Is shadcn breaking design standards?

Is your product a ghost in the shell?

If everyone is using the same blueprint to build their house, does the neighborhood still have a soul, or are we just living in a high-fidelity subdivision of the mind?

We’ve reached a strange peak in product design. You grab shadcn, you wire up some logic, and suddenly you have a responsive, accessible, "sleek" interface. It’s a massive upgrade from the days of fighting plain CSS. The margins are sane. The font scaling is logical. The buttons actually look like buttons.

But there is a price for this efficiency. We are currently drowning in the "Linear-descendant" aesthetic. You know the one: dark backgrounds, soft blurs, subtle purple accents, and that specific card-border radius that screams "I launched this in four hours."

It’s not ugly. In fact, it’s objectively "clean." But clean has become a synonym for indistinguishable.

The Comfort of the Default

There is a safety in defaults. Using a battle-tested library is rational. If you are building a small internal tool or a tiny side project, inventing a new design language is a waste of time. The value is in the utility. In these cases, "vibecoding" is just good business.

However, we have to ask ourselves: at what point does the convenience of the library start erasing the identity of the creator? If your SaaS looks exactly like your competitor’s because you both downloaded the same component library, you aren't just saving time--you are outsourcing your brand's first impression to a npm package.

It’s like a basketball team where every player has the same haircut, shoes, and shooting form because a manual said it was "optimal." You might win games, but nobody is buying your jersey.

The Paradox of Choice and the Death of "Vibe"

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argues that too many options lead to anxiety. Frameworks and libraries solve this by giving us a "right" answer. But when everyone takes the same right answer, we lose the friction that creates beauty.

Think about the most memorable products you’ve used. They usually have a "signature"—a specific density, a brave typographic choice, or a color palette that doesn't feel like it was picked from a "Coolors" trending page.

Is a product truly "designed" if no unique decisions were made? Or is it just "assembled"? We are moving from an era of craftsmanship to an era of curation, and while that makes us faster, it makes the digital world feel remarkably flat.

Breaking the "Standard" Without Breaking the Product

You don't need to hand-roll every CSS variable to stand out. You just need to inject a little soul back into the machine.

It can be small:

• Tweak the density: Don't accept the default padding if it doesn't fit your brand's energy.
• Kill the purple: If I see one more "Indigo-600" primary button on a dark mode dashboard, I’m going to need a very dry beer to recover.
• One "Signature" Screen: Pick one part of your app—the dashboard header, the onboarding, the empty states—and make it look like nothing else on the market.

We need better defaults, not just better critiques. I’d love to see a world where we share palettes for different energies—a "Calm B2B" set that isn't boring, or a "Playful Indie" set that isn't childish.

The Final Score

At the end of the day, I’m a fan of shipping but don't let the tools make the decisions for you.

If your product disappeared tomorrow, would people miss the features, or would they miss the way it felt to use it? If the answer is only the features, you haven't built a brand; you've built a utility. And utilities are easily replaced by the next person with a faster library.

What you should do next: Go into your global CSS right now. Change your primary brand color by 15 degrees on the color wheel and adjust your border-radius by 4px. See if the "soul" of your product starts to peek through the code.