How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it

(railcode.dev)

24 points | by yakkomajuri 44 minutes ago

6 comments

  • ananmays 33 minutes ago
    A designer did make it! The process you undertook is called design!
    • SV_BubbleTime 6 minutes ago
      I had this out with one of my employees, they were giving me shit for using Claude Design, and just how many iterations it took to get what I wanted.

      I explained that exactly what design is I just lack the skills to do it in illustrator and Photoshop but yes, no one gets it right the first time.

    • arecsu 32 minutes ago
      Literally yes
      • Gualdrapo 24 minutes ago
        > Most times I'll grab ideas from multiple places, combine them, and endlessly iterate on them until I get to something I'm happy with.

        The "designer" happens to not to be human. At that point it just sounds like going to a website template store and scrolling endlessly through options until you find a template you'd say "meh, this will do".

  • fiatpandas 24 minutes ago
    OP, you accidentally invented the design process that they teach in design school. You can officially call yourself a designer.

    1) have a high level functional goal

    2) be inspired and think of a motif

    3) go wide within that motif and explore

    4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate

    5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.

  • chmod775 36 minutes ago
    Answer: because a human designed it in an iterative process. LLMs just wrote the code.
    • phoronixrly 34 minutes ago
      And it still carries some of the cliche features of LLM-'designed' sites.
      • yakkomajuri 30 minutes ago
        It definitely does. Particularly under the hero imo.

        Doing this is really time-consuming so certainly there were some corners cut -- need to also focus on product after all!

        Particularly after we changed a lot of the messaging (after this post was written) I slacked off a bit. Keen to hear what's most annoying to you though, always looking for feedback.

        • bob1029 26 minutes ago
          The way the body content animates at page load is pretty annoying.
      • preommr 25 minutes ago
        like what?

        The website is simple enough that any design decicion could just as well ahve been done by a real human.

        The em-dashes, and the gradients were always egregious because they're strong opinionated decisions. This is just a straighforward, clean, tasteful website (really what most sites should aim for).

  • uncivilized 33 minutes ago
    Yes, if the designer was named Claude or Astra, then it does indeed look like that designer created it.
  • thefourthchime 27 minutes ago
    I love this because, it reminds me that when people hate AI, They hate low effort AI slop.

    This website demonstrates a tremendous amount of human effort, and it walks through the iterative design process that led to the final result. Taking inspiration, trying out ideas, tinkering—that's design.

  • slopinthebag 25 minutes ago
    So because of the article's premise, I'm going to be a bit of a dickhead. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, because it's not a judgement on the developers. I have also shipped way worse vibecoded frontends and this is coming from a UI guy, so it's not about being an AI hater or anything.

    Your site looks like an AI made it.

    Now there is an actually easy fix: just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic. And then I could buy that it was human-designed, at which point, it basically was. And just AI-coded.

    Otherwise it's quite cool, and well done.

    • preommr 16 minutes ago
      > just replace the glass panels and tabs with something that actually fits the rest of the aesthetic.

      Where is this glass?

      Is it the lighter green cards on the home page? That's not really glass, that's just a different a lighter color scheme. The tabs also look fine.

      • slopinthebag 12 minutes ago
        i'm not going to argue with you about aesthetics. taste and all that. but to me there are clearly divergent aesthetics with the rest of the site, and some elements. my suggestion is to just align them, and it will be more cohesive.
    • yakkomajuri 23 minutes ago
      This makes sense yeah, I guess following a similar approach used on the buttons for the tabs as well. Point taken!
      • slopinthebag 19 minutes ago
        Yeah that's the only parts of the design that I could identify as being clearly AI generated, or at least is ai-coded, if it was human designed. Including the panels for demo, pricing, etc.

        The rest of the design kind of reminds me of stardew valley's site, which is quite cute.

        Hope you don't take this as evil criticism, overall I'm a big fan.

        edit: it's not even AI coded, more like incohesive, and with the context of the article...but a simple fix and overall well done ;)

        • yakkomajuri 18 minutes ago
          Not at all! I agree with what you said