People told me my site looked AI-generated. So I designed it 12 more times.
My portfolio got called AI slop, for choices I had made on purpose. The fix was more AI, pointed at exploration instead of production. Four rounds in three days, one more pass in Paper, and no single winner.
Earlier this summer, a few people told me my site looked AI-generated. Not the writing. The design. I have been a product designer for 17 years, and my own portfolio read as slop.
The strange part is that I had designed it. The pastel aurora, my name in a handwritten script with a gradient running through it, the glowing button. I drew those in Figma and built them with AI. Gradients have been my thing since long before AI. But AI has since made that kind of gradient its signature, so people saw it and filled in the rest. The long copy and the heavy type didn't help.
So I redesigned it. Four rounds with AI agents in three days, 23 mockups, and a new site live by August 11. Then seven more directions in Paper in September. Here is how it went, in order, including the round where I was confidently wrong.
First, the taste file
I keep a taste file. It's a plain markdown file that tells every agent how I like things. The section for this site listed the gradient wordmark, the glow button and the shader hero as features.
So the brief started from that file and then overruled half of it with a ban list. No gradient text. No aurora blobs. No script fonts, no graph paper, no glassmorphism. What I meant by my gradients no longer mattered. What people read into them did.
August 6: seven agents, seven pages
Seven agents got the same brief and the same real product screenshots. Each one built a whole page as a single throwaway HTML file, about a thousand lines with 45 live controls for type, color and spacing.
I picked Companion. A near-black ground, a vermillion accent, and a chat panel docked on the right. Round two spent the next day refining it.
August 7: I was wrong
Then I looked at a day of dark pages and orange, and wrote this into the next brief:
"I think we have excessively been focused on this style with the orange theme and the dark background."
Round three banned the palette I had just picked and went five other ways. A day earlier I had been sure. Now I could see it was a mood, not a direction.
August 8: parts, not pages
Round four stopped designing pages. It was six component sheets: buttons, post lists, the chat, my name. It also gave me my gradients back, with one rule. A gradient is allowed inside a small object, like a button or a mark. Never as the page background.
The problem was never gradients. It was gradients as wallpaper.
August 11: what shipped
No direction won. The site that shipped kept Companion's chat panel and dropped almost everything else. The dark palette went. The gradients that are left live inside small things, like the orb in the chat panel, one click away behind the sparkle at the top of this page.
Nothing from the lab shipped as code. I exported the settings I chose and rebuilt the site from those.
September: seven more, in Paper
Six weeks later I redesigned the home page again, this time in Paper, the design tool I wrote about in Paper is awesome but not perfect. Claude Code designed straight onto the canvas, and I watched each direction take shape in real time. When one was close, I changed it by hand, and Claude picked up my edits in the next round. It was at least ten times faster than building in the codebase or in the lab.
Seven directions, lettered A to G. G went live on September 26.
Where the human stays
The agents never chose. The later briefs were mostly my own reactions, quoted back to them. What I liked, what I didn't, what I wanted to try next.
The lab didn't stop me from converging too early either. It made the reversal cheap. Throwing a round away cost an evening of looking, not a month of building. I got 23 designs in the time it takes me to make two, and most of them were competent. Competent was the problem I started with. Picking the one that was actually mine was the only part that didn't get faster.
If you want to try it
Start from your taste file, then write the ban list. Once you love a direction, make the next round forbid it. If you still want it afterward, it was real. And put every direction somewhere you can flip through.
Throw the mockups away. Keep the decisions.
My site got called AI-generated, and the fix was more AI, not less, pointed at exploration instead of production. AI can generate twelve versions of your taste. It can't tell you which one is yours.
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