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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The LLM writing sameness is bad. Use LLMs to help your writing! But don't include a word they generate, even just a vocabulary adjustment, in your own output. Have them critique structure and flow, spot overused words and passive constructions and dumb picks for topic sentences. It's great for that, and those are all objective improvements in your writing that won't mess up your style.

The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse.

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I've been using claude while trying to setup a new personal site. It's very nice to be able to say "I want a nice looking menu with links to other pages" and it spits out something good enough.

I would feel very weird using LLMs for writing, except for filing out stupid applications. I've had collaborators use LLMs for some technical writing and it's pretty much always borderline nonsense that has the aesthetic of something correct. For creative writing, I feel like heavily using an LLM would defeat the purpose :shrug:

My problem with LLM web design is that it adds a lot of useless stuff all over the place. GPT-5.x is particularly bad for this. If it makes e.g. a dashboard it includes a ton of figures and bits of text all over the place that mostly just say the same thing twice. But of course this is not really an innate problem with the architecture and will probably be sorted out soon, and you'll get good results if you come up with all the copy first and then ask it to make the site.

> The LLM sameness in web design is good.

I'd say that sameness isn't good either from a LLM or solo founder SaaS #171876137.

Absolutely agree. I recently wrote a speech and can't imagine how terribly hack it would have been had I taken the LLM's words as my own. I have second hand embarrassment just thinking about someone writing something important for or about a loved one and using the saccharine crap that was suggested at various points to me. Absolute drivel and a giant flag that you don't actually care enough about the audience to bring your own words.

I use them as a metaphor search and advanced dictionary. Every word is mine, but I get to improve my English and use some lesser-known (to me) expressions.

I have not used to review my writing yet. Is it that good?

> The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse.

See, I disagree. Having seen plenty of Claude generated websites and slide decks, to me it just screams "no effort whatsoever". AI sloppypasta for content, if you will.

If I can see within a few seconds that your website or slide was obviously AI generated, I will doubt its content, how much effort (if any) you've put into it, if it won't have hallucinations, and (especially for websites) if it's even real or a scam farm.

I'm not saying every website has to be unique, but at least tell your prompt to use a font or colour scheme or something specific to you that will make it seem like you've put in some effort and make the result stand out from the slop.

This has been a bugbear of mine (and many other people) since long before the advent of LLMs. It is not an intrinsically virtuous thing for a web design to be "effortful". Some of the most well-regarded UX systems in the industry are defined by rigorous sameness. If the baseline is good, departing from it is as likely to reduce legibility as increase it.

I'm going to play devil's advocate, who cares if it all looks generally the same? I grew up before everyone had dial-up, and I remember back then, when Web surfing on Netscape Navigator, all the websites also had a similar structure. Homogeneity in this context, to me, signals a design system that works best in the moment.

> who cares if it all looks generally the same?

Maybe here lies the crux; for some of us, the web and by extension the internet is about expression and individuality in a way, but all together all accessible by everyone. Everything looking the same instead looks conformist, and ultimately boring, which I guess is what many of us don't want day after day. We want new ideas, presented by the person/group who came up with it, in the way they would express it. The LLM kind of trashes the parts that add up to something interesting.

If you're doing art, do art. Nobody's stopping you. If you're trying to solve a problem for other people, be legible. Legibility and individual expression are goals in tension.

I'm not saying replace the entire thing with a flash animation or something drastically "artsy", just yours.

Colors? Sure, within reason. Layouts? No, bad. Unless you really know what you’re doing and why.

Uniqueness is a costly signal in a sea of information that is all calling for your attention. It signals that you as an author have spent real time on your web page to make it yours.

> who cares if it all looks generally the same?

It's not just about being the same, in which case the worst is that it has less to stand out with.

It's about looking the same as the other AI generated slops out there, which is a strong signal that the content is probably AI slop too, which doesn't merit time being spent on it and trying to understand if it's slop or a human that just used AI generated UI.

Before LLM you could sum up the web as the hamburger menu, bootstrap and materialize. Even Apple threw everything in a hamburger at some point.

Yes, but not everyone used the same colour scheme with the exact same box designs, highlight visuals, etc. etc.

Right, it totally wasn't the case that half the sites on the Internet were vanilla Bootstrap.

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