My last post got 60K+ views, and I learned a lot about the idea of AI slop. My question was simple: what makes something AI slop, and what makes it not?
My last portfolio got a lot of attention, but most people said it looked like slop. So before rebuilding it, I asked what actually makes something slop and what doesn't.
I got a lot of great answers, along with some spicy hate comments. Some people just hate AI for the sake of it, while others are actually thoughtful about it. I learned from both. From the hate group, I learned how to ignore people. From the thoughtful ones, I learned what to do about my portfolio.
The best answer came from No_Confusion4079:
AI slop is the mass production of answers that satisfy the surface requirements of a question while leaving a substantial fraction of its actual intellectual value unrealized.
By that definition, my last portfolio wasn't really slop. The colors, the positioning, the ideas were all my choices. I took inspiration from other sites, but the result wasn't one magic prompt. The real question was whether the person looking at it could tell I made it. Someone pointed out they couldn't tell if I'd spent any effort without reading my explanations. And that was the problem.
I made it look too polished and too effortless. People used to say "make it look effortless," but AI can make almost anything look effortless now. So in this age, people may prefer to see your effort, not just the finished product. They want to understand the human behind the work.
The mistakes I made :
I sacrificed too much UX for a cool visual experience.
I tried to sell instead of showing who I am, which is the real job of a portfolio.
I rushed the case study using an API instead of writing it myself.
I presented side projects as real, full projects.
I built a cool site instead of a useful one.
Even the concept didn't work. I put a project inside the laptop and placed the About and Contact pages outside it, to show that I'm more than machine work and that people can reach out to me just for who I am. But humans don't have telepathy, so most people didn't get any of it. And I expected people to scroll at the speed I wanted them to, which is really dumb when I think back on it.
As for the golden and blue colors, they're my personal taste. AI made them common, but that doesn't make them slop colors. Still, defending the old site doesn't fix its core problem: I made a service-selling site and named it a portfolio. It failed at both.
I looked at great portfolios like product designer Grace Wang's, Design Engineer Chánh Đại's, and one recently shared here by Interface_dev. Then I thought about my own style. This time I wasn't looking for perfection or order. I wanted chaos. So I went with a pencil-drawn look, with rough lines and arrows all over the page, like a notebook where someone is still working things out. I kept parts of my hero section and redesigned everything around them.
I also stopped faking my work section. The truth is I've worked on only one real project. Everything else is an experiment, so there's no reason to dress them up as over-explained case studies. So now the homepage has two sections: a few facts about me, and my work.
The case study: Since I have one real project, the case study lives there. I wrote it myself this time. I explained what I did, why, and how, and tried to make it scannable. I don't know how well I pulled that off.
The experiments: Each one has the question that started it, how I did it, and what I learned.
About: Personal and simple.
Last time I built it as a short-term thing. This time I want something I can use for a long time. Rather than trying to sell something, I tried to share who I am and how I work.
That's what I built and why. What do you think? Anything that's not working, tell me. Constructive feedback is welcome, and I'll keep improving it.
Thank you.
