It’s getting tiring to hear at this point, but the Claude voice comes through clearly in this post, and it’s a little off-putting. If even an important product release doesn’t warrant full human attention, where will we draw the line?
The post effectively communicated what it needed to. It seemed both written and structured in a way that was optimized for human consumption.
If they used AI to write this and that gave them more time to volunteer their time towards developing this fantastic piece of open source software, then this all seems like a good thing to me.
It is clearly not effectively communicated if the tool used to write it stamps its signature in such a way that it distracts from the great work they’re doing.
Its only distracts the distractable. Does anyone ever read product announcement blog posts like they were great literature? Ive always just skimmed, theyve always been throwaway writing to me. I’d rather the humans spend more time on the actual creative challenges in a project.
Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I use plannotator with claude a lot and have much better time, since I asked for a specific styleguide.
I used "CD era MSDN reference and Raymond Chen blogging style" as a starting prompt for the styleguide and my work ability to digest AI plans raised a lot.
Couldn't recommend it more. Humble, insightful and respecting the reader
I'm asking to scan projects on gitlab, go through some docs to find more grounding material, write a subarticle (in the same style), scan logs on the test env, issue some curls, etc.; until the whole article is digestible - in the "backing knowledge graph" department.
They are, and I am. While I don't use the words "LLM slop", I do have the urge to instantly stop reading any piece of writing that was obviously default Claude output with no effort to make it sound even remotely human written.
I'd rather read natural sounding, non-repetitive, and actually useful LLM text than the majority of reddit comments (including the serious ones) for instance.
I may complain that I don't like the way a sleezy con man talks, and I may be able to detect his communication patterns, but that doesn't mean I want the con man to speak in a different way I can't detect as sleezy. I don't want to talk to the con man.
Obfuscating LLM output to trick the reader into thinking it wasn't LLM output is not respectful.
I think you are forgetting about the decency and dignity part of "respect".
Yes there's a quality component to the role of communication in how it respects other people.
There's also honesty, transparency, truth and vectors along the dimensions of "Are we claiming and presenting the truth or are we bending facts and creating impersonations and warping reality?" Most AI is used for the latter today: people are having AI's write their words and speech for them and then the AI says things as though it were the human like "I said xyz" when the AI is NOT the human who did those things. That's lying and deception and disrespect to the reader.
Exactly! See this is what I don't get about the Claude/GPT-style writing that's so prevalent everywhere and why it annoys me even more. It's just so easy to get rid of it, that's why it feels even more disrespectful when I still see it everywhere in full force, just a few sentences is enough to get rid of so much of the extremely obvious tells, sometimes even a "Don't write like an AI" in the prompt leads to completely acceptable results. Everywhere I use LLMs I put a tiny style-guide with instructions such as yours, and the results are just so much more pleasant I barely understand why it seems that almost everyone else seems incapable of it?
The obvious response is of course, they're just completely unbothered by it. Why change it if it doesn't even matter (to me)? I presume the set of people who use AI like this for writing and the set of people who are annoyed by it are largely not overlapping, and there is a possibility that a lot of the text I read and think sounds human, might be written by an LLM with a style-guide like mine. Still though, if 5 words genuinely can reduce annoyance by a lot of people who read your article, why does it feel like so many people haven't picked up on it yet? Or is the LLM writing highly loved & popular amongst other people perhaps?
Serious question, why does it matter to you? Maybe they wrote a draft and reviewed Claude's writing before publishing. Why are we trying to "call out" when AI is assisting us in our work? This is an open source project, not a F500 company. They have limited resources, maybe English isn't their first language.
I'm not a shadcn user, and so as with any project I'm not familiar with, I'm looking to see if if it's interesting to me. If the post is thoughtful and clear and I like the sense I get of their perspective on programming, then great, tell me more. No guarantees but maybe the writer is someone whose software I'd like to use. Claude doesn't tell me anything except that the writer used Claude.
It's the same as with too marketing-speak, which conceivably this is. Maybe the actual work is good but Sturgeon's law, it's probably crud. If I really needed a UI library or whatever right now then maybe I'd dig deeper but in casual browsing HN mode? No time, catch them later.
So maybe all your maybes but who cares? It's not AI that made me think badly of them: I think badly of all software by default and it takes more than Claude to change my mind.
Tone/style bit aside, a real problem is length. Scroll waaay down and look at most older updates and see how brief and too-the-point they were. Often they look rushed, some essential links, and that’s it. Fine by me! That’s the real state of things… people usually don’t want to write bc it’s a lot of effort.
I see the same phenomenon at work. A year ago I’d read your two-sentence daily update in slack, all riddled with the quirks and oddities that made it yours. Today when I see the page of headings and emojis describing the couple things you did yesterday, I wince because now I’m the one who has to sift through the fluff to get to the point.
I think fundamentally it's just really annoying to read the same cringey LinkedIn style voice everywhere.
If you manage to write an AI assisted article that doesn't tediously follow the "what this means for you", "it's not this, it's that", "One thing. Two things. Three things." formula... I really doubt people would complain.
I agree that the style is somewhat generic, but for things like new release announcements, I find that the common structure allows me to skim through much faster. I value that and am happy with that tradeoff.
