I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had.
The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective.
I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.
One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile.
Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much
I see a lot of projects repeated: screen capture tool, LLM wrapper, blog/newsletter, marketing tool for reddit/twitter, manage social media accounts. These things have been around for a while so it is really easy for an LLM to spit them out for someone that does not know how to code.
Agreed. I'm over here working on Quake 2 mods and reverse engineering Off world trading company so I can finish an open source server for it using AI.
Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.
My favorite part about people promoting (and probably vote stuffing) their closed-source non-free app that clone other apps is when people share the superior free alternatives in the comments.
Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)
One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.
Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway.
You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience.
It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious.
Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews.
It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it.
I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share
I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).
There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent
30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%
An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI.
Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted.
But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future.
Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to see the effort.
I built my share of AI stuff (although more using AI in the product than vibe coding ), so I won’t complain. But I did got frustrated when I recently posted a Show HN that I thought HN community would like and no one did.
It is a comeback from a post that stayed for a few hours in the front page a few years ago. Also, it is a useful, non-AI slop, free product. So when it got none upvotes it made me think how I don’t understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did.
Here is the post for the curious
Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email
I had a similar experience trying to get feedback on my attempt to help different role families adopt AI evals as a common language (hands on tutorial or tool comparison).
I attribute it mostly to my own inability to pitch something that is aimed for many audiences at once and needs more UX polishing and maybe a bit on timing.
It's tough when you're not looking to sell a product but moreso engage in a community without going the twitter/bluesky route (which I'll bregudgingly may start using).
Maybe evals is a problem that people don't have yet because they can just build their custom thing or maybe it needs a "hey, you're building agent skills, here's the mental model" (e.g. https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent... ) and once they get to the evals part, we start to interact.
In any case, I still find quite a lot of cool things in SHOW HN but the volume will definitely be a challenge going forward.
Perhaps it's the right moment to start an AI Show HN (Vibe HN as recommended above), as I assume more than half of Show HN is now from ChatGPT/Claude, and it's impossible to cut through this noise with something reliable that humans craft over years.
It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.
I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it.
So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately.
Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer.
Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy.
So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile phones came, it will be probably with coding/programming.
OK, let's say there are two categories of software now.
One is where the human has a complete mental map of the product, and even if they use some code generating tools, they fully take responsibility for the related matters.
And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not.
I believe these are two categories that are currently merged in one Show HN, and if in the first category I can be curious about the decisions people made and the solutions they chose, I don't give a flying fork about what an LLM generated.
If you have a 'fog of war' in your codebase, well, you don't own your software, and there's no need to show it as yours. Same way, if you had used autocomplete, or a typewriter in the time of handwriting, and the thinking is yours, an LLM shouldn't be a problem.
No. I see this mistake everywhere. You're confusing "knowing everything" or "making assumptions" with "mental maps". They are not at all the same thing.
The benefit of libraries is it's an abstraction and compartmentalization layer. You don't have to use REST calls to talk to AWS, you can use boto and move s3 files around in your code without cluttering it up.
Yeah, sometimes the abstraction breaks or fails, but generally that's rare unless the library really sucks, or you get a leftpad situation.
Having a mental map of your code doesn't mean you know everything, it means you understand how your code works, what it is responsible for, and how it interacts with or delegates to other things.
Part of being a good software engineer is managing complexity like that.
There's a difference between not knowing the internals of a dependency you chose deliberately and not understanding the logic of your own product.
When you upgrade a library, you made that decision — you know why, you know what it does for you, and you can evaluate the trade-offs before proceeding (unless you're a react developer).
That's not a fog of war, that's delegation.
When an LLM generates your core logic and you can't explain why it works, that's a fundamentally different situation. You're not delegating — you're outsourcing the understanding, and that makes the result not yours.
I don't think so. At the end of the day it's just a tool.
Case in point: aside from Tabbing furiously, I use the Ask feature to ask vague questions that would take my coworkers time they don't have.
Interestingly at least in Cursor, Intellisense seems to be dumbed down in favour of AI, so when I look at a commit, it typically has double digit percentage of "AI co-authorship", even though most of the time it's the result of using Tab and Intellisense would have given the same suggestion anyway.
