[majormajor]

Yeah polish + consistency but also with busy-ness is a hallmark from what I've seen. It can be tamed, but takes effort.

That said, the provided examples definitely are a clear step up from the "default" you'd get. Like how some bootstrap-templated sites did it much better than others, while the best made it nearly invisible.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Busy-ness is a key tell. AI isn't economic in any sense. Applies to text, images, video, and sometimes to code.

There's a lot of detail, but most of it is decoration for the sake of distraction.

AI isn't good at understatement, subtext, or (ironically) elegant distillation.

[weiliddat]

What you said made me think that it's similar (not entirely the same, but adjacent) to those make-a-website for $XX or buy-a-template era of websites.

If we think about that as the intended competition (and not websites corps spent millions on design/polish/copy), I'd argue that AI (model + coding agent + skills + whatever) is doing a better job overall. Most agencies don't spend enough effort in understanding what you want, or hire juniors and bill them as seniors. It's almost always late, overbilled, somewhat what you said you wanted but not really, and technically terrible.

[crote]

I disagree.

The Neon Ramen example look really cool at first glance, but if you spend more than a second or 5 looking at it you keep finding visual glitches, inconsistent design, and elements which don't belong. It's nice for a brainstorming phase, but that's about it.

If you were to go with a buy-a-template you'd probably end up with a less flashy design, but at least it'd be consistent. Those templates are built by combining standard styled elements to create a bunch of common design patterns. Sure, nothing looks great, but nothing looks bad either!

If you don't really care about a website, going for a ready-made template is by far the safer, easier, and cheaper option. And if you go for something like Squarespace, you don't even need an agency at all.