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 drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone 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
Let's see, how to say this less inflamatory..
(just did this) I sit here in a hotel and I wondered if I could do some fancy video processing on the video feed from my laptop to turn it into a wildlife cam to capture the birds who keep flying by.
I ask Codex to whip something up. I iterate a few times, I ask why processing is slow, it suggests a DNN. I tell it to go ahead and add GPU support while its at it.
In a short period of time, I have an app that is processing video, doing all of the detection, applying the correct models, and works.
It's impressive _to me_ but it's not lost on me that all of the hard parts were done by someone else. Someone wrote the video library, someone wrote the easy python video parsers, someone trained and supplied the neural networks, someone did the hard work of writing a CUDA/GPU support library that 'just works'.
I get to slap this all together.
In some ways, that's the essence of software engineering. Building on the infinite layers of abstractions built by others.
In other ways, it doesn't feel earned. It feels hollow in some way and demoing or sharing that code feels equally hollow. "Look at this thing that I had AI copy-paste together!"
There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do.
It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.
Wait, what? That's a great benefit?
Let’s be honest, this was always the case. The difference now is that nobody cares about the implementation, as all side projects are assumed to be vibecoded.
So when execution is becoming easier, it’s the ideas that matter more…
— Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— but I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed. I think a lot of what we’re seeing are projects that were easy enough to reach MVP before encountering the final 90% of coding time, which AI is a lot less useful for.
My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.)
I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.
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.
I’ve seen variation of this question since first few weeks /months after the release of ChatGPT and I havent seen an answer to this from leading figures in the AI coding space, whats the general answer or point of view on this?
I don't think we need to wait a generation either. This probably was a part of their personality already, but a group of people developers on my job seems to have just given up on thinking hard/thinking through difficult problems, its insane to witness.
Long-term, this is will do enormous damage to society and our species.
The solution is that you declare war and attack the enemy with a stream of slop training data ("poison"). You inject vast quantities of high-quality poison (inexpensive to generate but expensive to detect) into the intakes of the enemy engine.
LLMs are highly susceptible to poisoning attacks. This is their "Achilles' heel". See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
We create poisoned git repos on every hosting platform. Every day we feed two gigabytes of poison to web crawlers via dozens of proxy sites. Our goal is a terabyte per day by the end of this year. We fill the corners of social media with poison snippets.
There is strong, widespread support for this hostile posture toward AI. For example, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...
Join us. The war has begun.
theyve already thought about it before reaching for code as a solution
It seems silly, but I know I'm more likely to review an implementation if can learn more about the author's state of mind by their style.
I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo
https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/
which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is.
Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"
Side note: I’d think installing Anubis over your work would go a long way to signaling that but ymmv.
presumably if this is true, it should be obvious by the quality of your product. If it isnt, then maybe you need to need to rethink the value of your artisanal hand written code.
I don't particularly care if people question that, but the source repo is on GitHub: they can see all the edits that were made along the way. Most LLMs wouldn't deliberately add a million spelling or grammar mistakes to fake a human being... yet.
As for knowing what I'm talking about. Many of my blog posts are about stuff that I just learned, so I have many disclaimers that the reader should take everything with a grain of salt. :-) That said: I put a ridiculous amount of time in these things to make sure it's correct. Knowing that your stuff will be out there for others to criticize if a great motivator to do your homework.
> author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space
I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”.
So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code
These days I do see a lot of people choosing software for the money. Notably, many of them are bootcamp graduates and arguably made a pivot later in life, as opposed to other careers (such as medicine) which get chosen early. Nothing wrong with that (for many it has a good ROI), but I don’t think this changed anything about people with technical hobbies.
When you’re young, you tend not to choose the path the rest of your life will take based on income. What your parents want for you is a different matter…
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 feel that actual 'understanding' is still incredibly important and it'll probably always be important. I'm talking about people actually understanding what's happening and why it's happening.