Had a funny experience with this some weeks ago. I started developing a small side project and after a week I wondered if this existed already. To my surprise, someone had already built something relatively similar _with the exact same name_ (though I had chosen mine as a placeholder, still funny though) only 2 weeks before, and posted it in Show HN.
I took a look at the project and it was a 100k+ LoC vibe-coded repository. The project itself looked good, but it seemed quite excessive in terms of what it was solving. It made me think, I wonder if this exists because it is explicitly needed, or simply because it is so easy for it to exist?
Give people the ability to submit a “Show HN” one year in advance. Specifically, the user specifies the title and a short summary, then has to wait at least year until they can write the remaining description and submit the post. The user can wait more than a year or not submit at all; the delay (and specifying the title/summary beforehand) is so that only projects that have been worked on for over a year are submit-able.
Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.
I think it is true with any distribution channel. When people figure out that it works, then everyone ends up bombarding that channel till it saturates.
Vibe coding is not helping either, I guess. Now it is even cheaper to create assets for the distribution channel.
Reminds me of the quote: "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded"
Some of it is "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes". Fare enough, I've seen plenty of things I've found cool not get much attention. That's just the nature of the internet.
The other point is show and share HN stories growing in volume, which makes sense since it's now considerably easier to build things. I don't think that's a bad thing really, although curation makes it more difficult. Now that pure agentic coding has finally arrived IMO, creativity and what to build are significantly more important. They always were but technical ability was often rewarded much more heavily. I guess that sucks for technical people.
> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes"
HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value.
So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions.
Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top. Or we could have particular days of the week/month where, perhaps by convention rather than enforcement, Show HN posts get more attention.
I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but it's perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.
This is a forum called Hacker News. It’s for technical people. Perhaps these LLM-generated slop projects could get posted on Product Hunt or somewhere focused on the creative product side of tech and not technical knowledge and discussion
The legend says SHNs are getting worse, but surely if the % of SHN posts with 1 point is going DOWN (as per graph) then it's getting better? Either I am dense or the legends are the wrong way round no?
The long-term trend (ie since 2023) is for more ShowHN posts to be stuck at 1 point compared with normal posts, and for that gap to be growing. This implies that people find the ShowHNs to be less and less interesting.
I think vibe coding something and showing it off on Show HN is probably fine, but it boils my blood when people cannot even be bothered to write the post body themselves. If someone is using an AI generated post body and title that's usually a clear signal of slop for me. The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!
The fact that the volume is exploding but the graveyard is also exploding, is a sign that the system is working, not that it's broken (the filter is working).
I did 3 ShowHN in 2024 (outside of the scope of this analysis), one with 306 points, another with 126 points and the third with... 2. There's always been some kind of unpredictability in ShowHN.
But I think the number one criteria for visibility is intelligibility: the project has to be easy to understand immediately, and if possible, easy to install/verify. IMHO, none of the three projects that the author complains didn't get through the noise qualify on this criteria. #2 and #3 are super elaborate (and overly specific); #1 is the easiest to understand (Neohabit) but the home page is heavy in examples that go in all directions, and the github has a million graphics that seem quite complex.
The small indie developer ain't dead yet, and from where I sit you could drive a star destroyer through the gaps in what software has been built so far.
It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding
Vibe coding as a term is really annoying. At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded? If I spent a year iterating on a design and implementation using Claude code, in a domain I’m an expert in, will that still be considered vibe coded?
I view it as do you have a full mental model of the code base.
If you do then not vibe coded.
For me, I have different levels of vibes:
Some testing/prototyping bash scripts 100% vibe coded. I have never actually read the code.
Sometimes early iterations, I am familiar with general architecture, but do not know exact file contents.
Sometimes I have gone through and practically rewrote a component from scratch either because it was too convoluted, did not have the perfect abstraction I wantet/etc.
For me the third category is not vibe coded. The first 2 are tech debt in the making.
I'll counter you this: I don't use AI at all, but in a way I am a vibe coder, even though I'm five years of full time work into one OSS project. I have no code review. I move fast and ship bugs. I roll forward.
