Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated frontend

Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated frontend

2026-06-12

I've been trying to make progress on a herculean task; I want decent looking<br>programs for personal use which I can generate quickly using AI agents yet I'm<br>a person without taste controlling an AI without taste. I found "one weird<br>trick" that does enough for me, the results are not extra nice but it doesn't<br>make me gag and I'll take what I can.

Style of Slop

I took a simple single web page app (more context below) and kept on asking the<br>agent1 to generate it in different styles. I found that there can be many different<br>styles, all of which feel like slop. Slop is not a<br>distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many others. Even when I got it to<br>make a page to look like X, it looked like X with slop.

Qt

Only one generation stuck out to me. Simply asking<br>it to make it look like a Qt app - to my tasteless eyes - removed almost all<br>feeling of slop. You can check some of the results out here.<br>This is obviously subjective, hard to convince anyone of and I'd like feedback.<br>I'd also like to see more experimentation in this area, are there any other styles or design guidelines<br>which an AI can generate without adding slop on top?

App context

I read this article from Axios<br>-- a forecast of how the electoral college will change in 2030 and I wanted to<br>visualize it. I dumped a picture in to chatgpt and asked it for a 270-to-win<br>style program with the forecast changes so I can see which routes open or close for R's vs D's.

Other apps

It does translate well outside of this example. I've now gotten codex to<br>translate all the other personal software I have to "Qt style" and I think they<br>look much better.

gpt-5.5-thinking in codex cli ↩