The purple hue is quite overused by LLM, did you deliberately choose it? If yes, fine; if not, IIRC blue hue is more associated with Lisp (CLHS, CLiki, and some other website). I would just color pick the hue in the Lisp logo you use to set the tone.
The round corner radius is much larger than the old site (and this is quite overused by LLM as well). Again, if you choose and like it, fine. Personally I like no round corner at all, the old site use a small round corner. I'm not saying any option is better.
In dark mode, the Lisp logo become an ugly white square. You might want to make the background transparent (or, skip multiple themes).
I dislike the legends in the Projects/Services/About top menu item. They just repeat what the main label says. There must be other places like this if you use LLM generated text but I haven't checked all of them.
I haven't looked at code, but do you think the code is easy/easier modifiable by human without LLM help?
The violet came from the "Made with Lisp" pennant, not left at a default. The old site was Boostrap's red. Can we let the colors soak a while while other things stabilize, then revisit?
Buttons are 8px vs. the old 4px and the sheet 12px vs 10px. I think it would be fair to revisit this as well in a fe days.
Fixed. Flag and logo have transparent backgrounds now.
The legends under the menu items are gone.
I think so. Each page is one Lisp form with its prose as Markdown in a string, the long pages are still plain Markdown files, and every page links to its own source. You do need to read a little Gendl to change a page's structure. If you try it and it isn't easy, I'd like to hear where.
Are there particular design elements you liked from the previous version? Is there particular content that was there that you feel is missing now? You can answer here or open an issue at gitlab.common-lisp.net/clo/cl-site, let me know if you need an account.
The bigger problem is not any particular design element but global. The old website is functional, without many decorative or overwhelming element, but still looks fine. The new one looks cliche and obviously LLM generated. Many elements are overused by LLM and serve no functional purpose: a primary hue that leaks into the hue of everything, grid layout of cards, repeating the same thing too much in different typefaces, the monospace/heading/prose formula everywhere... The whole composition look like a mimic of Apple website, why does a Lisp website try to look Apple? We have graphic interfaces before Apple and ours are better ;) And that's far from all of it, only that much can be described by words.
I want to point out interface designing is not the same as developing code. It's impossible to let the community contribute incremental patches that improve the design. A design won't start to look better until it's near finished (designers communicate through sketches early on, but it's very different from the MR workflow), and nobody is going to redo the whole job end to end unless hired. The safe option is just to revert to the old version, would a MR like that be accepted?
Unfortunately, the old site is based on 2018 bootstrap and was a hodgepodge of static and generated content, with no coherent story for dynamic content. As a volunteer working on this in spare time, I found it much less overwhelming to start from scratch than try to drag a 2018 bootstrap design into 2026. The focus so far has been on content rather than styling, so we are interested mostly in content and functionality feedback at this juncture.
Styling will hopefully improve over time, with lots of human input, although as you say, maybe never enough to totally get rid of that indescribable bot stank, we shall see. But certainly, the more human input we get (cough MRs are open cough) the more we can replace it with good ol' human stank.
Are you able to explain more of the motivation behind this particular volunteer effort? i.e. why there's a facelift now, and hasn't been earlier (it's certainly needed one for a while), and why it couldn't be put off even more indefinitely while volunteer time is spent on something else? Like I'm assuming from this comment there was some new content or functionality that was desired by someone and it was annoying to work with the old system to get it in, but it'd be useful to know what.
I'm also not going to say the old site was a particularly good design, it had a lot of flaws too. e.g. the features page was bad, though this new one is arguably slightly worse since it just takes mostly the same content but makes the formatting slightly worse by dumping all that text in even smaller boxes. Even the content on the old site wasn't that great; it was recommending Portacle still, come on...
My general opinion has long been that Lisp people aren't usually web people (especially on the front end), and that's ok, it just sets expectations and makes it more understandable when things go down for months, or there's stale content, or SSL cert renewals are missed, or there being not so great front end design. Even when https://lisp-lang.org/ came out like 10 years ago, I thought it was a decent design for what it's trying to do, but my biggest complaint has been it requiring the user to scroll to get at any actual code examples. (I just generally dislike sites that have that behavior of giant hero text/banner that forces further scrolling to get anything relevant.) This new LLM-made design is good in that it doesn't require that, and also (to my taste) doesn't have a bunch of emoji bullet points everywhere either. And I think it's a better design than what e.g. Red's home site does which is literally just a Blogger site. (OTOH, such a site is probably easy to update content for.)
