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by taintlord223 16 days ago
The UI of that page is so nice, should build a github competitor.

The user profile / contributions and PR UX is pretty much the entire "hub" product since git is a fully separate offline app.

5 comments

> The UI of that page is so nice

Is it? Seems a text description of "Make a website outlining 'How cooked GitHub' is with a modern style" to basically any LLM would produce exactly that UI and design, literally nothing of that design a human had any influence on, besides the ones selecting what training data the used LLMs was trained with.

I think most of us who've tried using LLMs for web-design can recognize that style and design at this point, regardless of model actually used.

Oh wow, I'm in the position to be able to give a peek behind the curtain of something (validly!!) critiqued as AI slop! Exciting.

I originally made the core data functionality of this site for myself because I was curious what the uptime stats for each service were (I build something that heavily depends on GitHub), and to viz the distribution/severity of those incidents, again per-service, over time.

It involved a lot of back-and-forth, and is not a one-shotter; maybe closer to 40-50 shots over maybe ~10 hours of human time. A couple memorable things that made it complicated, irrespective of the UI: sneaky bugs around double-counting time for overlapping incidents, no GitHub API for incidents so you need to puppeteer-scrape the backlog of incidents to get historical data. Although, you all are right to call out that the CSS was three shots, though, and it shows :) I thought it looked so cool in ~January 2026 and now it gives me the ick, too!

For people who are curious about how much direction went into the information architecture/presentation, it was fairly substantial. I wanted a contribution graph style viz and it took many turns to get it working the way I wanted. The swimlane viz for selected-day-incident visualization was also me, because I love swimlane graphs.

I ended up sharing it with some folks and they wanted to reference it, so I put it on a website. So it's jokey for sure, but I take my jokes seriously! I'm grateful that people have feedback on how it can better functionally and visually :)

> Although, you all are right to call out that the CSS was three shots, though, and it shows :)

Totally, my comment was all about the styling and design literally, and is in no way a comment about the data or actual contents of the website, hope you didn't take it that way as well, as it does seem proper in that regard!

Thank you for sharing it, and even greater thank you for sharing the process behind building it, for me that's more interesting almost :)

The Bootstrap of 2020s.
At least Boostrap pages were readable ;)
Compared to near unusable pages that large organizations produce, yes this page is highly effective at conveying information. Who cares how it was produced?
> Who cares how it was produced?

Well, we're at least two people who care, since we were conversing about how good/bad the webdesign is, then you jumped in here :) If you don't care, why bother to reply to people who seemingly do care? What kind of conversation are you expecting here, "Yeah, do tooo"? :|

Could you explain why you care?
Why I care about understanding people who think differently than me? I don't know, always did, not sure exactly why, always been interesting to understand people's perspectives, especially when I personally feel differently, tends to help myself understand me better too, so it's basically a win-win to get people to explain their reasoning.
A lack of effort put into presentation is a signal for low quality. In the past, this might've manifested in using default Wordpress templates, and now it manifests as stock LLM templates instead. Can you make high quality content and present it on a stock template? Sure, you can, but without any prior reason to believe that you put more effort into the content than the template, I'm liable to believe the content is LLM-generated slop as well and therefore untrustworthy and not worth my time.

In this case, it appears more effort was put into content than presentation, which is a possibility and the creator is in the comments saying as such, but humans operate on heuristics by default. The majority of sites that look like this have been a complete waste of my time and I usually just click away at this point.

A lot of software engineers do still care how software is produced. That's a good thing!
People who make web sites care? Isn't this a place to talk about how tech things are made!?
> this page is highly effective at conveying information

Is it though? If the page is near unreadable?

* Almost pure-black background rendering every not-pure-white colour barely readable

* Dark-grey and low saturation colours used almost everywhere, for both fonts and other coloured elements (the orange cells in the calendar are the most readable thing)

* Thin fonts - coupled with the dark grey colours this just adds to the readability issues

* Yet another incredibly long info-dump of a page

And then as far as actual information:

* Vanity metrics as the main information, that is a lot of things with no context or historical information

* A lot of aggregates and rollups that aren't that useful

No, I haven't tried Reader Mode.

It's a good demo for UI state syncing though, I'll give it that.

What really grinds my gears is how easy it is to get better designs out of LLMs. But if you don't ask, you get the default.
as someone who doesn't know how to get better design out of LLMs, can you elaborate?
Have an opinion on the design, imagine something, then tell it to do just that, then iterate. It's when you're unspecific you get the generic, bland and typical LLM design, you just have to be subjective and influence it in some (human) direction.
Also check out https://impeccable.style/, it's really good
what would you ask to get a better design?
Here is a provocative thought - maybe these are the so-called "better designs" from LLMs? It's not like writing English sentences is some huge secret you are sitting on that no one else knows.
> It's not like writing English sentences is some huge secret you are sitting on that no one else knows.

I'd actually say what really makes an excellent engineer stick out among many great engineers, is their ability to communicate clearly and knowing what needs to be communicated vs not, basically being way better at language and communication in general, and they also understand the important of it.

I agree. But I was talking about the "super secret" ability to write prompts, which pretty much anyone can do.
My point being that not everyone writes as good prompts as everyone else, the way you communicate, how clearly and how exact you are matters a lot, much more than you seemingly is under the impression of.

Same goes with the "LLM does web design" example from before, a web designer with great communication skills in web design, will (naturally) have a better prompt for something that'll potentially could look good, compared to a web designer that isn't at good at communicating what they actually want.

Outside design systems I rarely get good CSS from LLMs.

3D type stuff too, it's useless outside boilerplate.

Very little spatial reasoning training, no end-user subjective reasoning inference (Google is starting to though even in unrelated chats), so it's no surprise the LLM doesn't know what you want.

Since I don't even know what I want half the time until I saw it, the subjective reasoning piece is key - that is, being able to predict what I'll want to pretty good accuracy. Then you have your agents etc.

I’m actively working on an alternative Frontend for Forgejo at the moment, completely self hostable, free, and open source.

Moving everything from GitHub to Forgejo and Tangled for now. These outages haven’t effected me for the past month because of this.

Can you elaborate on how your Forgejo frontend will be different than the default one? I'm asking because I've only ever used GitHub, GitLab and Forgejo for longer periods and Forgejo was the fastest and easiest to use for me.
It’s still early days, but I already have it in a useable state so I could share more such as early screencaps.

I plan on focusing primarily on these areas:

- mobile experience is first class, even on old/slow devices

- diff viewer is fast even on extremely large pull requests

- stacked pull request support

- user interface is modern, accessible, and theme-able with a light touch of whimsy

- search is accessible from anywhere

- opinionated keyboard shortcuts and commandk palette from day one

Many other longer term goals that I’m not mentioning here for now while the roadmap is forming.

I'm deleting my GitHub repos today (been planned for a bit) in favour of a local Forgejo Git. I also have not experienced any service disruption since I migrated well over a month ago.
>"The UI of that page is so nice"

Most part screen is taken by picture. Contrast ratio is really low. Hard to read Should they remove that useless banner, current status which is the most interesting part coud've been made visible right away.

I would call this whole thing highly un-ergonomic

The UI is in the default claude code style
Lol it's pretty bad UI