Just read the post! It's essentially "we switched from Radix to Base UI". Why? "the ecosystem moved on". Nothing says braindead web frontend churn like this post, and them not having written it in the first place is just the cherry on the cake.
They could have just written "we asked Claude to rewrite our project with Base UI because it eclipsed Radix in NPM downloads".
Because it implies that the users of the AI don't understand that it's output is usually horseshit littered with enough good info to make it sound correct
> Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me.
Those short and punchy two-part sentence groups very much feel like the writing that Claude does, like: The writing feels familiar. Suspicion earns its keep. Ultimately, the judgement remains yours. Not conjecture, your thoughts.
Then again, I bet how much aversion people feel to that sort of thing depends on how much they’ve been exposed to that, especially in frustrating circumstances. Personally, that’s a lot (daily Claude Code) and sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
Or maybe people genuinely just write like that and overuse that style and Claude has ruined it for me, whereas otherwise I wouldn’t have given it a second look.
I call it "being shot in the face with bullet points". I was trying to use an LLM to write up some guidelines on how to use a piece of tech, and I kept getting frustrated that it felt like a slide deck rather than sincere persuasion.
Maybe it's a style that's always existed in moderation, but now it feels like it's being applied to every paragraph in every document or social posting.
People do write like that. Claude learned it from somewhere, after all. I read an X post yesterday where someone was complaining about "genuinely" as being an AI tell.
I think the broader phenomenon with the AI tells is it is revealing about a person's consumption. If they already interacted with and read material that resembled AI output, it wouldn't seem as weird. But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.
> But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.
It might also be the overuse of specific phrases and patterns. I sometimes scan over my own blog posts to see what appears too often and there are things that I overuse in my own writing as well.
It's not that it's bad writing. It's that people are used to bad writing. People are used to garbage. For example, your comment is awful from a literature or writing perspective. It needs to be edited. This comment that I'm writing right now is awful. We're used to crap writing and people who don't care about editing and putting out good, thoughtful words. When all you're used to is garbage, things that actually are better are generally going to seem odd and out of place. However, for those people that are used to better, more elegant writing, it's going to seem fine.
Of course, the difference here is context. In a comment, you're not expecting well-written sentences, structure, and editing. So we jump at these things that seem out of place because of the context.
> sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
You know what makes me upset?
- No writing
- Or bad documentation
- Or just no documentation
- Or just nothing being written down about something
For me, at its core, the most important thing is accuracy. Is it accurate? If so, good. We can start from there. If your issue is style, fine, but that's a personal judgment. As long as it's accurate, I'm fine.
That’s a genuinely smart take, and to be honest with you – most people never achieve this level of awareness. /s
Most humans speak in “garbage” and not perfectly correct sentences. Imperfection makes it human.
In this case, it’s not about unwanted sophistication, but fluff and specific sentence structures that tell you this was written by AI, not the actual people behind the project. I guess the closest analogy is to always being left on voicemail.
I didn't read the post and scrolled to a random clause.
"Because you own the code. You've added variants, changed classes, threaded new props. A codemod handles the components you never touched and breaks on the ones you did."
Am I the only one who expects ALL writing to be generated or at least edited by an LLM going forward? It's like pointing out the fabric in my clothes was not hand woven by a human. Sounding like an AI wrote it is not as valid a criticism as "it was unclear about...", or "It was too long", or "It left out this important point...". Can't we move past the "It sounds like AI..." posts?
I'd love to have this as a norm, as long as the AI doesn't lie and impersonate and deceive humans in speech by saying things as though it were the human like "I ate breakfast" or "I was saying this to my team" because clearly the AI did not do those things. That's lying, deception and harmful to a culture of truth and transparency.
Instead the humans who promoted and allowed the LLM content to post behind their human identity, didn't bother to update the LLM language and either do a) mark the post as AI generated or b) properly update those pronouns so it isn't an AI speaking through the humans point of view.
Consider this exaggerated example: Would it be ok for you if in a zoom meeting with your team someone was lip syncing an AI speaking on their behalf, both impersonating voice tonality, the words chosen, and even pretending to voice the humans thoughts themselves? Of course you wouldn't. So now extend this to the words people write in articles like this one where the "I said" perspective was used many times supposedly by an AI.
I disagree, that it's not tiring to hear - because it's deception and lying as it gets used and presented today. I believe it's dangerous to a culture of cooperation that I think cooperation requires trust and truth to support and preserve. I don't want articles to have AI's lying and saying "I did or said" when it was the human who did and said those things.
for example, in this article (if it was truly Claude written):
> Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries. January brought full Base UI docs.
If an AI wrote this, why and how is it pretending to be a human and the humans on the team at that? That's impersonation, and it's a lie and deceptive. I personally don't want a culture where my AI agent is talking as though its me, when a pro-cooperative and honesty/truth preserving culture would instead say "My human said" or at least label correctly that this is an AI acting on behalf of a human.
I hate the marketing-selling-linkedn style as much as anyone, but I don't think it's an LLM thing in particular. It's a style that existed before LLMs and it's very easy to make LLMs avoid it with one or two prompt paragraphs.
For what it's worth, I didn't get that vibe reading this post.
Isn't that a bit like working in the movie industry and no longer being able to enjoy films because you are always thinking about how they were made and noticing their flaws?