I see no reason to disrespect your work from what you say, but I also see no reason that AI would be much help to you after you had been learning for a year. If you are in the loop, shouldn't this be just about the moment when your growing abilities start to easily outpace the model's fixed abilities?
vibe coding is no-look coding, it's largely being replaced by agents that do the iteration to the point no human is involved beyond initial project description like "Build me a web browser"
> Show HN of course isn't dead. You could even say it's more alive than ever.
You could argue it's dead in the sense of "dead internet theory". Yes, more projects than ever are being submitted, but they were not created by humans. Maybe they are being submitted by humans, for now.
I am a major advocate for AI assisted development.
Having said that, it used to feel part of an exclusive club to have the skills and motivation to put a finished project on HN. For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development - remember that - when development of something worthwhile took years and was written entirely by hand?
I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.
> I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.
Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp.
Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.
There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.
It's better if you don't have to learn to program to make applications.
In the future it will seem very strange that there was a time when people had to write every line of code manually. It will simply be accepted that the computers write computer programs for you, no one will think twice about it.
I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc.
I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.
Get on the Fediverse. A hosted Mastodon account isn't that expensive, or you can get an account for free on just about any instance. Curate programming and developer accounts (there are tons.) Post your blog there.
Time for a new category? "Slop HN: Claude built this mini tool for me" - would be lol to see the "slop" in the header right in the middle of "show | jobs" -> "show | slop | jobs"
This aligns with my experience. It's good to have it properly analyzed.
If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.
Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts.
It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, basically.
I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had.
The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective.
I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.
One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile.
Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much
I see a lot of projects repeated: screen capture tool, LLM wrapper, blog/newsletter, marketing tool for reddit/twitter, manage social media accounts. These things have been around for a while so it is really easy for an LLM to spit them out for someone that does not know how to code.
Agreed. I'm over here working on Quake 2 mods and reverse engineering Off world trading company so I can finish an open source server for it using AI.
Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.
My favorite part about people promoting (and probably vote stuffing) their closed-source non-free app that clone other apps is when people share the superior free alternatives in the comments.
we need a Vibe HN
Prompter News
Hacker Slop
listen_to_what_the_man_said.stm
That may be something.
Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)
One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.
Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway.
You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
> the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring
concur, perhaps a dedicated or alternative, itch.io like area named "Slop HN:..."
I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience.
It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious.
Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews.
It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953
it was in this link included in this same story https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
18 relevant results in 0.96s, from Kagi.
> Maybe not an overnight sensation but
> It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis.
> It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence
If you had included an em-dash in your comment, you could have reached 100% certainty of AI generation.
I get that a lot. I’ve wondered why. It’s a bit sad and funny at the same time. I’m not a native english speaker which makes it even more confusing…
I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share
I think HN is a very particular group of people and not representative of the market for a lot of the products we make. We tend to like open-source things, ask lots of technical questions and complain about minute things. Also, Show HNs tend to perform better if they are quick to use (no sign in required, don't need to download, etc.).
It's also a pretty big lottery. Two nearly identical projects can get very different receptions depending on the phase of the moon.
If there's a non-lottery option for $6m in revenue and $4.5m profit over a few years, I wouldn't be alone in wanting to find it and work that option.
As per the old efficient market jokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044
Yes, this was in a marketing niche and I knew it wasn't a good fit
mine got lot of upvotes and huge traffic but it died after few days. I think it has more to do with novelty of idea rather than commercial interest.
Show us the Show HN!
Our revenue isn't public and this is a throwaway
what channel did you find success in?
Affiliates. They made it blow up overnight with an existing audience
Interesting, may I ask what network exactly you used?
We don't use one. Got connected through with the first affiliates in a paid/private community in that particular niche
This is helpful. Just to clarify, so you had created your own affiliate network and run this manually? Tracking, payouts, etc?
There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent
Can you recommend this software? It's definitely not considered an ad, but just to understand what exactly you find useful.
So the affiliates obviously get 25%.
30%. But it brought tons of word of mouth and such after the ball got rolling so the total affiliate commission compared to our revenue lifetime is closer to 10-15%
An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI.
Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted.
But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future.
Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to see the effort.
It's reasonably clear from the second sentence in the post that the uptick in submissions can be largely attributed to AI-assisted projects.
> The post quickly disappeared from Show HN's first page, amongst the rest of the vibecoded pulp.
