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Good design is not about what an app looks like—visually similar apps can justify radically different usability—and current AI-generated 'slop' interfaces repeat the same mistake as the Bootstrap era and McMansion subdivision housing: prioritizing appearance and templates over character and usability.

Scott and Wes extend the Homeowner's analogy: like McMansion homes that all look identical and have terrible usability, AI-generated UIs look samey on the surface. The real problem is how they function—Threads desktop looks like Twitter but is infuriating to use, and apps like TikTok and Instagram are visually indistinguishable. ✦ AI generated

Scott · Syntax · 2026-08-05 · original ↗

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starts at this moment · 9:36

The the biggest point is not what it looks like. It's it's how usable it actually is. Because if you take a look at like all of the apps, like if I open Threads, Twitter, Blue Sky, and and all of these other like short form blogging apps, sometimes I cannot even tell which one I'm in. ... Even though it looks very similar to Twitter, there is so much more thought and care put into the design of Twitter than there is on the threads desktop website. And that there is is a perfect example of it's not what it looks like. It's how the you interact with it, how you use it. ... If somebody spent the time to say, hm, when you click on this button where it says a notification, does that notification clear? or all of these little tiny examples as to how the interface is to to get where you want.

verbatim transcript · starts at 9:36

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9:46gosh, back in the early 2000s, what we had the basically unstyled websites, links were blue, backgrounds were white or single color. Maybe you had repeating background uh GIF images or something like that. Then we had the Bootstrap era where everything looked like either Bootstrap or foundation and you could see it from a mile away. And then now we have the AI slop era of the same thing

10:13where everything looks like you got unnecessary all uppercase labels. You got you you have all the design tells, right? >> Uh it's this is nothing new. It's just a different version of the same thing. And I I think this is a really good example because it's yes, they look like violently people always say like violently Ontario. Like you you've been to my neighborhood, right? All of the

10:37houses look exactly the same >> and they are all awful looking and and that that's one that's one part of it. They they they're not nice looking houses, but um on the same regard is like there's a lot of like weird things about it. Like my roof has like 800 peaks and valleys and it's all unnecessary. I've been in the attic. It could just be [laughter] a square. It

11:00could just be a little hut. Could be a triangle. But no, there is probably I don't know eight different peaks and points that are all unnecessary and they just added that cuz it it looked good. Um, and it was impressive to the people that wanted to buy these houses in the 2000s. And now like I we have to get your my neighbor got their roof replaced and it was like like $50,000 or

11:22something insane like that because of how complex it is, right? And there's all of these like like usability issues where like you you drive into the any garage on our street and you can hardly open your car door. Like like did nobody think that you would need to open car doors by driving in these things? Like there's all of these awful usability things about the houses and I agree

11:44where it's just like yes that is technically a house and that is technically a nice decent looking house but when you really get into like the usability and the flow and how people live in a lot of these houses there's a lot of like weird oddities that the people are trying to now undo in in how these things work. So my rant here is that it's not just what it looks like

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