I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.

I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.

Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.

The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.

I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.

And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.

I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.

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I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.

I do the same with new models.

> the front page is full of LLM smells

I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.

I saw it immediately as well. Some tells for me are:

- Off-white or sepia toned backgrounds, similar subdued color palette for icons, grey ALL CAPS subheadings

- Serifed headings

- Various "Item: Quantity" lists (Puzzle types: 10, Puzzles solved: 1,951, etc.)

- Middle dot character for separator

One common tell it is lacking is the placement of colored dots or circles in the corners of panels or other UI elements, sometimes animated/pulsing.

To be clear it's not bad, it's a clean and friendly style. It just has that certain look, like a visual "it's not X it's Y".

The UI of this site is similar to what Claude likes to generate. The fonts and text style, for example, scream of Claude Opus/Fable.

I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.

For images, there are some clear styles AI leans heavily on if not actively steered away[0].

It can definitely be prompted pretty successfully though, a bird spotting app was up her on HN recently with some really nice looking woodblock prints that were AI generated (I always feel disappointed/tricked when art turns out to be made by AI, I'm not sure why, it seems to pull the joy out of it for me)

[0] https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-100000-whys-of-ai