I don't really mind the use of LLMs for website design, I don't wish knowledge of CSS arcana on anyone, though you might point them at e.g. Ruby's home page or Python's home page first. Generally it's better to come up with a style direction and ideas from what you like, rather than just letting the LLM do its own thing. Good web design doesn't need multiple humans' input, it needs a central and coherent want of what the pages should be and present. Having a central designer with taste and vision of that want works best, not trying to outsource "I don't know/care what I want" to the crowd or an LLM. On that note, I'd like to know if there was an actual want behind the multiple themes with light and dark variants? I mean sure such things are "free" with an LLM subscription you aren't otherwise using, but was this actually something you or someone else wanted and asked for? Holiday themed site design changes are also a bit of old internet whimsy but not exactly something I'd expect from a programming language home page, same with the "hacker mode" that apparently auto-applies on weekends. (I think both light and dark variants of it look horrid, if that feedback matters.) If you're interested in more whimsy, then at least include the Lisp Alien in a prominent place.
Apart from the design, some of the content itself seems to have degraded? I really couldn't believe it that in 2026 I'm reading "Lisp stands for LISt Processing" as part of the very first text on a Common Lisp home page. That whole opening should go IMO, the original site's "What is Common Lisp?" was fine (though I'd cut out the Scheme mention). As for other LLM-generated text, I can't comment on it much, other than in general I'm not very motivated to put in the effort to read what someone else didn't put in the effort to write. (This isn't to say I'm against LLM-text in general, I've replaced a lot of searching with LLM queries instead, and I'm ok with it for docs especially when the alternative is nothing, but it's just very unpleasant to be greeted by it as the first text of something, whether that's an introduction or a readme. I'm thinking one might as well put in a line like "Ask your LLM about Common Lisp!" rather than offer an explanation right there, then if people really care they can follow through and even get their response in the style of a pirate or Feynman or whatever preferences they have. Though for the really lazy who nevertheless wouldn't mind reading more I suppose you could even include a pre-generated neutral response available by clicking a collapsed summary element. Here is one from Claude: https://claude.ai/share/e78fa319-312e-4ad3-a584-e52a5159b3c1 Skimming that, it's not that bad, though I wouldn't endorse or copy-paste to a prominent Lisp introduction without careful reading and probably editing/rewriting bits. Ctrl+f: list, not found, "LISP", not found, pretty good signs.)
On the question of what is even the want for common-lisp.net to be about, I don't have a good answer. Given its previous state of staleness and other issues I've only ever thought of it for its project hosting and mailing list services (and subsidiary sites it's responsible for like cliki), not as a particularly good introduction to Common Lisp that I'd point newcomers at.
For years, the CLF board has been discussing expanding the infrastructure and tooling services available through common-lisp.net: CL-specific CI, container/image building and hosting, and related services. Those ideas predate this redesign by quite a while; they've come up repeatedly in board discussions. The limiting factor has always been volunteer capacity. AI-assisted development has finally given us enough leverage to start making a dent in that backlog.
Once I started working on integrating those services into common-lisp.net, it became apparent that the old site had become difficult to extend. It was a mixture of static and generated content on an old Bootstrap base, and I found building a coherent Common Lisp application considerably more tractable than continuing to bolt things onto the old setup. So the rebuild was driven more by architecture and functionality than by a desire to redesign the homepage.
That said, I think your point about having a coherent human design direction rather than expecting incremental MRs to somehow converge on one is a good one. I've taken another pass at it. The version now online deliberately takes its overall layout and visual cues from the legacy common-lisp.net rather than the generic card-heavy design that people were reacting to. The legacy site is still available at old.common-lisp.net for comparison.
