The number of dark‑mode sites I’ve seen where the text (and subtext) are various shades of dark brown or beige is just awful. For reference, you want a contrast ratio between the text and background of at least ~4:1 to be on the safe side.
This isn't even that hard to fix - hell you can add the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to a skill.
A hundred self-thought devs not implementing accessibility standards is a different problem than a school teaching 100 students lacking these standards in its curriculum.
I would rather go back to when all side projects used Bootstrap than this purple-on-purple-with-glowing-purple mess of stuff we have now.
It’s insane though how many dark mode websites with purple there are right now, how come all LLMs converged on that style?
Plus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text into every visible inch of the page without some intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).
Maybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as "cool looking" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.
FWIW, there’s also an official frontend-design skill for CC [1]. A while back I incorporated some of the more relevant guidance from WCAG into it [2].
[1] - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
Tldr I would expect different outcomes with 4.7 with not being specific.
For reference, in the .claude/settings.local.json
{
"model": "claude-opus-4-6[1M]"
}In other words, I've found people like the above to think of LLMs as fairly static, as if we couldn't change their behavior with a simple sentence, instead of complaining about it. It's strange, to me at least.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary
Another possibility (although I’ve never actually tried this myself) is an MCP server that someone built specifically to connect to Lighthouse, which includes accessibility testing as part of its benchmarks.
Those of us who care that technology be accessible to as many people as possible, such as low vision users, find it relevant. You can ignore it if you wish.
See Rawls 'Original Position' on why you should care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
Now if only there were an ADA for website performance...
I hope you remember that well into your adult life.
Your hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.
Your limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.
You brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. You brought this problem upon others. People won't care about your problems. Why should they, when you didn't care about theirs?
> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.
Accessibility is legally required and not difficult to add.
Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people? Refusing to provide accessibility in your service is no different. You are actively discriminating in a way which could be illegal and certainly is unethical and amoral.
It's not even about age.
You can twist an ankle playing basketball and need accessibility features like ramps and grab bars.
You can get hit in the eye by a bit of debris when your toy drone crashes, and need help reading a screen while it heals.
People who don't think they need accessibility only have to wait. Everyone gets their turn.
Bad analogy, as none of those traits require any accomodation in a website or app.
Not that I disagree with the premise. Almost everyone will eventually have trouble reading small, low contrast text or details on their phone or screen, if nothing else.
Because Western society functions for the common good. We are not animals fighting for survival in the wilderness.
And because a web site not being accessible is a liability. Target was sued and had to pay millions for having your attitude.
But, context of how they were raised
That comment was wild
You will.
Accessibility that can be had on client side should not be a concern on server side.
“Don’t have bad vision if you didn’t want to be technical!”
(came across that way)
It also doesn't solve the issue if somebody is browsing your site on a mobile phone where the extension might not even work properly.
WCAG is not difficult - but it does require some modicum of effort.
…right now, today. But they might consider “build a world for ‘old’ you”
Stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it yourself.
Just get some concrete and some lumber, and build that wheelchair ramp.
You can even hire a contractor to follow you around town all day building them as needed.
the wheelchair is not built into the site, and only requires a few hooks or the odd helping hand to work.
mapping back to software, and especially websites, your user agent is your user agent. it should render websites in the way you want to see them, regardless of what colours the designer chose.
an AI accessibility browser is more like a wheel chair than a ramp
It depends what your goals are. All of my side projects were started because I wanted to learn something. Using a "skip to the end" button wouldn't really make sense for me.
Going off of the two screenshots in the OP, neither of those were about frontend.
So if the choice is spending time designing a more human frontend or spending more time on the core product, I don’t fault people for choosing the latter.
Now if the core product also stinks, that’s a different issue.
Then chances are it’ll be subpar either way. Every type of cheese, in six hours? The CSS isn’t the bottleneck there, it’s information hierarchy and the information itself. You can’t possibly learn about the history of cheeses and summarise it and organise it for a website in that amount of time. Writing the website code isn’t the lengthy part.
> That people choose to not to learn about topics they don't find interesting because they'd rather learn about topics they do find interesting, doesn't automatically make them dumber than you.
Why so rough? I don’t see any judgement of character or intelligence in the comment you’re replying to.
Besides, the idea of paying 200$/month to have the privilege of using ai in my side projects… it’s just stupid for me
It is also very fun to tackle hard engineering problems.
I enjoy both, and tend to oscillate between wanting to do a lot of one, or a lot of the other. I do recognize that I've been coding for so long that it's much more exciting to be solving "product problems" rather than "engineering problems", I suspect mostly because it's the area I've explored the least (of the two).
And there is a LOT to learn about a domain while you're working on the problem, even without even looking at the code.
I was surprised to realize that some of my friends don't share this sentiment. They take very little pleasure from being product developers, and instead really just enjoy being engineers who work on the code and the architecture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just found it very surprising. To be honest, I guess perhaps what I found the most surprising is that I am not one of those people?
And when you get your product in the hands of users can finally get that direct feedback line to/from them and can start working on the problems they find and thinking of product (not necessarily engineering) solutions for them? Man, that's so satisfying. It's like falling in love with coding all over again.
I anticipate that people with a builder spirit and strong technical background are going to be able to build awesome things in the future. What the Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack of today will be able to build?
I have a long list of projects that I have thought about but never implemented because of lack of time and energy. LLMs have made that happen.
I like designing programming languages and developing parsers/compilers and virtual machines. But the steps beyond type-checking are so incredibly boring (and I don't like using C or LLVM as targets) that I have done the front end 15-20 times over the last couple of decades and the back end only 3-4 times.
