2026-06-12

I've been trying to make progress on a herculean task; I want decent looking programs for personal use which I can generate quickly using AI agents yet I'm a person without taste controlling an AI without taste. I found "one weird trick" that does enough for me, the results are not extra nice but it doesn't make me gag and I'll take what I can.

Style of Slop

I took a simple single web page app (more context below) and kept on asking the agent ^{to generate it in different styles. I found that there can be many different styles, all of which feel like slop. Slop is not a distinct style, it can be overlaid on top of many others. Even when I got it to make a page to look like X, it looked like X with slop.}

Qt

Only one generation stuck out to me. Simply asking it to make it look like a Qt app - to my tasteless eyes - removed almost all feeling of slop. You can check some of the results out here. This is obviously subjective, hard to convince anyone of and I'd like feedback. I'd also like to see more experimentation in this area, are there any other styles or design guidelines which an AI can generate without adding slop on top?

App context

I read this article from Axios -- a forecast of how the electoral college will change in 2030 and I wanted to visualize it. I dumped a picture in to chatgpt and asked it for a 270-to-win style program with the forecast changes so I can see which routes open or close for R's vs D's.

Other apps

It does translate well outside of this example. I've now gotten codex to translate all the other personal software I have to "Qt style" and I think they look much better.