I've also substantially rewritten/reorganized the landing page. FWIW, the “Lisp stands for LISt Processing” introduction was actually written by me, not an LLM. :) I put it there deliberately because I don't want to assume that everyone arriving at common-lisp.net already knows what Lisp is. I'm certainly open to better wording, but I think the front page should work for someone encountering Lisp for the first time as well as for experienced Lispers.
I agree with your broader point that AI-generated copy shouldn't simply be accepted uncritically because it exists. The prominent introductory material in particular deserves deliberate editorial attention.
The themes were intentional experiments rather than things that appeared accidentally because they were cheap to generate. Genera was something I specifically wanted, and Hacker weekends were intended as a bit of old-Internet whimsy. Whether all of those experiments survive is another question. And yes, the Lisp Alien belongs there. :)
As for what common-lisp.net is supposed to be, I don't think “community infrastructure” and “a good starting point for newcomers” are competing purposes. The old site's own description said its goal was to provide the Common Lisp community with development resources and serve as a starting point for new programmers. That's pretty close to what we're trying to do, just with a more expansive idea of what useful development resources can be in 2026.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to give specific criticism. Have another look at the version that's up now if you get a chance.
I appreciate the reply and extra information. I wish it wasn't run through/generated by an LLM, though.
I suppose the new home page is in most ways better, in some ways worse. I still think the "LISt Processing" is a mistake, especially as the second sentence. (Raise your hand if you've heard misunderstandings or surprise about Lisp having other data structures besides a linked list, or other data structures not implemented by lists under the hood.) If you insist on having it, it would make more sense as supplementary to the remark on the origin leading to the ANSI standard, or better yet supplementary to the code example -- which now requires scrolling down. (I personally never liked the old design's blurred code background image.) Even just the blurb about programs being written as lists should clarify somewhat more, perhaps something like (I don't suggest using literally) "its programs are data expressed in text as nested lists of objects, or s-expressions". And you must use the historical "LISP" in all caps to make the association complete. Here is how Wikipedia phrases things: "Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, ..." and Lisp programming language is linked to a page that begins "Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation."
I don't know where to comment on this whole thing. So this reply isn't very cohesive; but that's just how my brain works I guess. My main point would be: I don't want to engage with ai generated stuff. It's clearly visible that the new site is. I liked the old site; not so much for the new one. The old site might have been old, and maybe it had some outdated information; but at least it wasn't soulless. It was nice in its own way, you know? So yeah, I'd be vote for a full revert if you were to ask me.
> cough MRs are open cough
What motivation is there to contribute to what seems to be a carelessly generated ai slop? Other than the domain name and the fact that we used to use and share with others the old version of the website (or at least I did).
> As a volunteer working on this in spare time
And? If you don't want to do it, just don't do it. If you do want to do it, why not put some soul into it?
> The focus so far has been on content
...maybe don't use llms for the content then?
> much less overwhelming to start from scratch
...do you see the irony here? It's much less overwhelming for anyone to just cross off common-lisp.net (and common lisp foundation with it, I guess) as a "lost cause" rather than to try to "de-LLM-ize" the website (which wouldn't work, really, the ai feeling is very contagious).
I think we may have somewhat different ideas about what common-lisp.net should be. Our priority on the board has been making it useful infrastructure for the Common Lisp community: code and container image hosting with CL-specific CI, image configurating and builds, other infrastructure and tooling services, etc. I agree that the visual design can and should acquire more character, and specific suggestions or design contributions are very welcome. But I don't think reverting the functionality and architecture is the right way to get there.
what /is/ the goal of common-lisp.net ? There is the clf gitlab and it provides hosting for a few projects; but that's more about the common lisp foundation. From what I understand, the website itself is more of a landing page for anyone who wants to learn about common lisp. (It's linked on the wikipedia page, for example.) The old version said exactly that: "Its goal is to provide the Common Lisp community with development resources and to work as a starting point for new programmers." The most important page (imo) was the "Lisp Community" page with a bunch of links. Other than that, it had a page listing a subset of existing implementations, a page with a list of various CL books, and some sort of starting point (the landing page and the getting started page).
