Show HN submissions have surged to three times the volume seen a few years ago, a trend many attribute to the rise of Claude Code. As a result, moderators introduced limits for new accounts. The surge has turned the front page into a sea of sites that feel AI-generated, prompting a systematic study of design cues that signal automation today.

Designers point to a handful of tell‑tale signals: the overuse of the sans‑serif Inter in hero headlines, the odd pairing of Space Grotesk with GeistSerif italic accents, and a palette dominated by “VibeCode Purple” with dark mode and medium‑grey body text. Other hallmarks include centered hero sets, colored borders on cards, and identical feature‑card grids that often appear in.

A headless browser powered by Playwright loads each site, while an in‑page script parses the DOM and computed styles. Every pattern is a deterministic CSS or DOM check, sidestepping subjective screenshots. The author estimates a 5‑10% false‑positive rate after manual QA, and offers the open‑source code for others to replicate or refine the analysis in the pipeline to improve efficiency.

Out of 500 examined Show HN pages, 21% triggered five or more patterns, 46% fell into the mild 2–4 category, and a third remained clean. The study suggests that while many projects ship with default LLM‑generated templates, designers are beginning to distinguish themselves with custom flair—an important move as AI agents become primary web consumers in the future of productivity growth.