performative-ui: a React library that parodies AI startup landing pages

performative-ui is a React component library that ships the visual language of an AI startup landing page — and treats it as comedy. Its own tagline reads: "AI-native React components that signal how oversubscribed your funding round is."

A catalog of design tropes

Published on GitHub Pages and npm, the project collects more than 30 components grouped by the part of a marketing page they occupy: Heroes, Menus, Social Proof, Atoms, Primitives, Banners, Backgrounds, Surfaces, Conversation and Pricing & Conversion. Each entry carries a one-line description that names the pattern it imitates. StickyBanner is "funding news disguised as utility." StatusDot is "always green, even when it's not." Popover is "built for conversion, not consent." WaitlistForm offers "demand we manufactured ourselves," and Prompt is "the textarea every AI builder ships instead of explaining what their product does."

What the components are actually saying

Several of the jokes point at specific habits of the current startup stack. MockIDE promises "real code is coming. This is the trailer." TokenStream notes that "server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025." Aurora reduces a generation of visual identity to "three blobs." SlippyWords is described as "buzzwords that physically move when you scroll. Motion design, allegedly," while LogoMarquee claims to be "trusted by everyone you've heard of, including the ones that didn't sign."

The rest of the catalog fills out the genre: five hero variants (AsciiHero, Goldeneye, Rotator, WordRoll, PromptHero), a Temperature menu that "goes to eleven," stat counters, community badges, a GlassCard described as "backdrop-filter: ambition," chat bubbles, a WibblingSpinner and a glowing middle pricing tier.

Install and ports

The library is published to npm as performative-ui, currently at version 0.7.0 under the MIT license. It supports React 18 and 19, is written in strict TypeScript, and the README advertises a bundle of about 30 KB. Documentation and live demos sit alongside the catalog, and the project has two community Svelte 5 ports of the same component list. On Hacker News, where it appeared as a Show HN post, it drew more than 1,100 points.