31/10/2026

Don't delegate taste

I’m definitely not a designer. I am practical: if it works, it works. But lately, I started seeing so many AI-designed sites and dashboards that my brain just says “AI AI AI -> B-tier work”. Just like the infamous em-dashes.

AI today makes it possible to create a lot of fancy, shiny, incredible tools, but what everyone notices is that LLM-generated UI also follows specific patterns. And I’m not here to critique prototypes and projects that without AI would probably not exist. Creating UIs is HARD and it matters a lot in demos: most of the prototypes I spin up look like this.

Four AI-built dashboards side by side

The AI layout: sidebar, a row of KPI cards, a chart below. Sources: forexfin.tech, pug.sh, stockfly.app, verity.md

What is the problem then? I see two:

If everyone is following the same pattern, this becomes something we immediately associate with slop. It’s generic, boring, and everyone can create it in 2 prompts. Do you want your work to be linked to that? I took great care in designing my website to feel a bit unique and “handmade”: of course I used Claude to help me with Astro internals and lots of CSS tricks, but I don’t want people to judge what I write by hand based on “slop signals” in the design.
More importantly, in interactive tools like dashboards, AI UIs often don’t follow best practices. There are tons of UI smells, like long, basic text explanations scattered around the interface, inconsistency, wrong colors, no accessibility. This makes the experience ugly and frustrating for users.

What can we do about that? You can learn!

DO NOT DELEGATE TASTE.

👉 AI has no taste. 👈

It’s you, unique and amazing human being, who can add your experience, your craft, and your sense of aesthetics to deliver something that is beautiful and works.

Of course, there are skills like Impeccable that can audit and clean your UI. In my experience, they help a lot, but slapping a skill on top is a patch to a deeper issue. It’s like a linter: it fixes what’s wrong, but it doesn’t teach you why it was wrong, and it misses the more nuanced decisions. Plus, Impeccable-patched websites still look the same once you start noticing them.

Follow a UX/UI course (I took Shift Nudge, but you can find many free resources on YouTube). Ask for feedback on your frontend. Or ask your users. And presenting your work in a more aesthetic way, with minimalism, will help you grow because you can apply the same lessons to presentations/slides and visual communication in general.

I also collected a little list of “AI UI smells” my tired brain sees (as of October 2026)

Dashboards

Same card, same 12px radius

KPI cards from eight dashboards with their corner radius

Sources: forexfin.tech, verity.md, swiftcruit.ai, pug.sh, stockfly.app, tryroal.com, easymacros.fit, embersent.com

Everything is a pill

Pills from ten sites, almost all with a 9999px radius

Sources: verity.md, pug.sh, stockfly.app, tryroal.com, boilerroom.ai, easymacros.fit, embersent.com, swiftcruit.ai, deepsql.ai

Tiny uppercase labels everywhere

Eyebrow labels from seven sites

Small, gray, letter-spaced uppercase labels on top of every number and every section. Hard to read, and they add noise without adding information. Sources: forexfin.tech, verity.md, swiftcruit.ai, tokenmaxxer.xyz, agentwatch, embersent.com

Cluttered card details

Six KPI tiles with delta pills, sparklines and truncated labels

Every KPI gets a percentage change and a tiny chart. Compared to what? Over which period? Usually it doesn’t say, and the labels get truncated to make room. Source: demo.pug.sh

Five KPI tiles with trend icons and green or red numbers