The main difference I've noticed when I built stuff with AI and without it, is that without it I understood and knew the code much more intimately, as the program was running, I could approximate with a fairly good degree of precision where in the code the program was at a given time - human based debugging.
When I'm using AI to build stuff all of this is gone. It's very little different from just opening a random Git repo, basically foreign code to me.
There are tasks that just need to be done, and then there are tasks one outta think about.
* some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a business they're trying to start and they want to get marketing
* some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's involves some cool tech under the hood and they want to talk shop
* some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a fun thing and they just want some people to have fun
Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails.
I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources.
I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets.
Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest.
I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do.
Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.
I'm not an anti-AI luddite, but for gods sake talk about (ie. submit) something else!
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 ;)
It's taken me about month; currently at ~500 commits. I've been obsessed with this problem for ~6 weeks and have made an enormous amount of progress, but admittedly I'm not an expert in the domain.
Being intentionally vague, because I don't want to tip my hand until it's ready. The problem is related to an existing open source tool in a particular scientific niche which flatly does not work on an important modern platform. My project, an open source repo, brings this important legacy tool to this modern platform and also offers a highly engaging visual demo that is of general interest, even to a layperson not interested in programming or this particular scientific niche.
I genuinely believe I have something valuable to offer to this niche scientific community, but also as a general interest and curiosity to HN for the programming aspects (I put a lot of thought into the architecture) as well as the visual aspects (I put a lot of thought into the design and aesthetics).
Do you have any advice on how to present this work in a compelling way to people who understandably feels as burned out on AI slop as you do?
Agreed. r/ProgrammingLanguages had to deal with this recently in the same way HN has to; people were submitting these obviously vibecoded languages there that barely did anything, just a deluge of "make me a language that does X", where it doesn't actually do X or embody any of the properties that were prompted.
One thing that was pointed out was "More often than not the author also doesn't engage with the community at all, instead they just share their project across a wide range of subreddits." I think HN is another destination for those kinds of AI slop projects -- I'm sure you could find every banned language posted on that forum posted here.
Their solution was to write a new rule and just ban them outright. Things have been going much better since.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j...
I would bet just the first two text fields would be enough to catch out vibecoders.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_r...
I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already.
I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.
Viber
concur, perhaps a dedicated or alternative, itch.io like area named "Slop HN:..."
More's the pity. I'm prepping for a ShowHN with a completely hand-coded project I started in December. It will be finished around end-march. I vibe-coded all the docs, because I spent all the time on the code.
I have no idea if the ShowHN is going to be at all useful, but I pivoted multiple times on various implementation things. Had it been coded by an AI, I don't think there would be any pivot.
The value is precisely from the pivots. An AI would have plodded on ahead anyway with a broken model for the problem-space.
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.
> sloptimists
Thank you for making it, and don't give up. Passion and vision > vibe coding sloptimists.
I'm sure a happy medium is shutting off links to vibe coded source code, and only letting vibed hosted applications or websites. For us who want to read code, source code that means nothing to anyone is pretty disappointing for a Show HN.
Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.
Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback.
I'll take this opportunity to strongly encourage sharing prompts (the newest tier of software source code) as the logical progression of OSS adding additional value to Show HN.
And yes, disclosing the use of AI should be par for the course.
I've tried asking ChatGPT to recommend projects based on my interests, but ChatGPT heavily hallucinated or projected my interests onto irrelevant projects (for example, a project might be about developing a new programming language and chatgpt was like, "you could use this in your soap making hobby!").
The Who's Hiring posts have community sponsored indexers and its easy for me to query job titles relevant to me, but keyword search is not as useful here.
Lobsters had a weekly thread by caius called, "What are you doing this week?" People would post personal projects or experiences in it. On top of interesting tech, that let us pray more specifically for and encourage some in need.
The weekly threads might work here.