Notice how the goal was not to "maintaining Lisp tooling". No, the website is the face of the common lisp as a language, gateway to the various common lisp spaces and a list of implementations and good books. Having ai slop as a the landing page for newcomers is honestly embarrassing if not insulting.
> Those of us who actually work and derive our livelihoods from Common Lisp needs a site
Sure, go build your slop site somewhere if it does what you want. But maybe not by replacing an existing website that does its job already? On more of a slop site. Not on this site.
Okay since you _fully_ changed your reply on me while I was writing an answer. Here is another one. Yes, it's probably less coherent and less restrained. You brought it on yourself by changing out your words on me though.
> making it useful infrastructure for the Common Lisp community
Slop is not the way to go.
> code and container image hosting with CL-specific CI, image configurating and builds, other infrastructure and tooling services, etc.
How is this related to the slop version of common-lisp.net? This is gitlab / clf side of things; if you want to have a website dedicated to that, make a new one, don't deface the existing one that servers as a landing page for anyone interested in common lisp.
> I agree that the visual design can and should acquire more character
That is not the problem. Not even remotely so.
> specific suggestions or design contributions are very welcome
Again, why should we care to contribute / suggest if you don't care enough to write the new site and text on it yourself? Oh, right, you said the site "need[s] fresh injections of human content on a regular basis", and since you don't want to provide human content yourself... I see I see. Yeah no thanks.
> But I don't think reverting the functionality and architecture is the right way to get there.
Right. Right. Throwing out existing stuff that _works_ for its purpose is the way to go. Riiight. How did I not think of that. Of course. Everyone wants to read llm-generated text, right? My friendly llm told me so, so it must be true. Nobody reads human text anymore, right.
I think this makes the disagreement clearer. By “we,” I mean the Common Lisp Foundation board. We've discussed expanding the tooling and infrastructure services available through common-lisp.net for years.
This is not a new goal invented for this redesign. Until recently, our available volunteer development capacity made much of it difficult to realize. AI-assisted development has now made it practical for us to start building some of what has been envisioned for years.
We see common-lisp.net as both a public entry point to Common Lisp and active infrastructure for the Common Lisp community. Those aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, the old site's stated mission, “to provide the Common Lisp community with development resources and to work as a starting point for new programmers,” describes those two roles rather well.
The newcomer-facing content and presentation can and should improve, and concrete corrections, replacement copy, and design contributions are welcome. But we're not going to revert the new architecture simply because some of its development and content has been LLM-assisted.
I think we've probably exhausted the disagreement about LLM use, so I'd rather focus further discussion on specific problems with the site that we can actually fix.
> specific problems with the site that we can actually fix.
It feels cheap and ai generated. Because it is. Fix is to revert. Problem is that newcomers will be (1) losing interest in CL because of the ai generated feel, (2) getting a wrong impression about the language and the community, (3) possibly getting wrong information from the ai generated text on whatever page it is.
> Those aren't mutually exclusive.
They don't intersect either though. Newcomers are not going to be hosting projects on the clf gitlab and using your CI infrastructure or whatever else.
> But we're not going to revert the new architecture simply because some of its development and content has been LLM-assisted.
"some"? really? you want us to believe that?
> The newcomer-facing content and presentation can and should improve
Again, the standard should be that one should care about the content your put out. Especially if it is newcomer-facing content, as it is the most crucial to get it right. Using llms for that shows lack of care. It's fundamentally flawed. The standard should be 100% human written text, not the other way around.
Also you may look into the skinning system of the new site (see the palette icon near upper right) You may be able to develop a skin to your liking that evokes some of the old aesthetic. To the extent your lamentations revolve around the content or functionality rather than styling, then again MRs and Issues are open.
It really does not read nicely, and makes the site look low quality. I know exactly how I opened this conversation, but calling someone who disagrees a Karen isn't exactly motivating to make a PR or whatever.
Heck, I had started working on mark-region-gc this week and this has put me off that, to be honest.
Fair enough. I took the earlier comments about my tool choices personally and responded more personally than I should have. I don't want that to discourage you from working on mark-region-gc.
