Look, I'm as anti-AI as the next guy but their homepage is good. They didn't compromise on quality.

Call a spade a spade.

Yeah this is it. I don't know what you think I expect? I'm reading your marketing copy, it's your job to market it. There are few brands in the world that can get away with forcing the buyer to do their own marketing. In this context it's grossly unearned confidence, the type you only get from idiots and LLMs.

Brings to mind The Show's "ugly MySpace" episode: https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-083

It would be nice if everyone prioritised, and was capable of, shipping polished products. But more likely the apps you're bemoaning come from folks who are not product designers. Even prior to genAI there were plenty of developers (myself included) who had patchy competence in some subset of {copywriting, documentation information architecture, visual design, identity, UI/UX, ...}. I know good developers for whom UI coherence is "not their problem," although they know well enough that it needs to be someone's problem. "Programmer art" is also a thing. I would argue that the non-coding parts of many open-source projects are what lets them down, and when it is good it is usually documentation that impresses me the most. But I think Ze Frank's view might be that, given the sudden drop in barriers to entry, it is amazing that everyone is having a go and trying to express themselves.

Something like a tiny app with a volume, port mapping, and a simple rebuild loop would make the value much easier to see.