More like working in the movie industry and noticing all the places where the director took the cheap shortcut instead of putting effort in. And while the result isn't much worse, it still feels a bit disrespectful. You reminisce about the time five years ago when things were much more human
Oh, and the target audience of movie you are watching are other people in the movie industry. Nearly everyone in the audience can tell where production cheaped out
For boring applications - do people prefer the copy paste approach of shadcn instead of a traditional ui library like mantine?
The copy paste approach may be easily modifiable but creates new problems - ie now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking up a version number.
I never understood the copy paste thing. Shadcn just reeks of a fad, and even after doing copy paste and trying it, I didn’t see what the big deal was. But enjoy it, y’all. One of the benefits of AI is that HN isn’t clogged with talk of JavaScript frameworks as much
I think it depends on the project, but I've found that using installable libraries becomes a bottleneck over time as you find yourself running into their limits, or trying to customise them in ways they really aren't design for.
I’m leaning towards vendoring for all my new projects.
Grabbing an off-the-shelf UI library is easy in the short term, but it’s usually overcomplicated, implements things I won’t ever need, is hard to tweak if/when you want to distinguish your app from the thousand others using the same library, and when you do decide to upgrade it, all your tweaks break in subtle ways.
What I think would be the best approach is building your own UI library. You own it, you get to reuse it across different projects and maintain the same visual style (if desired), and you add features when you need them.
It's one more thing to maintain, and it's also difficult to push back on things. If you use off the shelf components it's much easier to say to designers and managers that a UX pattern is not available or not valid. You can point to the mature well known community owned UI library you use and make it authoritative. It's harder to do it if you build your own, suddenly each designer and developer is throwing things in there, adding features etc. It's also difficult to agree on the structure, so the components are well thought out, flexible, but also not so flexible to lose semantics. It's not an easy job, do you use slots, composition, rendering callbacks, there are too many decisions and you spend time building the UI library instead of actually shipping features.
Odd to me when I read stuff like this but also posts about how AI is making everything trivial. Surely a thing that almost every company did in the early 2000s should not be hard today, but of course today you can’t just write HTML + CSS, you must consider every front end framework introduced in the last decade.
Mantine is brilliant, I can build anything in it quickly and then extend it or completely customize the theme or individual components, but there is a learning curve. I would not call it a giant learning curve.
I love Mantine. It’s easy to use, full featured with lots of components and helpers, and yet if you need to, you can use it headless and customise it too (I’ve never bothered though; I did add my own additional spacing/sizing options via the theme support though)
Any direct comparisons to base UI? I've been pretty satisfied with base UI so far, but my usage has been very basic so I'm open to switching if Mantine offers something better.
> that should just be ticking up a version number.
Ah, but it's rarely just that in many systems. It can only be just that if the component library does exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it happens quite often that component doesn't entirely do what's needed.
People bolt on extra CSS to the components all the time. Two lines of CSS is very tempting if the alternatives are a few hours of work at least. But those two lines need to be verified against every new feature of the component library.
Do those two line fixes a lot, and upgrading becomes A Project.
Ticking up a version number is all fine and good until it requires a dependency upgrade you aren’t ready for. If for example you wanted to upgrade MUI from 4 to 5, you’d find react 17 wasn’t supported. And if you weren’t ready or able to upgrade react, then you’d just be stuck using a UI library going more out of date by the day.
With shadcn / the copy paste format, you’ll almost never see that happen. The button shadcn provides for example is just css / tailwind. And if you did ever for some reason want to bring in a dependency for your button component you wouldn’t have to consider its effect on your other UI elements. The rest of your components can live independently (for the most part)
We have customized UI components we got from shadcn and now some use radix and some use base ui, and some have other dependencies or no dependencies at all. Properly tree shaken this is not a big deal at all and we can upgrade components individually as needed.
For boring applications this may be a bit much. But even then if you wait too long and mantine falls behind more than a couple versions, who knows how easy it would be to get your whole project up to date.
If you don't need to make any changes, it should be very simple to just upgrade by replacing the components. And if you need to make changes then well it's not gonna work with a traditional UI library.
> now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking up a version number.
If a component as basic as a button or a list view ever requires an “upgrade”, something is fundamentally wrong to begin with. HTML5, ARIA, etc. aren’t cutting edge technologies that the ecosystem still needs time to figure out. This should be pull once and forget.
Vendoring your components gives you the best of both worlds. You get a full component library but retain the ability to modify them as you want.
Your AI agent claim doesn't make any sense either. When upgrading normally your component just gets rewritten on disk. When switching from radix to base ui, a more comprehensive approach is needed.
How about leveraging llms to produce deterministic codemods? You can then iterate on this by running the codemods and using other deterministic guardrails, feeding the results back into the llm to improve the codemods?
Yeah exactly this is right. In the same way that we don't get an LLM to write the HTML for each request, but we do get an LLM to write the code to make the HTML
I think the two complement each other perfectly and will continue to do so. I keep writing AGENTS.md files for soft rules and custom linter rules for hard ones which IMO is the best of both worlds.
I have used and mostly like Shadcn, and yet their Radix-based radio button was a bit much, as are other choices, where similarly overblown solutions were used.
I'm in the same boat. We've been using PrimeNG for several apps at my job, and until we find a suitable replacement, we'll be stuck on using Angular 21.
