A week ago I argued that the next competitive advantage won't be AI, it'll be taste. But I left one thing unanswered: if taste is the advantage, then what does the lack of it actually look like?
That question stuck with me. Because in the AI era, bad taste has a very specific look. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Let me describe it.
The slop starter pack
You have seen this site. Probably five times today.
A purple-to-indigo gradient in the hero. A headline with "seamless" or "elevate" in it. Three feature cards, evenly spaced, each with a thin line icon. A bento grid underneath. A pricing table nobody asked for. And somewhere, if you look closely, a leftover "[Your Company]" that never got filled in.
It was built in an afternoon. It looks like it was built in an afternoon. Not because AI is bad, but because most people ship the first thing the model hands them.
That is the real tell. Not the AI. The not editing the AI.
The actual signals
Once I started paying attention, the patterns got specific:
- Builder fingerprints. v0, Lovable, Bolt, Framer and friends leave traces in the markup: default class names, telltale script tags, untouched component libraries.
- Untouched defaults. shadcn/ui and Radix straight out of the box. Great libraries. Dead giveaway when nothing is customized.
- Copy tells. Lorem ipsum in production. Buzzword density. Em dashes everywhere, because that is how the models punctuate. (Yes, I notice. No, there are none in this post.)
- Layout tropes. The gradient. The bento grid. The three cards. A "trusted by" logo row on a site with no customers yet.
- Leftovers. "As an AI language model." Placeholder brackets. Alt text that describes the prompt instead of the image.
None of these prove a human was absent. Plenty of good sites use these tools. But stack five or six of them with zero editing, and you are looking at slop.
Taste is just noticing
Here is the thing about taste: it is not about avoiding AI. I use Claude and Cursor every day. Taste is noticing when your output looks like everyone else's output, and doing the extra 10% that makes it yours. The custom font. Copy that sounds like a person. The one odd detail a template would never include.
Speed is a commodity now. Taste is what is left.
So I built a mirror
I wanted to see this at scale, so I built Slopdar. You paste any URL. It reads the public HTML, runs about 50 of these checks,takes a screenshot, and gives the site a "Slop Score" from 0 to 100. Zero means it looks hand-crafted. 100 means prompt-and-deploy.
It is meant to be fun, not a verdict. It reports signals, not proof. A high score means a site smells templated, not that no human ever touched it.
Run your own site through it. It is a little uncomfortable and weirdly useful. If you want the full list of tells with how to check each one by hand, I wrote a guide here.
AI made building fast. It also made everything look the same.few years are the ones who can tell the difference, and whocare enough to fix it before they ship.
That is taste. And now there is a score for it.
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