[jottinger]

This is also fair: it's definitely AI-assisted. I'm not a UI person; I have wonky color perception and synaesthesia, and a lot of experience has taught me that what works for ME in UI is what... uh... doesn't work AT ALL for other people.

So it's a problem: I can "hand write it" and have you say "mein Gott, who came up with THIS rubbish? Are they blind? Are they trying to blind US?" or I can have an AI spin something up that looks fairly bland and normalish, but fulfills the specifications I require, and have users go "this looks like a blog that pretty much anyone would write," except the content was always meant to be the differentiator.

And the UI is actually designed to be pluggable, anyway; what I work on is the backend REST services, and the UI goes through those services for all data - it has no access to the underlying datastreams, at all. Everything goes through https://api.bytecode.news, and the intent was that if someone was an awesome UI coder and wanted to show their stuff, they'd write their UI using CoolThing and I'd put it into the system at coolthing.bytecode.news, and if it totally dominated the "normal UI" I'd promote that to the default UI and just leave the other one out there as a reference (the UI you see is also hosted at https://nextjs.bytecode.news, as the "canonical url" for that implementation.)

That way, if someone's going "ooo I could make Struts sing with this" for some reason, well, the API endpoints are published with OpenAPI; go for it. Show the world.

The UI was always secondary to the concepts that drive the information system, and the content was meant to be more important than how the content looked. I'd rather deliver information than flash.

[culi]

I didn't mean any disrespect. I just think AI design is the opposite of what you're saying it is. It's flashy and distracting and filled with unnecessary animations that often hinder readability. I think a much simpler design would be beneficial to the readability.

Whether that's accomplished with LLM tools or not

[jottinger]

Also fair. I kinda thought the design for the UI was fairly normal - it looks like a lot of standard Wordpress themes would look, with an admin panel, a primary focused "recent post" and a list of other recent posts in descending order of attention. From a UX perspective, I thought it was okay; the animated circuit thing was my idea, but I tried to keep it VERY in the background, I wanted it to be fun and not a focus.

If you have ideas about what a proper UX would look like, I'm all ... eyes? ears? UX is not my thing and I am willing to consider breaking the molds to make something more awesomer if I can.