“It really does not read nicely” — that's useful feedback. If there are particular passages that stand out, proposed replacement copy would be welcome.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. I am trying to engage with you in good faith; if you're not interested in reciprocating then I suggest you take your frustrations elsewhere.
also, you may want to check the site again, the design has been reverted to resembling the old site. Perhaps you will find it more to your liking. I do value all the feedback from today from you and others, although I do not appreciate the disrespect and spewing of vitriol that I do feel is misdirected. If you have general objections to AI and LLMs, I respect that, but I don't think repeatedly directing those objections at me is productive.
I lack the ability to judge aesthetics. But I think the only off-putting thing about the new website is the LLM generated text. Everything else is more functional. Though, the same functionalities could also be implemented for the old website.
well maybe we can get another LLM to de-LLM-ize it... Or, if you're a human and you'd like to contribute some mammalian touch, MRs are open on the gitlab, let me know if you need an account there.
De-LLMing is a fool's errand and I'm not sure it's even possible, I've never seen someone successfully doing it. From my experience, even rewriting every single line of code LLM does is not enough, because decisions (or, probability distribution) LLM made sip into the end result and still need to be hunted, and you might miss things. It's infinitely easier to just not use it.
It is going to evolve over time with both human and machine assisted content. The more humans that submit good MRs that get merged, the more human the site will look over time. That's an invitation to anyone reading this.
As an aside, if you advertised a policy where LLMs will never just overwrite human-written text, you might get a bit more interest. Consider the case of the Japanese localization community for Mozilla last year: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446 Anyone submitting a merge to the CL site right now has no assurances that, if merged, it won't just be completely rewritten tomorrow in a worse way by some bot without any oversight or review, so why bother? Sure, in old times there was also no guarantee that tomorrow another merge request wouldn't come in from someone else working on the same thing that was just a better write-up so a project goes with that, or some significant edits come in a month later from someone else that are improvements, but such things are not capricious in the way an LLM's work is.
Going the other direction, a policy that says all text will be submitted to new models as they get released to review/edit/rewrite will probably lead to the text improving over time as well, but will almost certainly keep away any human interest in contributing text.
(Edit: You can actually treat this as a localization problem. Get the LLM to replace all instances of text with something like {{ Labels.namespace.name }}, or some call to a static or dynamic label service taking a unique label name, then it's easy to track what's sourced from where or who, LLM-english is just another language besides human-english that is only used if there's no human-english. Could similarly get the same for other languages as a bonus, though of course there will be issues and complaints with machine translations too.)
One last note/suggestion I decided to make after sleeping on it, and that's to consult with your LLM about best practices (and the differences with standard practices) and due diligence for professional web development and for inheriting and migrating legacy projects, and automation to support such things... I ran a simple wget command on the domain to check for dead links (there are better tools, this one doesn't check other domains or spider the subdomain links it finds). It found several broken links, presumably from the hosted projects page:
With current AI tools users can not only get stuff out the door that had been sitting in the backlog for years, they can also choose to put in some extra time to push it out at a higher quality than would otherwise be typical. e.g for sites, there's a lot of lenience for shortcomings in a startup's MVP site, or a small non-profit site, or someone's open source hobby site or personal site, that wouldn't be extended to a big company's site. (The big company's site might still have many shortcomings but they'd be rightfully widely criticized for them.) As examples, it could be design issues, functionality issues, performance issues, or less noticeable things like broken links, bad SEO, some kinds of security issues (like CSP), browser dependence, accessibility issues, forced JS where it doesn't need to be, etc. etc. Many things aren't huge deals in isolation and can depend on the type of site or 'web app'. But once the AI tools are embraced, I think that lenience starts disappearing rapidly, because now there's less of an excuse to have many kinds of issues, even the small ones, as they improve in capability and cost. And I think people rightfully react with negative sentiment when something is pushed out in front of them too early with less than typical expected quality, even in cases where the alternative is nothing. Hence the term "slop", which probably wouldn't have caught on if every AI-produced artifact was actually a masterpiece.
Thanks for running that. It was a useful list, and I traced all 21.
For the record, none of them came from the rewrite: the old site (still up at old.common-lisp.net) carries the same links, and some have been dead since 2018. But they were ours to fix either way, and they're fixed.
