Lazy websites

As recently as last summer, I added a new bookmark folder in Safari called “A.I. Slop”. It’s not a folder for articles I suspect to be A.I.-generated; it’s mostly about how the websites look. Some of them are actually good, fun, and useful sites. They just happen to look like every other website designed with A.I. (Claude Design, if my CSS palate identifies it correctly).

You know that look. It’s been documented often, most famously in a New Yorker article that described it as a “Claudian sameness”: off-white/beige background, orange or bright green/yellow accent colour, italic serifs for titles (sometimes just partly), and spaced small-caps subtitles. And don’t forget the cute little capsule buttons, with the thin outline that does something fancy on hover. How original.

This bookmark folder was initiated only as a way to document these many encounters, for future reference if you will. I’m not blaming the people behind these sites for using this style. They want something quick, something that looks good enough, so they use A.I. to do the HTML/CSS/JavaScript layout, and call it a day. I have no problem with that, but regardless, the look of a website tells a lot about the author’s intention.

The excellent newsletter Weekly Thing, from Jamie Thingelstad, recently featured a new Markdown editor called Beauty, so of course it got my attention, especially with this great and on-point introduction:

Feels like there are so many Markdown editors that we will end up with everyone having their own.

So I visited the web page promoting this new app, and, surprise, it is another Claudian clone, and it sets one word in italics in every heading. Brilliant.

Quick tip: if you want people to use your vibe-coded app and you’re telling them beauty is central to the experience — heck, the app is named Beauty after all — maybe treat your web page the same way, instead of reaching for the Calibri font-equivalent of web design.

Besides, wouldn’t the audience of a new Markdown app be particularly aware of this overused Claude design? I guess it’s an OK look if you want to present something to your kid’s school or to your banker, but a Markdown editor audience? Read the room.

It gets worse. This is how the app is described:

A Markdown editor for people who notice things. Free, on your device, and written in plain Markdown you can read without it.

I guess I’m one of the people who notice things then, and that second sentence just isn’t good, is it? Also, what is plain Markdown? Isn’t all Markdown “plain”?

I guess the Claude aesthetic isn’t the only thing bothering me about this web page. I mean look at this:

Machines are welcome everywhere else in the day. This is the room where you think — where a sentence gets moved four times because the fourth position is the right one, and nothing offers to finish it for you.

To finish what? The sentence? Isn’t a computer a machine already? What?

To me, this whole site is lazy at best. Using Claude Design for a website is OK. I think it looks bad, but who am I to judge? But using Claude Design while pretending to build a sophisticated, design-centric app? Not cool. I could maybe forgive the Claudian style if the copy weren’t so careless. This is why I have to point and laugh, Nelson Muntz style.