Design slop is the feeling that tells you a website is purely AI-generated. This is an attempt to classify the design patterns behind it.

Applying this scoring to recent ShowHN submissions shows that about a third of the submissions show medium to heavy design slop: https://slopcop.adriankrebs.ch/show

How the scoring works:

- A headless browser loads each site (Playwright)

- A small in-page script analyzes the DOM and reads computed styles

- Every pattern is a deterministic CSS or DOM check.

There are false positives, but my manual QA run verified it’s maybe 5-10%.

Is design slop bad? Not really, just uninspired. After all, the web was never about the fanciest design, and before the AI era, everything looked like Bootstrap.

However, there is a difference between trying to craft your own design and just shipping with whatever defaults the LLMs output. And the same has been the case pre-LLM when using CSS/HTML templates.

I guess people will get back to crafting beautiful designs to stand out from the slop. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.