[ilrwbwrkhv]

What all these ai apps have is a certain look. it's like the bootstrap look from the early days. you know the app is being made by somebody who doesn't really care about quality.

I think there is going to be a counter reaction towards artisanal apps which will come out of all of this.

Just how WordPress runs 70% of the web but it's 70% of the crap web.

Similarly AI will maybe create 70% of the apps but it will be 70% of the crap apps.

And this is not some sort of reflection on AI. AI is actually great tech, but it's more about the person making the app and the proof of work required to show how much they care about the product. Or in this case these apps will be associated with shady fly-by-night companies trying to sell something.

[BoorishBears]

I'm like AI and I still agree.

It's because models struggle with design, period.

They're not great at getting things like margins right and consistent across an entire app while they're trying to follow instructions for a complex design.

Similarly they understand contrast if prompted directly, but while they're implementing a complex design they'll tend to still end up making poor contrast choices with tons of default fonts everywhere.

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If you iterate more and provide images back to the model, you can start to get something better, but that's tedious and the opposite of what most people using these tools are trying to do.

And V0 defaults to the absolutely awful ui/shadcn which is the worst possible idea as AI driven development becomes popular (let's create a UI library with minimal design tokens, no package name, no guarantees on consistency or versioning because you literally cut and paste it and update it by applying diffs.)

I'm personally excited to see if larger models with multimodal output will be able to generate detailed coherent UIs, that I can then implement using a copilot for tedious parts.

To me that's the ideal flow to get something that doesn't have the "V0 Look"

[tracker1]

I'm going to have to completely disagree on Bootstrap. The use of Bootstrap isn't an indication on a lack of quality, it's an indication on a desire for a decent UI from the start. The fact that it was widely used isn't necessarily reflective of a given app.

Bootstrap, Material, etc. are all just established tools in terms of visual usability and consistency. Many people are far more concerned about having something functional over something that looks completely unique or different.

Personally, I tend to dislike most UI/UX experiments in terms of usability. Not all, but definitely most are just bad compared to what most people are used to.

[danudey]

As someone who is capable of programming, writing HTML, etc., but not of graphic design or UI/UX design, I can tell you that 100% of the reason the little things I wrote used bootstrap is because I really did care about quality, and bootstrap was the quickest and easiest way for me to get something "pretty good" straight out of the gate without having to spend ten times as long tweaking my design to get something a tenth as usable.

The problem is that the people who are lazy about it are obvious about it, so lazy sites that use bootstrap are obviously using bootstrap, and lazy sites that use wordpress are obviously using wordpress, but it's just confirmation bias.

It's just the Girls Suck at Math problem[0] all over again.

[0] https://xkcd.com/385/