So while I understand that new features on HN are few and far between, a quick validation of "Show HN" posts that says, "I see you are trying to post a Show HN..." with some concise explanation of the guidelines might help. I want to believe that most new users mean well, they just need better explanations.
From their perspective, HN is another place to post and get views on their project, part of a check list for their "launch" or whatever, not everything comes from within the ecosystem.
Some posts their projects then never reply to any of the comments, while for me (and many others I bet) half the reason of posting a Show HN is because I'm looking for participating in discussions about my thing and understanding different perspectives thinking about it too.
> I want to believe that most new users mean well, they just need better explanations.
Yeah, so far the only thing I know of is the "Please read the Show HN rules and tips before posting" blurb on the /show list, and the separate pages. Maybe some interstitial or similar if the title prefix-matches with "Show HN" could display the rules, guidelines and "netiquette" more prominently and get more people to be aware of it.
For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the mention that PRs that don't respect that will be close. Most if not all submitters of low-quality PRs don't do anything once their initial PR is closed.
Pretty bummed about that as I just submitted a show HN I'm pretty happy about (it solves an annoying problem I had for years, which I know many people have) and I was looking forward to talk about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050872)
Most people did not read the post, which was immediately evident from how they posted their application by copy-pasting and editing an application posted by someone else before them.
Few things in life are as reliable and trustworthy as the laziness of others.
My suggestion would be more radical: if it's AI written, the code is increasingly irrelevant. What is relevant is the prompt or spec: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198562 'Show HN' should ban "code-only" submissions if not majority human-written, and allow only "prompt/doc/test only" 'Show HNs'.
I am interested in a vibecoded project which was a well thought out goal or an interesting methodology or a striking prompt engineering trick (eg. the Anthropic Rust C compiler targeting the Linux kernel); I'm not interested in a obvious idea where I'm supposed to be impressed by a huge pile of rotting-code-debt of unknown quality and likely a lot of bugs, which is going to be written by a LLM in a few months anyway.
> "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." ---Fred Brooks, _The Mythical Man Month_ (1975)
The problem is that it's not clear exactly what format that takes nowadays. If it were a single one-shot prompt, you could share that. Ditto if it were a single session with Claude Code or whatever. But the iteration loops going on here are much more complex and noisy than that.
So where I'm currently at is: we'd be willing to build something to support this, but what would we build? What would be the a v0 of this or, to use pg's old phrase, the first quantum of utility?
You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.
Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.
Show HN [NOAI]:
This wouldn't necessarily need to be a technical change, just an intuitive agreement that posts containing LLM or vibe coded content are not allowed to lie by using the tag, or will be flagged... Then again it could also be used to elevate their rank above other show HN content to give us humanoids some edge if deemed necessary, or a segregated [NOAI] page.
[edit]
The label might need more thought, although "NOAI" is short and intelligible, it might be seen as a bit ironic to have to add a tag containing "AI" into your title. [HUMAN]?
Feels like effort needs to be the barrier (which unfortunately needs human review), not "AI or not". In lieu of that, 100 karma or account minimum age to post something as Show HN might be a dumb way to do it (to give you enough time to have read other people's so you understand the vibe).
Once some users have extra power to push content to the front-page, it will be abused. There will be attempts to gain that privilege in order to monetize, profit from or abuse it in some other way.
The only option along this path would probably be to keep the list of such users very tightly controlled and each vouched for individually.
---
I was thinking we could call them "Show Show HN" but I suppose that joke would get old
Meaning you would have to demonstrate that you had or were willing to contribute to the HN community before just promoting your own stuff.
Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 - Feb 2026 (34 comments)
What a bummer it would be to lose excellent posts by new users. They do happen!
so, in the past, i've created throwaway HN accounts for sharing things that connect to my real ID.
It should be possible to find the users with the most early upvotes on Show HN posts that wind up "succeeding" as an excellent indicator they can serve to filter them going forward. However to me it's a bit awkward for Y Combinator to plan on relying on volunteers... once these users are found one of them should be hired to do this full time.