The linked article[0] also talks at length about the impact of AI and vibe-coding on indie craftsmanship's longevity.
[0] - https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
I built my share of AI stuff (although more using AI in the product than vibe coding ), so I won’t complain. But I did got frustrated when I recently posted a Show HN that I thought HN community would like and no one did.
It is a comeback from a post that stayed for a few hours in the front page a few years ago. Also, it is a useful, non-AI slop, free product. So when it got none upvotes it made me think how I don’t understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did.
Here is the post for the curious
Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574
I had a similar experience trying to get feedback on my attempt to help different role families adopt AI evals as a common language (hands on tutorial or tool comparison).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263
I attribute it mostly to my own inability to pitch something that is aimed for many audiences at once and needs more UX polishing and maybe a bit on timing.
It's tough when you're not looking to sell a product but moreso engage in a community without going the twitter/bluesky route (which I'll bregudgingly may start using).
Maybe evals is a problem that people don't have yet because they can just build their custom thing or maybe it needs a "hey, you're building agent skills, here's the mental model" (e.g. https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent... ) and once they get to the evals part, we start to interact.
In any case, I still find quite a lot of cool things in SHOW HN but the volume will definitely be a challenge going forward.
Perhaps it's the right moment to start an AI Show HN (Vibe HN as recommended above), as I assume more than half of Show HN is now from ChatGPT/Claude, and it's impossible to cut through this noise with something reliable that humans craft over years.
It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.
I suspect the OG, grass fed, organic, gluten free, no AI Show HN will be dead.
If I used LLMs to generate a few functions would I be eligible for it? What constitutes "built this with no/ minimal AI"?
Maybe we should have a separate section for 80%+ vibe coded / agent developed.
I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it.
So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately.
Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer.
Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy.
So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile phones came, it will be probably with coding/programming.
OK, let's say there are two categories of software now.
One is where the human has a complete mental map of the product, and even if they use some code generating tools, they fully take responsibility for the related matters.
And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not.
I believe these are two categories that are currently merged in one Show HN, and if in the first category I can be curious about the decisions people made and the solutions they chose, I don't give a flying fork about what an LLM generated.
If you have a 'fog of war' in your codebase, well, you don't own your software, and there's no need to show it as yours. Same way, if you had used autocomplete, or a typewriter in the time of handwriting, and the thinking is yours, an LLM shouldn't be a problem.
We never really have a complete mental map.
"Oh, this library just released a new major version? What a pity, I used to know v n deeply, but v n+1 has this nifty feature that I like"
It happened all the time even as a solo dev. In teams, it's the rule, not the exception.
Vibing is just a different obfuscation here.
No. I see this mistake everywhere. You're confusing "knowing everything" or "making assumptions" with "mental maps". They are not at all the same thing.
The benefit of libraries is it's an abstraction and compartmentalization layer. You don't have to use REST calls to talk to AWS, you can use boto and move s3 files around in your code without cluttering it up.
Yeah, sometimes the abstraction breaks or fails, but generally that's rare unless the library really sucks, or you get a leftpad situation.
Having a mental map of your code doesn't mean you know everything, it means you understand how your code works, what it is responsible for, and how it interacts with or delegates to other things.
Part of being a good software engineer is managing complexity like that.
There's a difference between not knowing the internals of a dependency you chose deliberately and not understanding the logic of your own product.
When you upgrade a library, you made that decision — you know why, you know what it does for you, and you can evaluate the trade-offs before proceeding (unless you're a react developer).
That's not a fog of war, that's delegation.
When an LLM generates your core logic and you can't explain why it works, that's a fundamentally different situation. You're not delegating — you're outsourcing the understanding, and that makes the result not yours.
That sounds exactly like using a new library. The absolutists miss so much and contribute so little.
I don't think so. At the end of the day it's just a tool.
Case in point: aside from Tabbing furiously, I use the Ask feature to ask vague questions that would take my coworkers time they don't have.
Interestingly at least in Cursor, Intellisense seems to be dumbed down in favour of AI, so when I look at a commit, it typically has double digit percentage of "AI co-authorship", even though most of the time it's the result of using Tab and Intellisense would have given the same suggestion anyway.