That being said, a group did fork PrimeNG, and plan on maintaining it (new name pending)
I'm building Lily Design System as a response to Shadcn and similar systems not yet being available directly for multiple stacks including Svelte, Angular, Nunchucks. It's all free open source. If you want to send me your feedback, suggestions, etc. I can easily add things to Lily.
It uses Zag js for its primitives which is framework agonistic as opposed to Radix or Base UI. Shadcn is only for React. If you use Solid.js for example, Skeleton is an option for your design system.
That's great. Started using Base UI early on via 9ui [0] and found the primitives very pleasant to work with, especially if one wants to compose more complex components from other Base UI components. Maybe Shad can reduce some of the dependencies they rely on now.
Base UI is more low-level, a lot less opinionated and doesn’t force you into certain layouts. This of course makes it more complex to use, but that doesn’t matter if you’re using shadcn components because they’re doing that work for you.
So essentially they look and operate the same as Radix components at the shadcn level but you have low-level control later on should you need it.
I tried to use baseUI and gave up. Forms are a bit different and I can't no longer copy/paste similar form code between projects (unless I migrate everything to baseUI).
Personally I'd prefer React Aria; I don't have the patience to try understand why suddenly everyone is rushing to adopt Base UI instead of Radix which itself was once suddenly the thing everyone rushed to instead of Stitches.
Having a library not in anyway related to that to me feels like a big pro.
I have found React Aria to be very good. I really like how its a set of hooks, a set of premade components using said hooks, and I like how you can choose bits of either approach for your own components. Some of the hooks are very useful.
It’s getting tiring to hear at this point, but the Claude voice comes through clearly in this post, and it’s a little off-putting. If even an important product release doesn’t warrant full human attention, where will we draw the line?
The post effectively communicated what it needed to. It seemed both written and structured in a way that was optimized for human consumption.
If they used AI to write this and that gave them more time to volunteer their time towards developing this fantastic piece of open source software, then this all seems like a good thing to me.
It is clearly not effectively communicated if the tool used to write it stamps its signature in such a way that it distracts from the great work they’re doing.
It is distracting you because part of your mental focus is on "is this AI".
Its only distracts the distractable. Does anyone ever read product announcement blog posts like they were great literature? Ive always just skimmed, theyve always been throwaway writing to me. I’d rather the humans spend more time on the actual creative challenges in a project.
tldr; continue to cede ground on the slippery slope.
did i get that right?
yep, and when the llms can pack flatware, stamp license plates or clean bedpans, I'll argue we shouldn't have humans doing that bullshit work either.
Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I use plannotator with claude a lot and have much better time, since I asked for a specific styleguide.
I used "CD era MSDN reference and Raymond Chen blogging style" as a starting prompt for the styleguide and my work ability to digest AI plans raised a lot.
Couldn't recommend it more. Humble, insightful and respecting the reader
> respecting the reader
When people say LLM slop is disrespecting the reader, I don't think they are complaining about style.
That's where the annotation in plannotator helps.
I'm asking to scan projects on gitlab, go through some docs to find more grounding material, write a subarticle (in the same style), scan logs on the test env, issue some curls, etc.; until the whole article is digestible - in the "backing knowledge graph" department.
Very funny.
They are, and I am. While I don't use the words "LLM slop", I do have the urge to instantly stop reading any piece of writing that was obviously default Claude output with no effort to make it sound even remotely human written.
I'd rather read natural sounding, non-repetitive, and actually useful LLM text than the majority of reddit comments (including the serious ones) for instance.
that's precisely the objection most people have whether they realize it or not.
slop just means "I don't like this style"
when AI writes more reliably in a way that people do like, they will stop calling everything AI does slop.
I may complain that I don't like the way a sleezy con man talks, and I may be able to detect his communication patterns, but that doesn't mean I want the con man to speak in a different way I can't detect as sleezy. I don't want to talk to the con man.
Obfuscating LLM output to trick the reader into thinking it wasn't LLM output is not respectful.
I think you are forgetting about the decency and dignity part of "respect".
Yes there's a quality component to the role of communication in how it respects other people.
There's also honesty, transparency, truth and vectors along the dimensions of "Are we claiming and presenting the truth or are we bending facts and creating impersonations and warping reality?" Most AI is used for the latter today: people are having AI's write their words and speech for them and then the AI says things as though it were the human like "I said xyz" when the AI is NOT the human who did those things. That's lying and deception and disrespect to the reader.
Exactly! See this is what I don't get about the Claude/GPT-style writing that's so prevalent everywhere and why it annoys me even more. It's just so easy to get rid of it, that's why it feels even more disrespectful when I still see it everywhere in full force, just a few sentences is enough to get rid of so much of the extremely obvious tells, sometimes even a "Don't write like an AI" in the prompt leads to completely acceptable results. Everywhere I use LLMs I put a tiny style-guide with instructions such as yours, and the results are just so much more pleasant I barely understand why it seems that almost everyone else seems incapable of it?