This time, I spent two weeks developing a spec for the VM, including concurrency, exception handling and GC. And I led the AI through each subsystem till I was satisfied with the result. I now have a VM that is within 8x of C in tight loops. Without JIT. It is incredible to be able to allocate arrays of 4B elements and touch each element at random, something that would make python cry.
Working on the compiler now.
If it helps compare, you might have a full desire to manage a tricky server and all the various parts of it. It’d be removing the fun to just put a site on GitHub pages rather than hosting it on a pdp11. But if you want to show off your demo scene work you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed out on the fun just putting things up on a regular site.
(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)
I don't think this is overwhelmingly the reason though - I think many are just all AI, but if the project is technically interesting it might be sufficient to get me to grimace through it.
AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.
Before, it was like:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)
Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.
- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't
- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision
I've enjoyed using AI for both cases.
git worktrees as an example.
This.
Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.
I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.
The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.
because I value the process of learning by doing
What is the urgency in completing side projects? Commercial projects are usually the ones where you have some urgency.
I wouldn't use it because one of the reasons that I do side projects is to enjoy myself and learn new things, and these tools tend to do much of the stuff that I enjoy and learn from.
There could be many reasons to not use ai in a case like this, eg: retaining more control, breaking some new ground, because it’s fun, because it’s personal, etc.
I'm primarily a backend developer. Most of my work has been in serving json or occasionally xml. Spring Shell in Java is something that I'm closer to working with than a GUI. When I've done web work, the most complimentary thing that was said about my design is "spartan".
So, if I was to have a web facing personal project... would black text on a white background with the default font and clunky <form> elements be ok? I know we are ok with it on the HN Settings page. They work... but they don't meet what I perceive other people have as minimum standards for web facing interfaces today.
And so... if I was to have some web facing project that I wanted to show to others, I'd probably work with some AI tooling to help create a gui, and it would very likely have the visual design traits that other AI generated front ends have.
Ethical concerns, environmental concerns, political concerns and legal concerns.
Does your idea stand out? Then AI can get ~50% done, and you still have to fill in the gaps. People who do that right will not look very LLM-assisted unless you dig through the commits. That's how it should be done, imo.
Because generally speaking, stuff that is AI generated is largely devoid of value. If it’s AI generated anyone can prompt it into existence, so the likely hood that someone will find value in and use what you made is approximately zero. What you made is likely low quality, since you vibe coded it with little effort and that always shows. Lastly you don’t even get to experience the joy of solving problems yourself or the pride of having built something with your own skill.
Using some AI to build something is fine, it’s when it’s used so much that it’s immediately obvious on the packaging - the show hn post, the readme, the code itself.
It's easy to prompt some stuff into existence over a weekend. It is hard to polish it, fix bugs, have tidy UX, and so on. There's this meme going around (maybe from that Silicon Valley show?) where the grey-beard says he is valued for his taste and his conviction in that taste. This is -- fortunately or not -- reality.
Vision and taste won't get you the whole way, but they are a huge part of the equation. This is why Apple, for example, was so successful under Jobs: he had vision, and he had good taste.
Why would you put forth anything but this line?
The only side projects I do is contributing to an existing project. You can’t use AI for it because of provenance matters. But why would I want to? I want to program.
For private side projects this makes sense if you want the outcome more than the process. But even then I am skeptical. There is the benign effect of learning things: the more you know the more you desire to to know because you get more and more aware of the infinite horizon of not-knowing. I haven’t experienced this myself for “building”, but based on anecdotes I’m not psyched about the psychological profile of getting everything for free (in terms of programming). Some people seem to get manic about it. What’s the point of realizing your desires if that just means producing more of them? And the key to satiating that unsatiable desire is to put tokens into the alienation machine.
For side projects that you publicize (show hn) this makes less sense. There is a freaking glut of “I built this” with the predictable feedback around the Net, in these times: why the F would I take the time to test what you have “built” when I can “build” the same thing and get exactly what I want?
Getting a McDonald's saves time too
My interest in a project has always been rooted in the idea that its interesting to see other knowledgable people or people learning to attack a problem for themselves. I have really never cared about the "thing that it does." I liked reading the code, dissecting attempts and really learning about the person that wrote it through their line by line decisions.
That is now all gone. The "noise ratio" of slop projects which have none of the previously interesting thought and intentionality have drowned out the "rigorous projects."
It's actually very sad for me, it was something I previously really enjoyed. I am looking for a board that aggregates projects that still have that interesting "human factor" i would subscribe in a heartbeat.
I've never met someone who has spent more time coding than me (although for sure such people exist). I love writing code, I consider it an art form. I don't mind spending days optimizing a function until the code is beautiful (at least to me).
I also have dozens of projects in mind that I don't have time to go through; cue the meme of "I bought another domain that will sit empty for years", I have like 60 of those right now.
AI assistance/vibecoding, whatever you call it, has been a massive win for me because now I can sketch out those projects in a weekend, put them out and then, if I decide they're worth spending more time on, tradcode the parts that I really care about. As it is for many others, AI is another tool in my toolbox. It's the pencil and paper I use to draft stuff.
It's tricky because I do get that we all want to get rid of low-value AI slop, but also, it wouldn't be fair to me, and people like me, to have authentic projects discredited just because you used AI in the creative process; not just as part of it, but perhaps even to write ALL of the code. And then, why would that be a bad thing?
What difference does it make if it was me writing functionally identical code letter-by-letter instead of writing a comprehensive prompt and guiding AI to do as I wish?