Had a funny experience with this some weeks ago. I started developing a small side project and after a week I wondered if this existed already. To my surprise, someone had already built something relatively similar _with the exact same name_ (though I had chosen mine as a placeholder, still funny though) only 2 weeks before, and posted it in Show HN.
I took a look at the project and it was a 100k+ LoC vibe-coded repository. The project itself looked good, but it seemed quite excessive in terms of what it was solving. It made me think, I wonder if this exists because it is explicitly needed, or simply because it is so easy for it to exist?
Here’s a dumb idea:
Give people the ability to submit a “Show HN” one year in advance. Specifically, the user specifies the title and a short summary, then has to wait at least year until they can write the remaining description and submit the post. The user can wait more than a year or not submit at all; the delay (and specifying the title/summary beforehand) is so that only projects that have been worked on for over a year are submit-able.
Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.
I think it is true with any distribution channel. When people figure out that it works, then everyone ends up bombarding that channel till it saturates.
Vibe coding is not helping either, I guess. Now it is even cheaper to create assets for the distribution channel.
I think same thing happened with product hunt.
Reminds me of the quote: "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded"
Some of it is "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes". Fare enough, I've seen plenty of things I've found cool not get much attention. That's just the nature of the internet.
The other point is show and share HN stories growing in volume, which makes sense since it's now considerably easier to build things. I don't think that's a bad thing really, although curation makes it more difficult. Now that pure agentic coding has finally arrived IMO, creativity and what to build are significantly more important. They always were but technical ability was often rewarded much more heavily. I guess that sucks for technical people.
> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes"
HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value.
So I wonder if there's maybe a strong element of picking your moment with Show HN posts in order to gain better visibility through the masses of other submissions.
Or maybe - but I think this goes against the culture a bit - Show HN could be its own category at the top. Or we could have particular days of the week/month where, perhaps by convention rather than enforcement, Show HN posts get more attention.
I'm not sure how workable these thoughts are but it's perhaps worth considering ways that Show HN could get a bit more of the spotlight without turning it into something that's endlessly gamed by purveyors of AI slop and other bottom-feeding content.
This is different. It's clear that the driver here is the ease with which you can use AI to spit out slop projects.
This is a forum called Hacker News. It’s for technical people. Perhaps these LLM-generated slop projects could get posted on Product Hunt or somewhere focused on the creative product side of tech and not technical knowledge and discussion
I find this very interesting, but am I being dense here? https://www.arthurcnops.blog/images/hn-show-dead-one-point.s...
The legend says SHNs are getting worse, but surely if the % of SHN posts with 1 point is going DOWN (as per graph) then it's getting better? Either I am dense or the legends are the wrong way round no?
The long-term trend (ie since 2023) is for more ShowHN posts to be stuck at 1 point compared with normal posts, and for that gap to be growing. This implies that people find the ShowHNs to be less and less interesting.
Ah yes, I was being dense. I was so obsessed with the steepness of the last point drop and completely missed the overall trend line! Thanks.
I think vibe coding something and showing it off on Show HN is probably fine, but it boils my blood when people cannot even be bothered to write the post body themselves. If someone is using an AI generated post body and title that's usually a clear signal of slop for me. The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!
The fact that the volume is exploding but the graveyard is also exploding, is a sign that the system is working, not that it's broken (the filter is working).
I did 3 ShowHN in 2024 (outside of the scope of this analysis), one with 306 points, another with 126 points and the third with... 2. There's always been some kind of unpredictability in ShowHN.
But I think the number one criteria for visibility is intelligibility: the project has to be easy to understand immediately, and if possible, easy to install/verify. IMHO, none of the three projects that the author complains didn't get through the noise qualify on this criteria. #2 and #3 are super elaborate (and overly specific); #1 is the easiest to understand (Neohabit) but the home page is heavy in examples that go in all directions, and the github has a million graphics that seem quite complex.
Simplify and thou shall be heard.
The difference since Clawd and friends became popular is palpable, you see it growing on GitHub too with the PR spam.
I'm wondering how much of it is portfolio building to keep or find a new job in a post-Ai coding world
Side question: I love the charts in your blog post. Would you be able to share how they were generated?
yeah I also really liked the font and graphs. maybe its https://plus.excalidraw.com/virgil?