The obvious response is of course, they're just completely unbothered by it. Why change it if it doesn't even matter (to me)? I presume the set of people who use AI like this for writing and the set of people who are annoyed by it are largely not overlapping, and there is a possibility that a lot of the text I read and think sounds human, might be written by an LLM with a style-guide like mine. Still though, if 5 words genuinely can reduce annoyance by a lot of people who read your article, why does it feel like so many people haven't picked up on it yet? Or is the LLM writing highly loved & popular amongst other people perhaps?
Serious question, why does it matter to you? Maybe they wrote a draft and reviewed Claude's writing before publishing. Why are we trying to "call out" when AI is assisting us in our work? This is an open source project, not a F500 company. They have limited resources, maybe English isn't their first language.
I'm not a shadcn user, and so as with any project I'm not familiar with, I'm looking to see if if it's interesting to me. If the post is thoughtful and clear and I like the sense I get of their perspective on programming, then great, tell me more. No guarantees but maybe the writer is someone whose software I'd like to use. Claude doesn't tell me anything except that the writer used Claude.
It's the same as with too marketing-speak, which conceivably this is. Maybe the actual work is good but Sturgeon's law, it's probably crud. If I really needed a UI library or whatever right now then maybe I'd dig deeper but in casual browsing HN mode? No time, catch them later.
So maybe all your maybes but who cares? It's not AI that made me think badly of them: I think badly of all software by default and it takes more than Claude to change my mind.
Tone/style bit aside, a real problem is length. Scroll waaay down and look at most older updates and see how brief and too-the-point they were. Often they look rushed, some essential links, and that’s it. Fine by me! That’s the real state of things… people usually don’t want to write bc it’s a lot of effort.
I see the same phenomenon at work. A year ago I’d read your two-sentence daily update in slack, all riddled with the quirks and oddities that made it yours. Today when I see the page of headings and emojis describing the couple things you did yesterday, I wince because now I’m the one who has to sift through the fluff to get to the point.
Because it sounds like the average LinkedIn poster and we don't want it to invade spaces outside LinkedIn.
Because it means that they think I'm stupid.
They think it's not worth investing human attention to write it, so why am I expected to invest my attention to read it?
If it's written as SEO spam, why link it here?
If it's written to be read by humans, do they think we're stupid?
Because I associate that style with "I have little to say, but I will say it in as many words as I possibly can"
I think fundamentally it's just really annoying to read the same cringey LinkedIn style voice everywhere.
If you manage to write an AI assisted article that doesn't tediously follow the "what this means for you", "it's not this, it's that", "One thing. Two things. Three things." formula... I really doubt people would complain.
I agree that the style is somewhat generic, but for things like new release announcements, I find that the common structure allows me to skim through much faster. I value that and am happy with that tradeoff.
Just read the post! It's essentially "we switched from Radix to Base UI". Why? "the ecosystem moved on". Nothing says braindead web frontend churn like this post, and them not having written it in the first place is just the cherry on the cake.
They could have just written "we asked Claude to rewrite our project with Base UI because it eclipsed Radix in NPM downloads".
If you're not a heavy frontend developer then you probably don't know why radix is a blocker for most server side react
Because it implies that the users of the AI don't understand that it's output is usually horseshit littered with enough good info to make it sound correct
Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me.
Would be kind of funny if someone from the team came out and said it was written by a human.
> Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me.
Those short and punchy two-part sentence groups very much feel like the writing that Claude does, like: The writing feels familiar. Suspicion earns its keep. Ultimately, the judgement remains yours. Not conjecture, your thoughts.
Then again, I bet how much aversion people feel to that sort of thing depends on how much they’ve been exposed to that, especially in frustrating circumstances. Personally, that’s a lot (daily Claude Code) and sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
Or maybe people genuinely just write like that and overuse that style and Claude has ruined it for me, whereas otherwise I wouldn’t have given it a second look.
I call it "being shot in the face with bullet points". I was trying to use an LLM to write up some guidelines on how to use a piece of tech, and I kept getting frustrated that it felt like a slide deck rather than sincere persuasion.
Maybe it's a style that's always existed in moderation, but now it feels like it's being applied to every paragraph in every document or social posting.
People do write like that. Claude learned it from somewhere, after all. I read an X post yesterday where someone was complaining about "genuinely" as being an AI tell.
I think the broader phenomenon with the AI tells is it is revealing about a person's consumption. If they already interacted with and read material that resembled AI output, it wouldn't seem as weird. But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.
> But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.
It might also be the overuse of specific phrases and patterns. I sometimes scan over my own blog posts to see what appears too often and there are things that I overuse in my own writing as well.
It's not that it's bad writing. It's that people are used to bad writing. People are used to garbage. For example, your comment is awful from a literature or writing perspective. It needs to be edited. This comment that I'm writing right now is awful. We're used to crap writing and people who don't care about editing and putting out good, thoughtful words. When all you're used to is garbage, things that actually are better are generally going to seem odd and out of place. However, for those people that are used to better, more elegant writing, it's going to seem fine.
Of course, the difference here is context. In a comment, you're not expecting well-written sentences, structure, and editing. So we jump at these things that seem out of place because of the context.
> sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
You know what makes me upset?
- No writing
- Or bad documentation
- Or just no documentation
- Or just nothing being written down about something
For me, at its core, the most important thing is accuracy. Is it accurate? If so, good. We can start from there. If your issue is style, fine, but that's a personal judgment. As long as it's accurate, I'm fine.
