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For the past six months or so, we’ve been working really hard to get the AIs (or as I like to call them, the robots in the sky) to do a bunch of magical things. One of them just so happens to be web design.

Web design is not a new thing for me. I’ve been fascinated with it since I was twelve. (I am currently much older than twelve.) I’ve been fortunate enough to do web design-related work, in some form or another, for more than a decade.

Getting AI to make really good-looking websites isn’t a new problem either. I started working on it in 2024, and helped release a feature around it at a previous company in 2025. It’s only been two years. With how fast AI moves, it feels like a decade ago!

For this post, I want to share some of the observations and learnings we’ve picked up along the way, especially with the big boy models like Opus 4.8 and the recently released GPT-5.6 Sol.

Pictures over prompts

If you take one tip from this post, let it be this: giving AI visual context is one of the most powerful and efficient ways to help it produce good design.

I realized this very early, right when the model providers added vision. And it makes sense. That’s how we as humans think about, riff on, and work with design. You look at pictures. Lots of them. Things you like, things you don’t, until you start to form an opinion about what you want to make.

Imagine working with an interior designer. They’d show up with a lookbook: paint swatches, material samples, hardware finishes, a few nice photos torn out of a magazine, something they found on Pinterest. Just to see what you like and what you don’t. The purpose isn’t to smash it all together into a final design. It’s to help you develop a point of view.

Speaking of lookbooks: Lookbook is literally the name of one of our features. It helps users redesign their site when, for whatever reason, they’re not happy with it.

Using GPT Image 2.0, which is absolutely phenomenal at creating web design mock-ups by the way (saving that for a separate post), we’ve meticulously generated over a thousand designs meant to capture different aesthetics and industries. From the light and playful child care vibe to the sleek, dark, modern look every SaaS company seems to love. This “window shopping” experience exists to help you find what you’re looking for, or discover what you didn’t know you wanted.

Whether you pull something from Lookbook or bring screenshots of your own inspiration, do not, and I repeat, do not, skip this step.

You will have (way) more success with “here’s a screenshot, make this exactly” than with clever, compounding ways of sculpting a design.md file and writing a meta prompt for your prompt to do this and that. (Try it with Ploy, Claude Code, Codex, or whatever you’d like.)

Hand the same screenshot to both models, though, and they take it to different places.

Opus tends to hold a balanced type scale, even when the design is a little less standard. Sol reaches for very big text, especially on hero headings. GPT-5.5 was egregious about this. 5.6 is better, but it still does it sometimes.

Sol handles the more creative layouts, though. Intricate bento boxes, for example. Opus plays those safer.

Neither instinct is wrong. It just helps to know which one you’re arguing with.

Slop

I suppose you can’t have an AI design post without talking about the giant dirty elephant in the room. Slop.

To the credit of every single model provider out there, the base-level design capabilities of AIs in mid-2026 far exceed whatever the heck we had back in 2024 and 2025.

AI slop in web design is trickier to articulate than the stuff you see out of image or video generation. It doesn’t stick out as sorely as a sixth finger. (Usually.)

To me, slop isn’t a specific choice of font or color, like a serif on terracotta orange over a creamy background (looking at you, Claude). It’s generic design that gets a little too excited about decorating. Everything gets a flourish. Nothing gets a reason.

It’s kind of like if someone wanted to get you a gift, and they asked, “Hey, do you like frogs?” and you said, “Sure.” And the next day they show up with frog-themed things all over the place. A shirt covered in frogs. A pen with a miniature frog on the clicker end. A bobblehead frog, somehow with “I love frogs” printed across the bottom. All delivered in a nice, clean, cream-colored box with a terracotta orange bow, and a smile that says “Clean. You’re absolutely right.”

Sol has a tell too. It leans into the (micro) patterns you see all over SaaS websites. It likes to put things in boxes. Sharp boxes. Content divided up by horizontal and vertical lines.

Claude over-decorates. Sol over-structures.

Signal

To stop the slop, you have to get the model to focus on the signal inside the frog-filled noise, as...