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Why AI-built apps all look the same, and how to fix it

AI tools fall back on the same defaults every time: the purple button, the uneven spacing, a new style on every page. Here is why it happens and five ways to fix it.

You can usually tell when an app was built by AI. Nothing is broken, exactly. It just has a look: a purple gradient button, cards with soft shadows, spacing that is slightly different in every corner, and a dark mode that works on some pages and not others.

This is not because the AI is bad at building. It is because of how it decides what things should look like.

Why it happens

It has no design sense of its own. An AI tool has read an enormous amount of code, and when you ask for “a button” it writes the most ordinary button it has seen. Ask a thousand people's AI tools for a button and you get roughly the same one. The purple gradient is not a choice. It is an average.

It starts from nothing each time. When you ask for a second page, the AI does not remember what it decided on the first one unless something in your project tells it. So it decides again, a little differently. Six pages later you have six slightly different buttons.

It only draws what you see first. A button is not one picture. It also has to look right when you point at it, press it, move to it with the keyboard, or switch it off. AI tools usually draw the resting state and stop, which is why AI-built apps feel flat when you use them.

Nobody told it the rules. A human designer works from rules, even unwritten ones: these four colours, these six sizes, always this much space. An AI tool has none unless you give it some, so it invents a value every time it needs one.

How to fix it

You do not need to become a designer. You need to take decisions away from the AI.

1. Give it parts instead of asking it to draw

The biggest improvement comes from having a set of finished parts in your project (buttons, menus, form fields, tables) and telling your AI to build with those. An AI that assembles screens from good parts makes far better screens than one that draws every part from scratch.

2. Write your choices down once

Put your colours, text sizes, spacing and corner sizes in one file, each with a name. Then the instruction to your AI becomes “only use the named values”, and a random purple has nowhere to come from.

3. Give it standing rules

Most AI building tools have a place for instructions that apply to every request. It is often called rules, knowledge or project instructions. Three rules do most of the work:

• If a ready part exists, use it. Never make a new version.
• Never invent a colour, size or spacing. Use the named ones.
• If something is missing, say so instead of making it up.

4. Ask for the states

When you ask for something new, ask for all of it: “with hover, focus, disabled and dark mode”. It is a small sentence that fixes the flat feeling.

5. Make it check its own work

Before you accept a screen, ask your AI to look at what it built and compare it with the rest of the app. It is surprisingly good at spotting its own inconsistencies once you ask.

The short version

AI-built apps look the same because the AI is averaging, forgetting, and guessing. Give it finished parts, named values and a few firm rules, and the same AI produces work that looks designed.

That is the whole idea behind Goop: a complete, ready-made look for your app, with every state already designed, and the rules written for your AI. It is not out yet. You can leave your email to hear when it is.