That’s a genuinely smart take, and to be honest with you – most people never achieve this level of awareness. /s
Most humans speak in “garbage” and not perfectly correct sentences. Imperfection makes it human.
In this case, it’s not about unwanted sophistication, but fluff and specific sentence structures that tell you this was written by AI, not the actual people behind the project. I guess the closest analogy is to always being left on voicemail.
Maybe the human has been reading too much ai generated text and got influenced by it?
Exactly! We have accepted British English, American English, Australian English …. Lets just accept AI English and move on.
To me, it couldn't sound more AI if you tried.
There's not a strong reason for a human to write this type of content anymore
Why should a human read it? And by extension why even bother than if it’s just for machines?
I didn't read the post and scrolled to a random clause.
"Because you own the code. You've added variants, changed classes, threaded new props. A codemod handles the components you never touched and breaks on the ones you did."
It's so staccato throughout, a human wouldn't write like this.
Am I the only one who expects ALL writing to be generated or at least edited by an LLM going forward? It's like pointing out the fabric in my clothes was not hand woven by a human. Sounding like an AI wrote it is not as valid a criticism as "it was unclear about...", or "It was too long", or "It left out this important point...". Can't we move past the "It sounds like AI..." posts?
I'd love to have this as a norm, as long as the AI doesn't lie and impersonate and deceive humans in speech by saying things as though it were the human like "I ate breakfast" or "I was saying this to my team" because clearly the AI did not do those things. That's lying, deception and harmful to a culture of truth and transparency.
Instead the humans who promoted and allowed the LLM content to post behind their human identity, didn't bother to update the LLM language and either do a) mark the post as AI generated or b) properly update those pronouns so it isn't an AI speaking through the humans point of view.
Consider this exaggerated example: Would it be ok for you if in a zoom meeting with your team someone was lip syncing an AI speaking on their behalf, both impersonating voice tonality, the words chosen, and even pretending to voice the humans thoughts themselves? Of course you wouldn't. So now extend this to the words people write in articles like this one where the "I said" perspective was used many times supposedly by an AI.
I'm sure this received full human attention, even if they used a computer to help write it (be that more traditional text tools or more recent ones).
I disagree, that it's not tiring to hear - because it's deception and lying as it gets used and presented today. I believe it's dangerous to a culture of cooperation that I think cooperation requires trust and truth to support and preserve. I don't want articles to have AI's lying and saying "I did or said" when it was the human who did and said those things.
for example, in this article (if it was truly Claude written):
> Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries. January brought full Base UI docs.
If an AI wrote this, why and how is it pretending to be a human and the humans on the team at that? That's impersonation, and it's a lie and deceptive. I personally don't want a culture where my AI agent is talking as though its me, when a pro-cooperative and honesty/truth preserving culture would instead say "My human said" or at least label correctly that this is an AI acting on behalf of a human.
I hate the marketing-selling-linkedn style as much as anyone, but I don't think it's an LLM thing in particular. It's a style that existed before LLMs and it's very easy to make LLMs avoid it with one or two prompt paragraphs.
For what it's worth, I didn't get that vibe reading this post.
Isn't that a bit like working in the movie industry and no longer being able to enjoy films because you are always thinking about how they were made and noticing their flaws?
More like working in the movie industry and noticing all the places where the director took the cheap shortcut instead of putting effort in. And while the result isn't much worse, it still feels a bit disrespectful. You reminisce about the time five years ago when things were much more human
Oh, and the target audience of movie you are watching are other people in the movie industry. Nearly everyone in the audience can tell where production cheaped out
After watching the movie everyone in the audience goes back to their offices, and what do they use to improve their productivity? Right, AI.
For boring applications - do people prefer the copy paste approach of shadcn instead of a traditional ui library like mantine?
The copy paste approach may be easily modifiable but creates new problems - ie now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking up a version number.
"just ticking up a version number" drastically understates the headaches of Material UI over the years.
Not a boring application, a very large application -- each major version update was a tedious process because they completely upended many APIs.
We've migrated to shadcn, and upgrades are now easy; we can upgrade a single component -- add the new ones free.
With MaterialUI we had to update EVERYTHING to their new APIs to be able to take advantage of the new features anywhere.
With shadcn we can be selective.
I never understood the copy paste thing. Shadcn just reeks of a fad, and even after doing copy paste and trying it, I didn’t see what the big deal was. But enjoy it, y’all. One of the benefits of AI is that HN isn’t clogged with talk of JavaScript frameworks as much
I think it depends on the project, but I've found that using installable libraries becomes a bottleneck over time as you find yourself running into their limits, or trying to customise them in ways they really aren't design for.
I wrote something about it a few years ago when shadcn was relatively new on the scene https://andrewingram.net/posts/recipe-kits-a-great-alternati...
I’m leaning towards vendoring for all my new projects.
Grabbing an off-the-shelf UI library is easy in the short term, but it’s usually overcomplicated, implements things I won’t ever need, is hard to tweak if/when you want to distinguish your app from the thousand others using the same library, and when you do decide to upgrade it, all your tweaks break in subtle ways.
What I think would be the best approach is building your own UI library. You own it, you get to reuse it across different projects and maintain the same visual style (if desired), and you add features when you need them.
