What 1,590 AI Built Apps Reveal About the Slop Problem

Someone ran the experiment I keep wanting to run. They took 1,590 Show HN landing pages and scored each one against sixteen known AI design patterns. The result: 22 percent were heavy slop, 32 percent were mild, and 46 percent were clean.

Sit with that. More than half of every new product launched on Hacker News carries a visible AI generated look. Not half of the lazy ones. Half of everything, from people who cared enough to launch in public.

What the number actually measures

The slop score is not measuring ugliness. It is measuring sameness. Every app in the heavy band made the same defaults visible: the gradient, the glass cards, the identical page skeleton, the vague hero. The model is drawing from one distribution of good enough, so everything converges on the same face.

That is why the tell is so damaging. A visitor cannot articulate it, but they feel it in the first second: this looks like the last forty things that wasted my time. Sameness reads as risk, and risk kills the signup before your copy gets a read.

Why the clean 46 percent won

The apps that scored clean did one thing the others did not. They overrode the defaults. They picked a color on purpose. They wrote a headline that named the exact job. They designed the empty state instead of shipping a blank grid. None of it was expensive. All of it was a decision.

That is the whole thesis of how I score apps. I am not grading taste. I am counting the decisions you made versus the ones you let the machine make for you. Slop is the sum of the decisions you skipped.

How to move from the 54 to the 46

You do not need a design degree to cross the line. You need to know which defaults to override, in what order. That is a checklist, not a talent. The hard part is that you cannot see your own hits, because you approved every default and went face blind weeks ago.

An outside score fixes that. It names your tells, pins them to the screen, and hands you the fix so you can spend your decisions where they count.

Want your own number instead of a guess? Run your app through auditmy.design and see which band you are in, and the exact list to climb out.

Related

• Why I score apps instead of just roasting them — the method behind the bands.
• Slop is death by a thousand unmade decisions — what the clean 46 percent did differently.

Source: the 1,590 Show HN slop analysis, 2026.