> I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"?
It's just vibes. There really are no reliable, simple criteria to determine if something was made with AI, and that shouldn't be surprising, since the whole point of LLMs is to mimic humans' work.
For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.
Almost everything on that list seems invalid, at least as a simple checklist criteria. All of the tropes involved are ubiquitous in ordinary semi-formal writing, which is why the LLMs are using them in the first place.
It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.
That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.
The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. Many observers on Reddit and elsewhere noted it “looks 100% designed by Claude.”
"The text (especially the "About" section, key concerns, and Erin’s quote) reads like strong AI-generated or heavily AI-edited copy. It has that clean, structured, persuasive style common in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. "
Not this shit again. Someone writes in clean English, people on HN are like iT muST bE Ai caUSe NoONe wouLD wrITe lIKE tHAt
It obviously has signal if the website is all about attacking AI. It shows hypocrisy and a lack of attention to detail that undermines their credibility.
The code is interesting though, it's not minified, it's very readable, and nicely indented with lots of comments.
The curated data center list is just some inline JSON.
The javascript uses var instead of let or const, I'm not sure if this is just style choice, or there is some code post processing.
It doesn't use react, AI seems to almost always opt for react for front end design, unless told otherwise.