Design Slop Cop: how AI-generated does this website look?

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Fly.io

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2–5 people

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Ongoing

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Yes

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Show 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