Ask HN: Why do all LLM interfaces look the same?

2 points by grendelt 8 days ago | 7 comments

They all seem to have the same exact layout (conversations on the left, primary chat exchange on the right, resources and windows on the far right). Many appear to use the same font.

If these companies are truly competing, why are they not trying to visually distinguish themselves from one another?

krapp 8 days ago |

They all look the same because they're all generated by the same service. LLMs used for GenAI are mediocrity machines regardless of the medium.

And companies don't try to visually distinguish themselves from one another when using AI because the entire point of using AI is to try as little as possible so as to get a product to market as fast as possible. And who exactly would be doing the trying anyway, the designers and artists that the company fired and replaced with a prompt engineer (who is probably using AI to generate their prompts?) There is no longer a human qualified to make such decisions anywhere in the loop.

This is the way the future of design looks now, best to get used to it.

verdverm 8 days ago |

often, you have to have a really compelling reason to change a widely adopted user experience, people get used to expecting things in certain places and operating in certain ways

I don't see a ton of design space here. A bunch of them wanted to change how developers work with Ai (cursor/antigravity), but I just use a CLI in a VS Code tab/pane along with the files. VS Code is quite flexible and you can customize your layout (I swap left/right drawers, people comment on it occasionally)

grendelt 8 days ago | |

There's not a ton, but why not toy around (at least with A/B) where the chat prompt is at the top and the conversation flows in reverse chronological order.

Claude appears to at least _try_ to have a different aesthetic. Gemini is using Google's own in-house typeface.

Just seems weird there's not more experimentation and seeing what sticks than just doing what your competitors are doing.

verdverm 8 days ago | | |

> conversation flows in reverse chronological order

none of or chat/comm tools, tech, saas, and online interfaces work like this

this is exactly the kind of thing you shouldn't try

check out The Design Of Everyday Thing, and maybe more so Don't Make Me Think

verdverm 8 days ago | | |

move outside of Big Ai offerings, there is variety and experimentation

or build your own harness, you'll learn a ton by doing so, manu great libraries that handle much of the plumbing

I use OpenCode, been doing the tui thing for 6 months or so, but I've heavily customized it