Ask HN: Why do all LLM interfaces look the same? | Hacker News Reader

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

2 pointsgrendelt7 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?

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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.

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)

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.

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

> 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

I've read (and recommended Design), I'll check out Don't Make Me Think. Thanks!

I mean, you can TRY... just "that's how we've always done it" doesn't mean it's bad. Blogs and news sites always post stuff at the top to stay in the F-shaped layout. Chats do the opposite. Services don't conform to any of that (each web dashboard has its own unique layout).

I just find it curious why all the big players in the space all somehow came to use the same UI. The same font choice and same Projects, Recents, Chats layout on the left side seems beyond mere chance. (Kinda how the Soviet's Buran orbiter somehow magically came to look like the exact same design of spacecraft as the NASA's Space Shuttle. Surely no peeking or copying took place.)

sometimes... there are only so many designs that are viable, like how rockets to space generally look the same

when it comes to chat direction, that's about users rejecting it, it's too different, people are creatures of habit and comfort

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