I think one look at the flood of vibe-coded projects (like decomps, mods, etc) hitting the retrogaming scene now proves this article wrong already. You literally see a major project blow up in one day, then immediately get 'busted' for AI.
And it's almost certainly hitting other fields too. Games on Steam, mobile apps, websites and web apps, etc.
Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.
The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
Exactly! AI is just mirroring the slow death of creativity over the last couple of decades. If you have the willpower to live a more analog life free of creativity-killing digital wasteland-type deathtraps, the creative spark that hits in moments of quiet contemplation can be funneled through the accelerator of AI-assisted coding to create incredible things. Why does no one seem to realize this?
There's a lot of hatred for AI in these communities, to the point half of Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit goes ballistic when they learn the developer used Claude or Codex at some point. Media outlets and influencers are doing the same thing too.
Yes I’ve seen this. The hatred is easily as unhinged as some of the stuff from the “AI will soon learn to fold space and access infinite energy from the zero point after it recursively becomes god” delusional AI utopia crowd, or the “nuke data centers” crowd.
AI seems to break a lot of peoples’ brains. It’s like it totally bypasses nuanced thinking and understanding and normal curiosity and goes straight to some kind of overflow state.
The hatred stems from retrocomputing enthusiasts wanting an escape from modern computing. When someone's having fun with their retrocomputing hobby, they don't want what they see as the worst part of modern computing playing any role in that hobby. They're trying to get away from the hype, but it's inescapable.
Oh yes, first thing that sprung to mind when I started to see games being made with Ai on itch and then steam and of course the posts showing up daily on certain subreddits.
A lot of friends who were not computer illiterate but also definitely not coders are now publishing websites regularly with whatever comes to their mind at the time.
Quality could be questionable but quantity-wise I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth.
Yeah, I think the ideal AI user for coding is the one who is not so ignorant that they can't even explain what they want done, but not so knowledgeable that they could simply do it themselves. It's like a crutch: if you don't have legs it's completely useless, but it can let you hobble around if yours don't work perfectly, and if they do work then it's also pretty much useless.
Most everything took a hit. Roughly half of the front-page content throughout the day is AI press releases, AI product marketing, vibecoded projects, and essays about AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but there's not much room left for anything else.
I don't even feel the effect as much because my brain filters these posts out nowadays, like ads. I have essentially zero interest in clicking on Show HN posts anymore.
I feel like there was an attached covenant with the "Show HN" concept that implied someone had likely put some level of painstaking craft and creativity into whatever their project was. It felt like a reasonable bargain to give your own time to looking at the post and seeing what they had spent time and effort in creating.
I'm struggling to see what the point is to looking at Show HN projects these days. It's like inviting your family in to see your latest bowel movement before the toilet gets flushed.
The bird frame project has all the signatures of something developed with thought, care and effort put behind it, and the fact that it involves physical hardware is part of that. There's a reason it reached the front page.
My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subscription, and we should not pretend that software developed in 2026 is the same as software developed in 2021. Everything has changed, including incentives to post, and that has changed the level of attention I can devote to that category of HN post.
In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.
And you still seem to be exaggerating - I suspect that the number of projects that can be recreated easily is much lower than 90%.
And you sound extremely angry about it. Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
And... as a final point - I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
> In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.
My apologies, I assumed that it was implied that I was speaking generally. I will try to be clearer going forward.
I stand by my 90% figure based on what I observe from the full corpus of daily "Show HN" submissions.
> And you sound extremely angry about it.
I can't even begin to imagine what part of my very plainly written comments are communicating "extreme anger" but I guess it's difficult to communicate tone online!
> I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
It depends on what you mean by "terribly difficult".
To provide some clarity on my view:
Just because something can be recreated easily does not automatically make it terrible or bad, but the fact that we can now generate software as easily as we generate a bowel movement (to borrow from my previous comment) means the bar for quality and attention has changed.
> Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
I spent 20 years trying to resist the rise of Trump. The moment the U.S. turned its back on the Geneva Conventions, which were specifically designed to stop the atrocities of fascism - it was extremely obvious what was happening.
I screamed in people's faces - alienated half my relationships. And absolutely nothing I did had any impact whatsoever. And so I learned to accept the things which I cannot change.
You need to know - the hype isn't fake, my friend. Those stories are real. If you genuinely want to resist, you need to shed your bad information. Good luck.
Remember that "Where's the Shovelware?"¹ post?
¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
I think one look at the flood of vibe-coded projects (like decomps, mods, etc) hitting the retrogaming scene now proves this article wrong already. You literally see a major project blow up in one day, then immediately get 'busted' for AI.
And it's almost certainly hitting other fields too. Games on Steam, mobile apps, websites and web apps, etc.
Busted? I’d think that AI would be a godsend for retro computing, a field always starved for programmer support especially in emulating obscure stuff.
People do it for the pleasure of figuring out obscure stuff. The point is dealing with that old unsupported tech as much as the games themselves.
Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.
The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
It's possible to use AI to help create non-slop. However, almost nobody does.
Exactly! AI is just mirroring the slow death of creativity over the last couple of decades. If you have the willpower to live a more analog life free of creativity-killing digital wasteland-type deathtraps, the creative spark that hits in moments of quiet contemplation can be funneled through the accelerator of AI-assisted coding to create incredible things. Why does no one seem to realize this?
There's a lot of hatred for AI in these communities, to the point half of Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit goes ballistic when they learn the developer used Claude or Codex at some point. Media outlets and influencers are doing the same thing too.