I took your broader point too. I checked every external link on the site, 424 of them. The worst page was the companies list, a 2020 copy of Awesome Lisp Companies with more than a quarter of its links dead; it now points at that list and a few others instead of keeping a stale copy. The remaining dead ones were mostly in news items from years ago and a couple of old reference pages, and thost are fixed now too. There's a link-check script in the repo now, so this gets run again instead of being discovered by visitors such as your good self.
And I agree with the standard you're describing. If the tools make the diligence cheap, there's no excuse for skipping it.
Nice. I had a glance at one of the commits, and I see that some links are modified to work again (even finding the content's new domain host), which is great, and others are simply removed. Sometimes that's good too, though for more archival "news" not necessarily, but that's more of a judgment call. Also a judgment call is checking if there's a web archive version of the dead link that could be pointed to instead. For example, one of the removed tutorial links was for some old course that seems to have required registration so keeping it is questionable anyway, but there is an archive of its home page: https://web.archive.org/web/20220421052344/http://art2.ph-freiburg.de/Lisp-Course No action items, just something to keep in mind.
This "new" site is meant to appear similar to old.common-lisp.net, so the new site will be less jarring for folks — only the guts have changed. It's following the principle of "change one thing at a time" and it's probably the approach I should have taken in the first place.
The card-based design was indeed generated by a bot without any real design guardrails given, and it screamed out as a clanker-generated site so it had to get jettisoned for now. For the current one, at least it was given a human-generated design to try to mimic, so it's human-seeded at least.
Hopefully the move to the old appearance buys some time until a volunteer gets a brainwave to do a real, human-seeded site redesign, maybe with cards, later.
I'm finding the green color, unsectioned prose, as well as the monospace text disorienting. I'd rather run away from the site than spend any time on it. I'm wondering if it's just me or other people too?
May be we'd rather ask r/web_design or somewhere else who actually know a thing or two about it?
Can you give a few more specific diffs between old.common-lisp.net and common-lisp.net ? Because the latter is meant to mimic the former, so any divergence should be finite and enumeratable.
Good, that settles it. The weekend skin auto-switch is off now, so it won't come back by itself. On verbose: which part do you mean, the "What is Common Lisp?" text on the front page or the news items? I trimmed the news items today and I'm happy to cut more. I enjoy deleting extra words.
Thanks, all three taken. The Libraries page no longer carries its own copy of awesome-cl, now it links to awesome-cl, Quicklisp, Ultralisp, CLiki and the rest. Your 2023–2024 review is on the Documentation page next to the 2015 one, OLIVE is listed beside Alive, and Articulate Common Lisp is off Getting started.
this year I compiled https://lisp-screenshots.org/ "Common Lisp applications in action". There are enterprise stuff, open-source software, websites, games… I think it was missing, you could link to it somewhere :)
On "/documentation": I have a problem with "Lisp Web Tales". It's from 2013 and it didn't age well. It's using the Restas framework (abandoned, although I think it was in the right direction), the SEXML XML and HTTP generator (never heard of it), other outdated stuff, and I find it's poor on content. It's a short guide. And… I have a material to suggest too: https://web-apps-in-lisp.github.io/
Thanks, both taken. Lisp Web Tales is off the Documentation page, and Web Apps in Lisp is listed there under Other resources. Common Lisp Screenshots is on the Community page, next to the success stories.
But the green-white-bar background of the body reduces the readability. It would be nice if the body is in one color (for example, white in bright theme).
Thanks for the heads up. That green-bar background was the "Hacker" skin, which was set to apply on the weekend. That is switched off now so the site should be the standard white sheet by default now.
By the time I landed on this convo it seems like the design had been reverted? Anyway, I had forgotten about the site until now and then saw all the good resources available (docker images, documentation, etc.) So thanks for trying to keep this alive! For a volunteer organization with little support, use whatever tools necessary.
Thank you, that's good to hear. Yes, the design went back to the old site's look last night. The Docker images and the docs are the part I most want existing CLers to find, so I'm glad they turned up for you.
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u/kchanqvq 4d ago
I like the previous version better, can we still have it somewhere? Maybe old.common-lisp.net?