The website is a little too obviously made by Claude. The first thing I noticed is the classic "pill with pulsing green dot that says something is active or live" claudism.
FWIW, I did suspect AI was probably used when looking through the README, but it also didn't really impact my opinion much because the value proposition of "I can use a Rust library to control this through the same primitives the tool itself uses instead of writing a bunch of shell scripts" far outweighs that. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet but plan to later today, and ultimately the experience I have is going to matter a lot more to me than what tools you used to generate the README visuals.
I've tried out plenty of things that seemed promising but turned out to have sloppy implementations before the LLM days, and I've also used some things that are ostensibly vibe-coded but had shockingly high quality of UX compared to the alternatives because the creators put in time and effort into polish beyond what people who make software the "traditional" way tend to, so to me, the important signal is what level of care went into the creation of the software. I'm hoping that this project turns out to be one of the good ones, and if it is, the people who dismiss it because of vibes (pun intended) will be the ones missing out.
For what it's worth I genuinely loved your landing page. I casually clicked through and got an immediate unexpected chuckle at the giant animated crab.
It's obviously AI assisted but I interpreted it as a nod to itself on that and really appreciated it.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think the big AI standout (not your fault) is the classic GenAI lightning that behaves more like a weird viscous liquid. Another one I see a lot is the number of avian creatures flapping their wings with all the subtlety and grace of an ornithopter going in reverse.
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Your site needs some work on the responsiveness. At around 1200 pixels width on my browser, half of the video just gets cut off. It just doesn't scale correctly.
If there’s anything I don’t mind being done with AI, it’s a product landing page. There are only so many ways to creatively design one, so who cares how it was made?
The usual answer is some handwavy nonsense about "well if you were too lazy to write the text, why should I read it?" said by the same people too lazy to write the code...
commonlisp (sbcl) is one of the best sleeper techs out there. one of those if you're in the know type industry secrets. part of it is because their website looks like something out of the 90's. clearly having a nice website and some level of marketing is necessary to get adoption. Im more than happy to see devs use AI to automate that so they have more time to focus on their creations.
Isn't lisp getting advertisement every couple months here or so. After so many decades I don't believe the reason lisp doesn't have traction is just marketing.
Given that Hacker News somewhat famously was written in lisp, "an advertisement every couple of months here" probably translates to an order of magnitude less in places that have a lower density of long-time lisp fans from the early days.
I’ve never seen a scroll related animation that I didn’t hate to some degree. I suspect that the issue is that I skim and scroll REALLY fast and the animations always break the feeling of the page being a real surface.
Apple is the worst offender. Some of their product pages make me physically uncomfortable like when you miscount the number of steps in a stair and step into empty air.
And it’s not that I’m sensitive to animations or motion in general. Video games are no problem at all even when the physics make no sense.
There’s something special about how good scrolling is on Apple’s trackpads and mobile screens which causes a really deep immersion for me. I have an Ubuntu desktop with an old school scroll wheel mouse and there the animations are just annoying but not uncomfortable.
I think the issue is that the parallax is choppy in your page. For whatever it's worth, I typically don't care much about parallax in itself but I thought the same thing about the scrolling not being smooth.
As someone new to this site, I understand wanting to keep the AI Slop at bay, but for some of us, it's been a boon to get our ideas into an actual working application. I have decades of IT/Network/Enterprise experience, but creating and writing a complex tool would have been well beyond my abilities or patience. I had a friend say that AI is a "scourge on the intellectually lazy" and I couldn't really refute that, but I had to add that it is a boon to a lazy intellectual, which I consider myself to be.
I'm not saying don't use AI. It's alright to use AI in my books, I'm just saying watch out for obvious hints. Some people translate that to "this product is cheap" even if it isn't at all the case.
I understand you've put a hell of a lot of work into this. You might want to have a look at https://www.awwwards.com/ and take some inspiration for some of the designs, then write up a general spec sheet of how the website should look and feed that into Claude.
Otherwise Claude just does what a language model does best, and regurgitates a lot of the same styles.
It's a shame though that if you come from the world of OCaml, F# feels like its stuck in C#'s shadow a bit. You can get pretty far with F# by using it as a functional language, but eventually you'll want to interop with the rest of the .NET ecosystem and suddenly you're writing in a weird OOP/Functional hybrid style.
OCaml is wonderful too but having written F# for different companies for years, my code is pretty much never that hybrid stuff. Sure, .NET:s weird asynch apis, sometimes the code comes out a little bit weird but that is the exception to the rule imho.
F# is so elegant and terse for writing functional-style wrappers around OO code packages! Unfortunately, you find yourself needing to write functional-style wrappers around OO code packages.
You do have to ask yourself why Windows has such a high market share. Chrome OS is Linux based but still managed to poke a deeper hole than much of us expected in the consumer space. Android is Linux based and practically annihilated Windows CE off the face of the earth. Mac OS has been competing fairly well with Windows despite being hardware exclusive. I very very very rarely see a Linux distribution in the wild being used on a PC/Laptop. When I do, it's usually being used by a nerd who knows their thing.
I think the reason Windows is so successful is because it's stable, bulletproof and easy. You don't have to burn an ISO to a USB and boot from it, partition a disk and install it. You don't have to grep grub at any time. You rarely have to use PowerShell for much of anything at all, including device management, managing services and even tweaking the registry.
The "desktop environment" is the operating system, not a seperate abstraction around it. There's no research required on what distro works best for you, what package manager is ideal, what file system to use, what window manager to use, what desktop environment to use. There's no messing with repositories either. No issues with drivers that require compiling from source, no marking an executable as "executable" through chmod.
I like Linux, but the Linux community overestimate how usable it is outside of their meta, and underappreciate their own mental model of what a computer is and how it differs from the layman. Most people want to open their laptop, double click a browser and watch Family Guy funny moments on facebook.com without having to troubleshoot PulseAudio because it's suddenly gone super quiet.
ChromeOS did not poke a hole in the consumer space. It’s the B2B of hardware where the user is not the buyer. To a first approximation, no one wants a ChromeOS based computer for their home anymore than they want to run Salesforce at home. It is cheap and from what I have heard, Google’s MDM software is top notch.
Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.
And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.
It's so simple. It's because windows DID have a much better desktop experience in the past, for decades, and they built a trillion dollar company around it. It's no longer the clear winner though, and they are simply surfing the momentum of having an existing user base that doesn't want to relearn apps and UIs, apps and games that only work on windows due to the size of the user base, and general marketing and sales and existing corporate contracts.
None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.
No to be fair I do see what he's saying. I see a major difference between the more expensive models and the cheaper ones. The cheaper (usually default) ones make mistakes all the damn time. You can be as clear as day with them and they simply don't have the context window or specs to make accurate, well reasoned desicions and it is a bit like having a terrible junior work alongside you, fresh out of university.
The cheaper models can't be taught or improved due to their inherit limitations, which makes it a huge pain to even try with even the simplest of tasks. Perpetually, no matter your instruction file(s).
I agree. The more expensive models I must admit have impressed me, but sometimes they take so long and are so expensive you might as well do it yourself. That being said if you're feeling particularly lazy there is now a "do it for me" button built into code editors, but until perhaps 2035 this technology is still somewhat pedestrian compared to what it could be in the future.
I think this particular design language became a bit of a trend before AI ate it up. I'm not sure what it's called but it proceeded neobrutalism and every single desktop app or self hosted solution had a landing page that looked exactly like this. I imagine AI saw the pattern and doubled down cause it's Claude's favourite design language.
