hubraumhugo · HN
Design slop is the feeling that tells you a website is purely AI-generated. This is an attempt to classify the design patterns behind it.
Applying this scoring to recent ShowHN submissions shows that about a third of the submissions show medium to heavy design slop: https://slopcop.adriankrebs.ch/show
How the scoring works:
- A headless browser loads each site (Playwright)
- A small in-page script analyzes the DOM and reads computed styles
- Every pattern is a deterministic CSS or DOM check.
There are false positives, but my manual QA run verified it’s maybe 5-10%.
Is design slop bad? Not really, just uninspired. After all, the web was never about the fanciest design, and before the AI era, everything looked like Bootstrap.
However, there is a difference between trying to craft your own design and just shipping with whatever defaults the LLMs output. And the same has been the case pre-LLM when using CSS/HTML templates.
I guess people will get back to crafting beautiful design