Yes I’ve seen this. The hatred is easily as unhinged as some of the stuff from the “AI will soon learn to fold space and access infinite energy from the zero point after it recursively becomes god” delusional AI utopia crowd, or the “nuke data centers” crowd.
AI seems to break a lot of peoples’ brains. It’s like it totally bypasses nuanced thinking and understanding and normal curiosity and goes straight to some kind of overflow state.
The hatred stems from retrocomputing enthusiasts wanting an escape from modern computing. When someone's having fun with their retrocomputing hobby, they don't want what they see as the worst part of modern computing playing any role in that hobby. They're trying to get away from the hype, but it's inescapable.
Oh yes, first thing that sprung to mind when I started to see games being made with Ai on itch and then steam and of course the posts showing up daily on certain subreddits.
A lot of friends who were not computer illiterate but also definitely not coders are now publishing websites regularly with whatever comes to their mind at the time.
Quality could be questionable but quantity-wise I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth.
Yeah, I think the ideal AI user for coding is the one who is not so ignorant that they can't even explain what they want done, but not so knowledgeable that they could simply do it themselves. It's like a crutch: if you don't have legs it's completely useless, but it can let you hobble around if yours don't work perfectly, and if they do work then it's also pretty much useless.
My wife plays the web games from the New York Times.
There was one she liked but she wanted to change the rules.
Of course it took Claude Code about 10 minutes to do it, and she was delighted.
For websites, isn't that just Wix? Or Microsoft Frontpage?
I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth
No you can't
Is it just my impression, or programming language posts took a hit. I think I don't see them as often as before.
Most everything took a hit. Roughly half of the front-page content throughout the day is AI press releases, AI product marketing, vibecoded projects, and essays about AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but there's not much room left for anything else.
[dead]
not just those but programming stuff in general I feel like? except for maybe some mini projects which again are kinda Show HN..
Instead we get anthropic and openai system status pages or marketing posts constantly.
They are now about 5 GL programming languages, pun intended.
I see Zig news quite often here. The rest - not so much.
I don't even feel the effect as much because my brain filters these posts out nowadays, like ads. I have essentially zero interest in clicking on Show HN posts anymore.
I feel like there was an attached covenant with the "Show HN" concept that implied someone had likely put some level of painstaking craft and creativity into whatever their project was. It felt like a reasonable bargain to give your own time to looking at the post and seeing what they had spent time and effort in creating.
I'm struggling to see what the point is to looking at Show HN projects these days. It's like inviting your family in to see your latest bowel movement before the toilet gets flushed.
Did you see the project that displays the birds it's heard onto an e-paper display that looks like a print?
It was pretty cool. Nothing at all like a bowel movement.
Yes, a rare gem.
So long as you agree there are gems - it's not all shit.
The bird frame project has all the signatures of something developed with thought, care and effort put behind it, and the fact that it involves physical hardware is part of that. There's a reason it reached the front page.
My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subscription, and we should not pretend that software developed in 2026 is the same as software developed in 2021. Everything has changed, including incentives to post, and that has changed the level of attention I can devote to that category of HN post.
In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.
And you still seem to be exaggerating - I suspect that the number of projects that can be recreated easily is much lower than 90%.
And you sound extremely angry about it. Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
And... as a final point - I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
> In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.
My apologies, I assumed that it was implied that I was speaking generally. I will try to be clearer going forward.
I stand by my 90% figure based on what I observe from the full corpus of daily "Show HN" submissions.
> And you sound extremely angry about it.
I can't even begin to imagine what part of my very plainly written comments are communicating "extreme anger" but I guess it's difficult to communicate tone online!
> I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
It depends on what you mean by "terribly difficult".
To provide some clarity on my view:
Just because something can be recreated easily does not automatically make it terrible or bad, but the fact that we can now generate software as easily as we generate a bowel movement (to borrow from my previous comment) means the bar for quality and attention has changed.
> Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
Yes, signal-to-noise.
> I can't even begin to imagine what part of my very plainly written comments are communicating "extreme anger"
I think it was your comparison to fecal matter.
Exactly how I felt reading this comment. This site is dead, no point anymore.
"And nothing of value was lost."
[dead]
Let the AI renaissance begin!
If only the AI renaissance didn't mean a dark age for everything else...
Yeah. But I'd argue that it really isn't possible to know what is going to happen.
But yeah. I'm trying to focus on the positive aspects. Because what else can you do?
> Because what else can you do?
You can resist.
Upvote quirky projects, call out fake hype, make your disapproval visible, call AI slop what it is.
The term AI has become a liability in some circles, so let that be proof that you don't have to just accept whatever AI companies tell us.
You can, it won't work. What results are you hoping to attain by resisting?
I spent 20 years trying to resist the rise of Trump. The moment the U.S. turned its back on the Geneva Conventions, which were specifically designed to stop the atrocities of fascism - it was extremely obvious what was happening.
I screamed in people's faces - alienated half my relationships. And absolutely nothing I did had any impact whatsoever. And so I learned to accept the things which I cannot change.
You need to know - the hype isn't fake, my friend. Those stories are real. If you genuinely want to resist, you need to shed your bad information. Good luck.
I, for one, am fine with witnessing what changes ´neocoding´ will bring us.
Yes - I am delighted with what I can now do.
Simultaneously I am terrified of what others will be able to do.
[dead]
Incase the nav bar is too far away, https://news.ycombinator.com/show
There’s more noise, but also more signal.
I’ll take it.