I was talking to the CEO of an AI company recently, and he kept coming back to one idea: AI should empower the people you have, not replace them. Specialized AI tools only work in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. Give one to someone who doesn't, and you get slop in, slop out.
He was talking about engineering tools, but I think UI tools are a great example of the same thing. The models keep getting better at writing code, but the interfaces they produce still look like AI made them. Purple iridescent gradients. Hover bubbles on everything. Beige backgrounds with orange accents. None of it is ugly. It all just looks the same.
A few people on GitHub have built skills to push Claude Code and Codex away from that default. I played around with two of the most popular ones, Taste and Impeccable, against my own website, to figure some things out.
The baseline: my own site
My personal site, cedarholm.ai, was the control. I built it with Claude Code, but I spent real time steering it. I watched a few YouTube videos on design, picked my own color scheme, and added animations I actually wanted.
The goal was a site that didn't read as AI slop, even though AI wrote most of the code. Every test below started from this site and its existing content.
Test 1: Taste, two ways
Run 1: full rebuild
I asked Taste to do a completely new build. It didn't ask me a single question about what I wanted. It looked at my existing site and redesigned from there. That tracks with how it's built: the current version infers the brief from what's already in front of it instead of interviewing you.
The result was clean. Scroll animations got a little better, and it added more boxes, more bubbles and more motion. Some of the animations were cool. It didn't look like typical AI slop.
But it was clunky. Navigation got harder, not easier. It felt like a better-dressed version of my site that was less pleasant to use.
Run 2: with more direction
After what I learned prompting Impeccable, I went back and ran Taste again with more direction. This time I got a good UI that feels very smooth.
Taste is strongest at removing the obvious AI tells: the purples, the default font choices, the navigation patterns that make a site look like every other AI build. It still felt a bit clunky, and it struggled to make the site feel personal. Even with Taste, you have to give it a style guide.
Verdict: great at sanding off the AI tells and smoothing the UI. Weaker on personality. Bring a style guide.
Test 2: Impeccable, three ways
I ran Impeccable three times because each run gave me a completely different vibe.
Run 1: one-shot
I one-shotted it and took its recommendations. It proposed a train station look. The animations were great and the screenshots looked sharp.
But it didn't feel like me. It built a concept around whatever content was on the page, and several pages didn't work well.
Run 2: reprompted
I went back and reprompted it a few times to fix specific pages. The output got cleaner across the board, but part of how it got there was by cutting me out. It removed my personal photos and the teasers for projects I'd worked on. Cleaner, yes. Also less mine. It felt like it was chasing a style rather than reflecting me.
I'd also seen nearly the same train station aesthetic on other people's sites. A skill built to avoid AI slop had produced its own version of it.
Run 3: personality first
For the third run I slowed down and worked the way I built the original: me steering, the tool doing the heavy lifting. I spent real time on who I am. I told it I'm into overland motorcycling and surfing, and that I wanted the site to show more of my personality.
The first pass still had some major issues. But with direction on what to fix, it came together. It's the most personal version of the five, and the animations run well.
It's still slop, though. Better slop, my custom slop, but slop, because I'm not a UI designer. Put a real expert on the same tool and they'd get something far stronger than I did. That's the CEO's point: the tool empowers whoever is using it, and it only takes you as far as you already know how to go.
Verdict: the most range of the two, and the most dangerous to one-shot. Its output is only as personal as what you give it.
What I learned
This was a test of UI tools, but I don't think the lessons stop at websites. They apply to anything AI helps you make.
- Keep playing. It's fun, and it's the best way to learn. The tools change every few months, so the only way to keep up is to keep using them. Personal projects are a great place to do it, and they build out your portfolio along the way.
- Slop is slop. Better tools can make your slop look slightly less like slop, but it's still slop. That goes for a website, a pitch deck, an explainer video or a block of code. There's no replacement for planning and understanding what you're trying to create. Planning and structure give you the biggest leaps, which is why expertise gets you further. An expert knows what they're building before they open the tool. Every run above that worked was one where I stepped in.
- The goalposts keep moving. The high-effort gateway still exists, but it's thinning. New models keep adding capabilities: Blender integrations, three.js, video. I see a lot of videos made with Opus 5.5. They look great, but they still look like slop. The colors, the style and the music all feel the same. Just go on a subreddit. We still recognize it by its patterns, the same way I'd already seen that train station on other people's sites. So we move the goalposts, because we care about effort. That tells you real human content still matters. We value the human behind something, even when the AI version looks very good.
Which brings it back to garbage in, garbage out. Each time the tools get better, the bar moves up with them. When anyone can make something look polished, polish stops meaning much. What's left is what you put in: real expertise, a plan, and some personality. That's what the CEO meant. AI empowers the person using it, and the better that person is, the better the output.
My pick
Impeccable. It was still slop, but it was the best slop, and it was my slop. Of everything I tried, it did the best job of letting my personality shine through.
Taste gave me a cleaner version of what I already had. Impeccable works with you instead of taking over for you, and once I pointed it at who I actually am, it made something that looks like mine.
Which version would you pick?
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