> building your own UI library
It's one more thing to maintain, and it's also difficult to push back on things. If you use off the shelf components it's much easier to say to designers and managers that a UX pattern is not available or not valid. You can point to the mature well known community owned UI library you use and make it authoritative. It's harder to do it if you build your own, suddenly each designer and developer is throwing things in there, adding features etc. It's also difficult to agree on the structure, so the components are well thought out, flexible, but also not so flexible to lose semantics. It's not an easy job, do you use slots, composition, rendering callbacks, there are too many decisions and you spend time building the UI library instead of actually shipping features.
Odd to me when I read stuff like this but also posts about how AI is making everything trivial. Surely a thing that almost every company did in the early 2000s should not be hard today, but of course today you can’t just write HTML + CSS, you must consider every front end framework introduced in the last decade.
Mantine is brilliant, I can build anything in it quickly and then extend it or completely customize the theme or individual components, but there is a learning curve. I would not call it a giant learning curve.
I love Mantine. It’s easy to use, full featured with lots of components and helpers, and yet if you need to, you can use it headless and customise it too (I’ve never bothered though; I did add my own additional spacing/sizing options via the theme support though)
Any direct comparisons to base UI? I've been pretty satisfied with base UI so far, but my usage has been very basic so I'm open to switching if Mantine offers something better.
Love love love mantine.
> that should just be ticking up a version number.
Ah, but it's rarely just that in many systems. It can only be just that if the component library does exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it happens quite often that component doesn't entirely do what's needed.
People bolt on extra CSS to the components all the time. Two lines of CSS is very tempting if the alternatives are a few hours of work at least. But those two lines need to be verified against every new feature of the component library.
Do those two line fixes a lot, and upgrading becomes A Project.
Ticking up a version number is all fine and good until it requires a dependency upgrade you aren’t ready for. If for example you wanted to upgrade MUI from 4 to 5, you’d find react 17 wasn’t supported. And if you weren’t ready or able to upgrade react, then you’d just be stuck using a UI library going more out of date by the day.
With shadcn / the copy paste format, you’ll almost never see that happen. The button shadcn provides for example is just css / tailwind. And if you did ever for some reason want to bring in a dependency for your button component you wouldn’t have to consider its effect on your other UI elements. The rest of your components can live independently (for the most part)
We have customized UI components we got from shadcn and now some use radix and some use base ui, and some have other dependencies or no dependencies at all. Properly tree shaken this is not a big deal at all and we can upgrade components individually as needed.
For boring applications this may be a bit much. But even then if you wait too long and mantine falls behind more than a couple versions, who knows how easy it would be to get your whole project up to date.
Can you explain what copy paste means here?
I use Material UI for all my AI coded applications. Am I doing something wrong? What difference would Shadcnd even make in a world of Claude Code?
Isn’t either infinitely customizable via CSS? So what’s the difference?
I don't like the copy paste. Rather use lower-level abstractions for the UI if I know I have to make modifications.
The copy paste approach is just a plain bad idea, I am not sure why this doesn't get more criticism
If you don't need to make any changes, it should be very simple to just upgrade by replacing the components. And if you need to make changes then well it's not gonna work with a traditional UI library.
Bigger issue ,every app that use shadcn use 100% same. I still have to figure how people differentiate their brand using shadcn.
> that should just be ticking up a version imber.
Is it ever that simple?
I highly prefer a copy and paste approach. The less npm installs the better.
As grug, I prefer the paste approach
> now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking up a version number.
If a component as basic as a button or a list view ever requires an “upgrade”, something is fundamentally wrong to begin with. HTML5, ARIA, etc. aren’t cutting edge technologies that the ecosystem still needs time to figure out. This should be pull once and forget.
Martine just straight up sucks.
Vendoring your components gives you the best of both worlds. You get a full component library but retain the ability to modify them as you want.
Your AI agent claim doesn't make any sense either. When upgrading normally your component just gets rewritten on disk. When switching from radix to base ui, a more comprehensive approach is needed.
The ai agent “claim” is from the webpage that is linked to:
When You're Ready to Migrate
You don't need to migrate. But if you want to, we built a skill for it:
pnpm dlx skills add shadcn/ui
Then ask your coding agent:
migrate accordion to base-ui
This is just an ongoing trend to address coding agents first in documentation, and people / manual methods second.
> Mantine just straight up sucks. > Mantine is brilliant.
Thanks internet.
Moving away from codemods and towards LLMs doing migration work is an interesting development.
Even if they’re more deterministic, I wonder if the days of codemods are numbered.
How about leveraging llms to produce deterministic codemods? You can then iterate on this by running the codemods and using other deterministic guardrails, feeding the results back into the llm to improve the codemods?
Yeah exactly this is right. In the same way that we don't get an LLM to write the HTML for each request, but we do get an LLM to write the code to make the HTML
The framing in TFA is a dangerous way to think. Codemods are whatever, I could take em or leave em.
What you want isn't skill files for LLMs, though. Just write docs for humans. Write a migration guide, for humans.
It's going to take us a while to realize they should be the same things, skill files and docs.
Sorry, what is codemod here?
I just googled it a second ago https://martinfowler.com/articles/codemods-api-refactoring.h...
