Tailwind and slop apps
Welcome to my blog!
My name is Brian Douglas. I'm a husband to my wife and father of two girls.<br>We live together on our farm in the hills of Donegal, Ireland. We have sheep,<br>chickens, rabbits, and some dogs and cats.
I also have a hobby, which is computer science. I have a master's degree in the subject, and<br>it's handy for paying the bills.
This blog is dedicated to that hobby and my thirst for knowledge and understanding in regard to<br>the field of computer science.
I hope you'll find some of my writing interesting. If you do, then email me, and we can have some<br>correspondence, like it's 1998.
Tailwind is great. It's a quick way to style a webpage and offers incredible<br>flexibility. The problem is, despite Tailwind being incredibly customisable<br>I can instantly tell when a site is using Tailwind. It has a certain look and<br>feel that is hard to shake. A few years ago this "look and feel" was fresh and<br>classy. Now thanks to LLMs prefering to use Tailwind to style a page rather than<br>traditional stylesheets, the same "look and feel" has become an indicator of a<br>slop product.
So to prove my point, I went on to hacker news and searched for "Show HN". Ignoring<br>all the links to vibe coded github repos. I clicked on a few vibe coded apps and,<br>with 100% honesty, the first four I clicked on were using a variant of a Tailwind<br>"frontpage" template on their site. I've added screenshots of them below so you can<br>see for yourself.
The point I'm trying to get across here, is that if you have made a product that you<br>genuinely care about and want others to recognize, then spend time and pour at least<br>an ounce of creativity into the brochure site. Prompting an LLM to "make a stylish<br>homepage for my product" is not a good idea. People can see through it instantly. The<br>reason being, that LLMs predominantly chose a Tailwind template to use as the base for<br>the page. After seeing this template reused a thousand times, prospective users/clients<br>will instantly be put off. Prompted advertisingly material is the biggest red flag I see<br>when it comes to software. It indicates that the software has been vibe-coded and rushed<br>out.
Apache Burr
A python library to simplyify something that is already simple.
Spark
Creates a synopsis for LinkedIn?... doesn't LinkedIn already do this?
And the price cards.
Labilo
Summarise a webpage into a card, but you have to pay for some extras.
And the price cards.
Artist Kit
I'm not sure what this is. Generates a webpage for DJs? but you pay for some extras.
And the price cards.