I think what you’re talking about is real, but it’s only part of the problem. The issue is it’s poor design. There’s a lack of consistency that is really off putting. Spacing is inconsistent and doesn’t create a sense of visual hierarchy. Buttons, inputs, selects, call-outs, table cells are barely distinguishable from each other, but also inconsistent within their own categories. The copy is also confusing. I don’t even know what this does.

This is, once again, about diversity and the lack thereof (and I don't mean diversity in a political sense).

LLMs seem fundamentally incapable of producing truly diverse outputs, truly creative and different responses to the same prompts in different runs. Because you and me use the same Claude, if you want a website and I want a website, we'll get (almost) the same website. This is not some BS about "the average of its training data", most of the LLM style (both in design and in text) comes from reinforcement learning. You could RL Claude to produce a very different style, but you couldn't RL it to produce a different style for me than it does for you.

I think this is also where a lot of the complaints about "Claude writing" come from.

I don't know, I think you have a point that aesthetic preferences are subjective and shifting. But there is also all-caps monospaced text with emdashes in it on the site; just an example of something I think would not turn into a fashion at any point because it just looks silly (subjectively, to me at least). Thus I don't think the antipathy of people towards these llm-generated landing pages is entirely based on associating it with other LLM sites, there is at least an element of it clearly not being through as much human review and interaction as a hand-crafted landing page necessarily would be.

> Its why sites that are "well designed" but obviously just use a squarespace or wix template feel so cheap.

Same. I honestly am very satisfied with the aesthetics of free Wordpress blogs. Like Terry Tao has. I also have one.

This is a problem that i'm actively working on (https://fudge.design), what i've realised is that it's simply not an issue of capability - given a well crafted site and a competently written visually aware harness, most recent models can replicate that website.

So it's what lies between saying "I want x website" -[.....] -> Code+Assets

The issue has to do with specification fidelity, in short a grill-me style aesthetic interrogation using illustrative tooling - ascii diagrams for specifying layout, copy and user-flow, image-gen mockups for higher fidelity mockups. References are also very important for nailing down the aesthetical qualities. I've noticed it's far better vs purely text description to simply gather up a mood-board telling the llm to find commonalities and come up with a design system and brand guide.

So I don't believe it's an unsolvable problem, it's simply a lack of effort on the implementors part. Also there's probably some survivor's bias here (you won't notice an intentionally designed vibe-coded site)

For example here's one reference exploration site i recently made with grok: https://explorer.withfudge.com/

I really want to create a nosology of common generic memes that can be applied to literally anything without context. Saying that the evaluators are just stupid and arbitrarily chasing the fashion of the week instead of the evaluators possibly actually latching onto some structure is a tale as old as time.

What do you mean flannel is outdated? I never got that memo.

flannel is forever.