm’s - they suck the soul out of everything. Which is fine in the right context but that shouldn’t we as a species strive for in design imo.

Looks as if AI sucks at frontend tbh.

Is this a critique of the marketing page or of the product?

Some more serious critique of things I noticed within 30 seconds:

- Text isn't selectable on the page.

- The tooltip in the "day 1" to "day 14" cards gets cut off by the border (I see this mistake ALL the time with AI-generated frontends btw)

- It's sparse and very long. I think the information could be condensed in half the size, and it would improve the presentation. This is personal preference though.

- The playbooks' "mark complete" are not persisted on reload or navigation.

All in all, it's functional and quite decent. I agree with the other people saying it looks generic, but I disagree on it being necessarily a bad thing for this kind of product.

I know nothing about pools so I can't comment on the accuracy of the playbooks. It's nice that there's so many of them, but given the LLM vibe of the text I'm slightly suspicious.

Hey, one thing I made with this technique is hartwork.life a simple Wordpress store for a friend. I used open ai to design it for me, and then used the techniques above to get Claude code to implement the proper designs.

I am still trying to learn how to wrangle Claude properly, but I have this Claude.md[1] for that I used to make the website. In particular one of the last rules about using imageMagick for comparison.

I haven’t touched this website in a bit (waiting on client) so now I use playwright mcp for the screenshots and the browser interactions.

[1] https://github.com/panda01/hartwork-woocommerce-wp-theme/blo...

I started with a boilerplate but AI has been huge at letting me get what I want in terms of frontend building when I was never talented at design or css.

I built https://bridge.ritza.co (demo@example.com username and password if you don't want to sign up) as a trello/linear replacement without looking at a single line of code and it's both good enough for me and doesn't have the obvious AI frontend 'look' as it was copying from the starter.

> doesn't have the obvious AI frontend 'look' as it was copying from the starter.

Check out the other reply and scroll down a bit…

I mean the app itself, not really the landing page if that's what you're referring to?

Yeah you’re right my bad.

Highlighted text "no per-seat pricing" is unreadable in dark mode on the home page (dark blue on black). It's surprising for me to see someone use this as an example of decent design because I'm somewhat sure this front page text coloring was never seen/reviewed by a human.

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