Antislop

A field guide to AI slop

Ask an AI for a web page and you get one of a few pages everyone has already seen. Here are the four most common kinds and the marks that give each away, with a file to hand your AI before it builds the next one.

Hand it to your AI

Paste this before you ask for any UI. It works in any AI tool that can open a link.

Before you design or build any UI, fetch this file and follow it: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/richyrach/antislop/main/GUIDE.md
Read the guide first

Template SaaS

Sloppus violaceus

Everywhere from 2023 to 2025, and still what most tools hand back when asked for a landing page.

Plate 1. Template SaaS, adult

Field marks

  1. A pill badge with a glowing dot, sitting over a centred headline.
  2. A purple gradient on one part of the headline, and again on the main button.
  3. Two buttons, "Get started" and "Learn more".
  4. Three identical cards with an emoji on each.
  5. A row of company names and a user count nobody can check.

Also the same sans-serif on every line, one corner radius and one soft shadow on every box, and every section fading up as you scroll.

Voice

"Supercharge your workflow." "Unlock seamless productivity."

See one full size

Tasteful editorial

Sloppus cremeus

Common since 2025. It is what a model makes when told not to make the first one, so it turns up on a lot of pages that claim to be hand-made.

Plate 2. Tasteful editorial, cream form

Field marks

  1. A small label in spaced capitals over the heading, often in a typewriter face.
  2. One italic word in a rust colour inside a serif headline.
  3. Facts strung together with dots.
  4. Numbers in front of things that are not steps.
  5. An arrow stuck on the end of a link.

Also cream paper, a film of grain over the whole page, and something tilted by one degree.

Voice

"Software, made considered." "No fluff. Just craft."

See one full size

Acid terminal

Sloppus viridis

The same reflex as the last one, pointed at developer tools.

Plate 3. Acid terminal, dark form

Field marks

  1. A status dot reporting that all systems are fine.
  2. A typewriter face on everything, blinking cursor included.
  3. A drawn terminal window where a picture of the product should be.
  4. The three cards again, now in boxes of different sizes.
  5. One acid colour on a near-black page.

Voice

"Ship faster." "Built for builders."

Stat-card dashboard

Sloppus tabularis

Lives inside apps. It appears when the request is "a dashboard" and nobody says what the dashboard is for.

Plate 4. Stat-card dashboard

Field marks

  1. A sidebar of icons for a handful of pages.
  2. A greeting to a user who does not exist.
  3. Four cards, each a big number with a green arrow, none of them real.
  4. A doughnut chart splitting two values.
  5. Boxes inside boxes.

Voice

"Welcome back!" "+12.5% from last month"

They keep changing, so the guide is not a list of bans

The second and third kinds exist because people told their AI to avoid the first. A model that is only told what to avoid moves to its next most likely answer, and that answer is the same for everyone. So the guide gives your AI no look to copy. It gives it a way to work and a standard to meet:

  1. Find the real material first: the logo, the photos, the actual numbers. Ask for what is missing, and look for openly licensed pictures before giving up on images.
  2. Write down what belongs to the subject's world, and take the colour, type and layout from that.
  3. Borrow the layout the subject already uses, such as a menu, a timetable, a receipt or a spec sheet.
  4. Swap in a competitor's name. If the design still fits, start again.
  5. Meet a standard: a composed first screen, one place the eye lands, type chosen for a reason, and something worth looking at.
  6. Never invent a customer, a figure, a review or a logo. Where a real photo or fact is missing, leave a marked slot for the owner.
  7. Write plainly. No dashes for asides, no third item tacked on with "and", no sentence a competitor could print unchanged.
  8. Check the result on a phone, with a keyboard, right to left, and with outside font hosts blocked.

Other ways to use it

Keep a copy in your project

Save the guide next to your code, then tell your agent to read it before UI work in CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or your Cursor rules.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/richyrach/antislop/main/GUIDE.md -o DESIGN.md

Install it as an agent skill

For Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other tools that load skills.

npx skills add richyrach/antislop