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.
I 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.
Looking the same is not itself the problem. This is a same-looking that indicates a lack of human thought underlying it. That is a problem, and it is concerning to me if one does not think this.
Honestly, 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.
Interesting, 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.
This 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.
I’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.
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
Where do you consider the line here to be? What if the design and the core code is mine but I use AI to apply it to additional elements, pages, etc (something I do a fair amount)? What if I designed, or had a very good human designer design, an entire well-crafted design system and design language in Figma but feed it to AI to help turn it into static assets?
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
It's not like the before times were a paradise but putting together anything like this took time. If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research. In LLM land you can just tell Claude to fart out an investigation in a few minutes and never invest time in it.
>If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
You don’t get it do you?
The content is wrong and this aesthetic means: you cannot trust this.
As someone who makes a living making website I wouldn’t have expected the tide to turn so fast.
Clients now hire me to absolutely NOT have this aesthetic
> Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
> I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
As long as these comments come up, people haven't given up against this flood. It's a good sign. Also consider cause and effect. These comments only exist because of AI content.
Another issue is that "This site was made with AI" just doesn't really add much to the conversation. There will very likely come a time soon when 95-99% of the sites that make the HN front page will be AI-assisted or AI-generated. What are these people going to do? Comment "This site was made with AI" on every single article? Why not just add a disclaimer to the top of HN that says "Most of these articles are made with AI" so the commenters don't have to log in just to tell us each and every time?
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
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.
One of these things was wholesale systemized actual state-run murder. The other is a range that encompasses big companies run by awful people and also a binary blob I can run on a GPU in my basement.
Why 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.
I would say, because not everyone cares as deeply as you do.
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
> Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
If 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
The 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.
> The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft.
I don’t believe that at all, and it’s not implied in my comments. What I’m saying is that the value isn’t in the style, that part can also be replicated. It’s not in the content, that can be replicated. It’s the same for >90% of startup ideas people come up with when discovering agent coding. You were able to create a cool SaaS project in a weekend? Congrats. Any other dev can point their LLM to your website/app and make a clone in even less time. The safe ones have a high barrier of entry, such as hardware, or similar, but the vast majority is trivially cloneable.
I don’t know what that will result in. I assume we will be chasing more human experiences, but I have no idea.
In 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.
Yeah 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.
New 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...
Please, 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.
It 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.
As 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.
I'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.
Looks 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.
Also 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.
That'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?
Very 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”
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.
I 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.
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.