I came to HN from Slashdot, and it's been a good run. But, as they say, all good things...
I think it would be better if, instead of being defined in terms of being "positive" about AI (in the sense of saying that everything to do with AI is all great and rosy and awesome, and thinking every new AI thing is the next big thing, and praising every vibe-coded piece of slop), the focus was explicitly on having mature, software engineering-focused discussions of how to actually understand, make, and use AI and AI tools/harnesses, where it's taken as common ground that these are tools, not magical genies that will usher in the rapture of the nerds or make software development obsolete, nor uniquely evil technologies that only fascists could ever use or like or that are completely useless, or tools that only talentless hacks who don't care about the craft, good use. So basically to avoid shallow dismissals and endless culture of war arguments.
I would love to have a place that discusses the pros and cons of different ways of approaching specification, natural language programming, DSLs, property-based testing, behavior-driven development, lightweight formal methods like model checking, or even more heavyweight formal methods like doing proofs, etc, as means of using the extra time and lowered cognitive load allowed by AI coding agents to actually increase the reliability and improve the documentation of your project and as a result, get better reliability and more productivity out of the agents themselves!
Some examples of this kind of discussion that I actually find useful are:
- https://kiro.dev/blog/kiro-and-the-future-of-software-develo... - https://kiro.dev/blog/property-based-testing/ <--- especially this one - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09008 - https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/12/16/natural-language.html - https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/06/23/code.html - https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-verificati... <--- and this one! - https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - https://friendlybit.com/python/writing-justhtml-with-coding-... - https://checkeagle.com/checklists/njr/a-month-of-chat-orient... - https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey - example of the stuff I'm trying out: https://gist.github.com/alexispurslane/4d01ac5522f1b58be2bc1...
But I'm serious. This forum is meant for human beings to satisfy their intellectual curiosity discussing topics of interest which are usually but don't need to be related to tech or programming. The humanity matters, even if it's damned hard to find sometimes because expressing humanity is a negative social signal here.
AI may be the nexus of the industry at the moment but it's destroying everything this community and culture are supposed to be about. Every vibe coded project, every comment passed through ChatGPT, every conversation lacking in any technical merit because 99% of people here only know how to engineer a prompt and are aggressively ignorant about everything else. Every tedious philosophical drain-circling about whether AIs are sentient or whether humans even are. Every arrogant declaration by AI bros about its futility. And the implication behind all of it that the human element doesn't matter.
I mean, Show HN is supposed to be a place for passion projects, and it's turned into nothing but vibe-coded slop. It isn't fun anymore.
So they don't want us here, and we don't want them here. Someone vibe code a forum - because no one else will want to touch it then - and the AI bros can leave so those of us who think human effort still has value can discuss the things we have an interest in in peace, and there they can be as positive about AI as they want.
