Koen Bok

Lobsters

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Every startup landing page suddenly looks the same, and developers are done pretending it’s fine.
The pattern has a name now, even if nobody agreed on it together: instrument serif headline, gratuitous italics, an em dash or three, a three-word tagline that means nothing, a curl-into-bash install script, and a “trusted by” row of logos that all happen to be from the same YC batch. A satirical site nailed the aesthetic so precisely that it reads less like parody and more like a bug report against the entire industry.
The reactions are where this gets interesting. Mitchell Hashimoto, who’s built more developer tools than most people have installed, put it bluntly: “I’m so incredibly tired of seeing low-effort AI-designed web pages. I basically bounce off any new product immediately when I see it (never get a chance to judge the product itself). Lots of thin lines, glowy styles, inconsistent fonts, lots of monospace. You know who you are.” That last line landed hard enough that people started retweeting it just to pile on.
Koen Bok’s take was even sharper, and it’s the one that’s sticking: “If your site looks vibe coded, I’m going to assume your app is the same quality.” That’s the real accusation buried in all this. It’s not really about aesthetics. It’s that a landing page has become a tell. If the founder outsourced the design to an LLM without a second look, what else got the same treatment? The backend? The auth flow? The actual product logic?
There’s a real irony here too. AI tools made it trivially easy to spin up a slick-looking site in an afternoon, which was supposed to be a win for indie builders who can’t afford a designer. Instead it flattened everyone into the same template, and now that template is a red flag instead of a selling point. The tells (glowy gradients, inconsistent font weights, monospace everywhere for no reason) are becoming as recognizable as a phishing email’s bad grammar.
Nobody’s proposing a fix, and that’s kind of the point. This isn’t a bug to patch, it’s a taste problem, and taste doesn’t scale the way code generation does. For now the discourse is just developers publicly declaring they’ll judge your product by your CSS, whether that’s fair or not. Given how many of them are saying it, it’s apparently fair enough.

Trends

AI-generated landing pages have converged on a recognizable aesthetic—instrument serif headlines, gratuitous italics, em dashes, curl-into-bash install scripts, and 'trusted by' logo rows from the same YC batch—and developers are calling it out as a liability rather than a shortcut. Mitchell Hashimoto and Koen Bok both publicly criticized the trend, with Bok arguing that a vibe-coded look signals the whole product, not just the design, was rushed. The irony: AI tools were supposed to democratize good design for indie builders, but instead flattened everything into a template that now reads as a red flag rather than a selling point.

Vibe-coded landing pages are now a bounce-rate liability

I think blaming “vibe coding” misses the point. AI is just the tool.
Give the same AI to 10 people and you’ll get 10 very different results depending on their taste and whether they can actually recognize good design.
You can vibe code a great landing page. The problem starts when “it generated successfully” becomes the quality bar.

Most of this vibe coded website will have similar future.
For founders: Save now, pay later.
For customers suffer now, confuse later
When you want to add scalability, performance and additions at later stage this can make good amount of issues in vibe-coding if not managed well.

To any juniors reading this: Don’t let the headlines discourage you. Instead of focusing solely on learning a language, focus on learning how to debug, how to write prompts that produce modular code, and how to read documentation. The tools are changing, but the need for logical thinkers has not.

AI is a powerful tool for automating routine tasks. It’s not a designer, it’s not a writer. “Intelligent” is only in the name🤷 AI is currently only very good at coding. Because it’s extremely routine and formulaic.
I’m afraid of people’s complete trust in what is written🙄. AI generates what you’re more likely to like. It doesn’t think - it generates. Now they are trying to introduce AI into government sectors where people’s fates are decided. AI has the final say 🤯

Lol. Ask AI to vibe code you an app and you get a beautiful monolithic 4000 line HTML doc.
wew lad. btfo microservices