Why does LLM generated websites feel so "LLM generated".
Its like a bootstrap css just dropped. People still giving "minimum effort" into their vibe code/eng projects but slap a domain on top. Is this to save token cost ?
To be honest if it were my software I'd probably give it a "Prof. Dr." style page and call it a day, then get called out on Hackernews with "haven't you heard of CSS? It's 2025, you actually want to entice people to use your software, don't you?" or similar.
they feel like that because people building them are not generally designers and they don't care about novelty or even functionality as long as it looks pleasing to the eye. Most of them probably include "make it look pretty" etc in the prompt and LLMs will naturally converege to a common idea for what is "pretty" and apparently that is purple gradients in everything and if you don't have taste, you can't tell any better, beacuse you're doing a job you don't fundamentally understand.
This skill demonstrates how to tell an agent to make a non-generic website [1].
These are the money lines:
NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families
(Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes
(particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable
layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks
context-specific character.
Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel genuinely
designed for the context. No design should be the same. Vary between
light and dark themes, different fonts, different aesthetics. NEVER
converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for example) across
generations.
Because their goal isn’t to build a website, but to promote and share their product. Why would anyone invest more time than necessary in a tangential part of the project?
Fair enough. I did not see this as a promotion of the product and more of as a show experimental side project. But if they really want to promote the product, the llm design isnt helping giving any confidence. A blog post would have sufficed.
It's because LLM tools have design guidelines as a part of the system prompt which makes everything look the same unless you explicitly tell it otherwise.
To give an example that annoys me to no end, Google's Antigravity insists on making everything "anthropomorphic", which gets interpreted as overtly rounded corners, way too much padding everywhere, and sometimes even text gradients (huge no-no in design). So, unless you instruct it otherwise, every webpage it creates looks like a lame attempt at this: https://m3.material.io/
I'd hazard a guess that it's based on what the LLM can "design" without actually being able to see it or have taste and it still reliably look fine to humans.
And now Perplexity has mailed all of those "free" users to add a "card" (wont charge now) to continue with its free pro offer. Apart from airtel perplexity ran a lot of college based programs where students were basically referring each other for money.
They also have 12 months free when subscribing through Paypal. There's almost zero chance I remain a customer after those 12 months are over, since I find ChatGPT way more valuable.
Thanks for clarifying. It looks like I needed to refresh my memory of the browser APIs.
Reading further, this API only works remotely for CSS via chrome.scripting.insertCSS. For JS, however, the chrome.scripting.executeScript JS needs to be packaged locally with the extension, as you said.
It seems the advanced method is to use chrome.userScripts, which allows for arbitrary script injection, but requires the user be in Dev Mode and have an extra flag enabled for permission. This API enables extensions like TamperMonkey.
Since the Claude extension doesn't seem to require this extra permission flag, I'm curious what method they're using in this case. Browser extensions are de facto visible-source, so it should be possible to figure out with a little review.
That's the javascript included in the plugin crx. This is about code retrieved over API being executed (so that code being run cannot be approved by chrome webstore team)
Its a "tool call" definition in their code named 'execute_javascript', which takes in a "code" parameter and executes it. The code here being provided by the LLM which is not sitting locally. So that code is not present "in the plugin binary" at the time when chrome store team is reviewing it.
I'd very curious to know how they managed to deal with this then. There's always the option of embedding quickjs-vm within the addon (as a wasm module), but that would not allow the executed code to access the document.
