Hacker News Reader

Comment by oijkuij | Hacker News Reader

If folks like this kind of thing, I discovered https://bento.page/ from a HN post and have been using it off and on for the past few months. It has a much larger featureset but is specifically focused on presentations (for now!). Unlike this project, the editor and content embed themselves in an html file, so you aren't dependent on the host site existing to serve the editor.

View on HN

> https://bento.page/

Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.

I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.

I agree with you, but it is so funny that three years ago, a website that look like this would probably make the front page for its excellent design alone. Now, it gives off similar energy to a wix website.

You are right, then again: I think three years ago someone would have commented about the gloss in the background as well (saying that it’s unhelpful, distracting and resource intensive).

Landing pages are always a proxy for quality. Quality in implementation, quality in domain knowledge, in communication…

At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.

I find it completely logical.

> Landing pages are always a proxy for quality.

Always is a very strong claim.

Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.

That depends on how you look at it. These front pages are made in a certain way that tells me "low level engineer".

I could make other examples: websites of online shops that have been around for a while and that are just medium-sized, local businesses, tend to look much worse than your average influencer webshop. But the medium-sized local business tends to have the much better value for money ratio, and I can tell it from their website.

Design says something. AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you, and that imitation annoys people, rightfully so. That has little to do with AI per se and everything with the immitation the human behind it does.

> AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you

Now I see your point. Fair enough

I liked it when kernel.org was just https://www.kernel.org/pub/

landing page is not proxy for quality, but proxy for how good at marketing your project is.

It could be the case that marketing is high quality, but the actual project low (tho, of course, this doesn't have to be the case).

And vice versa with low quality (looking) landing page.

Three years ago it would probably be "ah yeah, the same corporate/bento box style page as literally every page out there".

I would not call that excellent, decent maybe. Maybe we have different standard or taste. I myself like collecting landing page that I think great.[1]

1. https://www.cosmos.so/alfirous/websites/landing

it's a fair criticism though. learning and eventually relying on new tools is an investment. it helps to know the developer is invested too, not just moonlighting.

Not only the design but the text. Like it says so much and so little at the same time and constantly repeats the same cliches like "the file is the app" or "the api is the x". Unmemorable, unfocused and boring is what it comes across. I know devs don't care about marketing copy but it does make a difference on how you're presenting your app to first time potential users.

The file is literally the app though. That’s the entire point of this thing.

Unfortunately it's such an overused idiom in AI generated text that most people read it as a metaphor vs what is literally true about the app

That and the "The boring deck is dead. One file killed it."

It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.

Yep absolutely. I've become so quick to recognise the pattern and it triggers some sort of mild disgust reflexively.

We had few submissions and links in comments this week to some very "young" projects and their home pages looked like pressed from the same machine.

But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".

Not a luddite, it's just allergy to slop, that's normal.

I won't get over this prejudice and I don't have to frankly

> I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design.

My issue isn't cookie-cutter, but if by gloss you mean unnecessarily animated, then yeah. But I've had this issue for over a decade. AI without direction is just mimicking popular site designs that were doing this same crap before.

> At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.

How do you feel about WordPress / Hugo themes?

> How do you feel about WordPress / Hugo themes?

I knew a web dev who exclusively made WordPress websites for local small businesses. They always looked great. The themes were put together by hand with care from a designer, and the developer/end user filled them and tweaked them *purposefully*.

Sure if you have some web dev experience you start spotting them, but that never turned me off from a business in the same way that the above page does. I expected every business to have a website, but not for every business to commission a wholly bespoke design system. The themes available were numerous and of high enough quality that they were fit for purpose and didn't have this nauseating effect, at least for me.

That's just plain terrible graphic design.

There’s also https://github.com/nathanvy/singlebook which looks like the same philosophy but for documents.

That's amazing, thank you. I love that you can export JSON, edit it in your favourite text editor and then import it back. Its exactly what I want.

Interesting, though on initial scan I could not easily determine who made it, why, what's the future for it, any terms or licenses, etc. With complex html and downloads, I have no idea what else may be sneaking in and/or phoning home :-/

Cool project. It reminds me of https://tiddlywiki.com/ for Powerpoints.

same, i've been using it extensively and it's very convenient having the ability to let Codex/ClaudeCode generate a whole deck, and then do the last edits myself in the browser.

Way too complicated. Tiny Office is nice because it's minimalistic and intuitive. Bad comparison

Reply on news.ycombinator.com