...and especially, a font. Comic Sans Neue PRO?
The small indie developer ain't dead yet, and from where I sit you could drive a star destroyer through the gaps in what software has been built so far.
It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding
Vibe coding as a term is really annoying. At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded? If I spent a year iterating on a design and implementation using Claude code, in a domain I’m an expert in, will that still be considered vibe coded?
I view it as do you have a full mental model of the code base.
If you do then not vibe coded.
For me, I have different levels of vibes:
Some testing/prototyping bash scripts 100% vibe coded. I have never actually read the code.
Sometimes early iterations, I am familiar with general architecture, but do not know exact file contents.
Sometimes I have gone through and practically rewrote a component from scratch either because it was too convoluted, did not have the perfect abstraction I wantet/etc.
For me the third category is not vibe coded. The first 2 are tech debt in the making.
I'll counter you this: I don't use AI at all, but in a way I am a vibe coder, even though I'm five years of full time work into one OSS project. I have no code review. I move fast and ship bugs. I roll forward.
I see no reason to disrespect your work from what you say, but I also see no reason that AI would be much help to you after you had been learning for a year. If you are in the loop, shouldn't this be just about the moment when your growing abilities start to easily outpace the model's fixed abilities?
I feel similar but since starting to use Claude (only 4 days ago) I get it. "Vibe coding" to me is just a new term for pair programming.
vibe coding is no-look coding, it's largely being replaced by agents that do the iteration to the point no human is involved beyond initial project description like "Build me a web browser"
If show HN is getting diluted and flooded then maybe yhere is opportunity for someone to make a website for showing off your shiny new project.
Something rapid fire, fun, categorized maybe. Just a showcase to show off what you've done.
HN is an unique tech niche, I suspect many hobby projects will get more attention in their less technical niches or applications
Seems like a sign of things to come - software becomes personalized and while having the cost driven to zero of commoditization
I feel this. I recently posted a Show HN for a tool I've been working on, and it got 2 points. Honestly I think I posted it too early.
It is indeed, and it is very much ripe for a serious review. Which is a pity because I think it is one of HN's most powerful pieces.
> Show HN of course isn't dead. You could even say it's more alive than ever.
You could argue it's dead in the sense of "dead internet theory". Yes, more projects than ever are being submitted, but they were not created by humans. Maybe they are being submitted by humans, for now.
It's not just Show HN. Other parts of HN are drowning too.
You get things posted that you can generate yourself in a day using a model. So it's like, great, but also no.
It's turning into an influencer economy, similar to twitch streaming, youtube or only fans.
I am a major advocate for AI assisted development.
Having said that, it used to feel part of an exclusive club to have the skills and motivation to put a finished project on HN. For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development - remember that - when development of something worthwhile took years and was written entirely by hand?
I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.
> I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room.
Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp.
Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.
There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.
Vibecoders are never going to master anything
It's better if you don't have to learn to program to make applications.
In the future it will seem very strange that there was a time when people had to write every line of code manually. It will simply be accepted that the computers write computer programs for you, no one will think twice about it.
Will programs even exist in the future? Surely the AIs will just take input and return output?
> Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development
Just saw one go from first commit to HN in 25m
I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc.
I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.
Get on the Fediverse. A hosted Mastodon account isn't that expensive, or you can get an account for free on just about any instance. Curate programming and developer accounts (there are tons.) Post your blog there.
Not everything has to revolve around HN.
Great article btw, really loved to see these kind of numbers, thanks.
Time for a new category? "Slop HN: Claude built this mini tool for me" - would be lol to see the "slop" in the header right in the middle of "show | jobs" -> "show | slop | jobs"
And a lifetime ban if you show slop under 'Show HN'.
We probably just need to cultivate a culture of not upvoting them in the first place.
This aligns with my experience. It's good to have it properly analyzed.
If this effect is noticeable on an obscure tech forum, one can only imagine the effect on popular source code forges, the internet at large, and ultimately on people. Who/what is using all this new software? What are the motivations of their authors? Is a human even involved in the creation anymore? The ramifications of all this are mind-boggling.
Yeah, I don't think that LLM output is appropriate for Shown HNs.
was just asking for something like this yesterday, would be interesting to see how account age factors in
Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts.
It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, basically.