A tool to do automatic migrations eg react often publ
I think the two complement each other perfectly and will continue to do so. I keep writing AGENTS.md files for soft rules and custom linter rules for hard ones which IMO is the best of both worlds.
I have used and mostly like Shadcn, and yet their Radix-based radio button was a bit much, as are other choices, where similarly overblown solutions were used.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46688971
My main gripe with Shadcn and, well, most UI libraries nowadays, is that they are reinventing the wheel for like a thousandth time.
I’m trying out Ark UI on a side project. They do have some genuinely useful components, like tags input: https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/tags-input
They have a tabs/“segment group” component with a nice animated active element indicator which would probably be tricky to implement: https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/segment-group
And then they also have stuff like overcomplicated “click to copy” button and a <details> reimplementation: https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/clipboard, https://ark-ui.com/docs/components/collapsible
All with a verbose markup that renders as a div soup.
I think this is really an indictment of the platform. Much more stuff should be covered by the browser.
this is actually true; the web was done so terribly to begin with on day one, that we have been paying the price of compatibility thereto ever since.
The web was for hyperlinked documents (and forms?). And it’s still does the job beautifully. It was never an UI toolkit.
What is the shadcn/ui equivalent for Angular?
PrimeNG had a licensing change recently and I'm looking at a suitable alternatives for a fresh project.
> PrimeNG had a licensing change recently
Both attempts [1] to surface this on HN failed but if you are using a PrimeTek component library you need to be aware of this change.
PrimeNG, PrimeReact, and PrimeVue are all going fully closed source and ongoing licencing will be $800 per developer seat in 2027. [2]
The previous repos have been archived. [3]
PrimeFaces remains open source but it's now developed and maintained by independent volunteer developers who are not employees of PrimeTek.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+Next+Chapter+of+PrimeTek
[2]: https://primeui.dev/nextchapter
[3]: https://github.com/primefaces/primeng
Well, fuck.
Any community forks?
Posted in a sibling comment: https://github.com/openng-org/open-prime
I'm in the same boat. We've been using PrimeNG for several apps at my job, and until we find a suitable replacement, we'll be stuck on using Angular 21.
That being said, a group did fork PrimeNG, and plan on maintaining it (new name pending)
https://github.com/openng-org/open-prime
https://spartan.ng/
Correct. Nothing else comes close.
I'm building Lily Design System as a response to Shadcn and similar systems not yet being available directly for multiple stacks including Svelte, Angular, Nunchucks. It's all free open source. If you want to send me your feedback, suggestions, etc. I can easily add things to Lily.
https://lilydesignsystem.github.io
https://www.zardui.com
This reads like a script to a Theo video
On React Native support: https://github.com/mui/base-ui/issues/2612
I miss a good old skeuomorphic styleguide. I guess the last one was Blueprint?
Shadcn is great until you want to use it
Why ?
My choice is https://www.skeleton.dev/
Why? There's a thousand component libraries, what makes this one stand out?
It uses Zag js for its primitives which is framework agonistic as opposed to Radix or Base UI. Shadcn is only for React. If you use Solid.js for example, Skeleton is an option for your design system.
There are ports of shadcn for svelte, vue and solid.
There’s also Basecoat, which is shadcn for vanilla JS.
https://basecoatui.com/
That's great. Started using Base UI early on via 9ui [0] and found the primitives very pleasant to work with, especially if one wants to compose more complex components from other Base UI components. Maybe Shad can reduce some of the dependencies they rely on now.
[0] https://www.9ui.dev
What's the difference?
All of these component libraries look the same.
UI libraries are the new Linux distributions ;-)
Why? What advantage does it bring?
Base UI is more low-level, a lot less opinionated and doesn’t force you into certain layouts. This of course makes it more complex to use, but that doesn’t matter if you’re using shadcn components because they’re doing that work for you.
So essentially they look and operate the same as Radix components at the shadcn level but you have low-level control later on should you need it.
I tried to use baseUI and gave up. Forms are a bit different and I can't no longer copy/paste similar form code between projects (unless I migrate everything to baseUI).
Yeah instead of this slop a simple table explaining the tradeoff would have been far superior.
Curious if anyone tried Astryx that was open sourced by Meta last week to see how it compares.
Tangential but does anyone an have opinion on Base UI vs React Aria?
Trying to decide between the two atm.
Personally I'd prefer React Aria; I don't have the patience to try understand why suddenly everyone is rushing to adopt Base UI instead of Radix which itself was once suddenly the thing everyone rushed to instead of Stitches.
Having a library not in anyway related to that to me feels like a big pro.
I have found React Aria to be very good. I really like how its a set of hooks, a set of premade components using said hooks, and I like how you can choose bits of either approach for your own components. Some of the hooks are very useful.
> why suddenly everyone is rushing to adopt Base UI instead of Radix
MUI (who started Base UI) hired the Radix "original" developers and they were pushing that as it being Radix v2.
Most of the websites I found are still on the radix version.
Imagine building a brand new component library to replace your already quite successful component library and still making it React-only.
based
Great news. I've found that no UI library comes close to shadcn's quality.
It even looks incredible when building desktop apps. We used it to build DB Pro [1] and the DB Pro website, and everyone compliments us on our design.
I see it becoming the defacto choice for UIs especially when building with agents.
[1] https://dbpro.app