I wonder how will this review system work. Perhaps, a Show HN is hidden by default and visible to only experienced HN users who provide enough positive reviews for it to become visible to everyone else. Although, this does sound like gatekeeping to me and may starve many deserving Show HN before they get enough attention.
e.g. [20h/2d/$10] could indicate "I spent 20 human-hours over 2 days and burned $10 worth of tokens" (it's hard to put a single-dimensional number on LLM usage and not everyone keeps track, but dollars seem like a reasonable approximation)
On the front page, someone made a cool isometric NYC map via vibe coding - another front pager was someone who also claimed to make an ultra fast PDF parser that failed on very common PDFs and gamed the speed metric by (useless) out of order parsing.
Guess which one I installed and spent more time using? These vibe coded projects aren't interesting for their code and almost always not intended to be used by anyone if they're libraries/frameworks, but the applications made with vibe coding are often very cool.
An easy win is turning off the firehouse of vibe coded GitHub portfolio projects and just ask for a link to a hosted application. Easy.
A separate queue is the solution. Then the moderation system (dang, tomhow, seasoned users) can apply an adjustable threshold to promote Show HN posts to the main queue.
(more about that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384)
HN has a vouch system. Make a Show HN pool, allow accounts over some karma/age level to vouch them out to the main site. I recently had a naive colleague submit a Show HN a week or so ago that Tom killed... for good reason. I told the guy to ask me for advice before submitting a FOSS project he released and instead he shit out a long LLM comment nobody wants to read.
The HN guidelines IMO need a (long overdue) update to describe where a Show HN submission needs to go and address LLM comments/submissions. I get that YC probably wants to let some of it be a playground since money is sloshing around for it, but enough is enough.
The clarity and focus this discipline would enforce could have a pleasant side effect of enabling a kind of natural evolution of categorizations, and alternative discovery UIs.
- Min. 90 days account existence in order to submit
- Cap on plain/Show/Ask HN posts per week
Most of the spam I see in /new or /ask is from fresh accounts. This approach is simple and awards long-term engagement/users while discouraging fly-by-night spammers.
Set a policy of X comments required per submission in the last 30 days (not counting last 24 hours) for all submissions, not just "Show HN:" posts.
Meaning, users would need to post X comments before they could post a submission and by not counting the last 24 hours, someone couldn't join, post X comments and immediately post a submission.
It would limit new submission posts to people who are active in the community so they would be more familiar with the policies and etiquette of HN along with gaining an idea of what interests its members.
One thing I noticed recently while going through several of the Show HN submissions was that a lot of the accounts had been created the same day the submission was made.
My guess is HN has become featured on a large number of "Where do I promote/submit my _____?" lists in blogs, social media, etc. to the point that HN is treated like a public bulletin board more than a place to share things with each other in the community.
I love the Show HN section because so many interesting things get posted there but even I have cut back on checking it lately because there are simply too many things posted to check out.
I hope they do something to improve it.
This will definitely improve the SNR of all submissions. I second this.
hah that sounds like a Show HN incubator.
More seriously though, I think some sort of curation is unavoidable with such topics. If you get inspired by stack overflow where you have some similar mechanics at work, then I'd say that is not too bad. But of course you risk some people being angry about why their amazing vibe coded app is not being shown. Although the more I think of it, this might be a good thing.
Edit: One more thought just came to my mind. A slight modification to the curation rule, you let everything through, just like now. However, the posts are reviewed and those with enough postive review votes get marked in some shape or form, which allows them to be filtered and/or promoted on the show page.
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.
It's like books. Old but still relevant books are the best books to read.
This tech industry is changing so fast though. Maybe a year is too much?
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?
It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/
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.
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.
One of those comments was genuinely useful feedback from Argentina about localization. That alone made it worth posting. But the post was gone from page 1 in what felt like minutes.
What's interesting is this isn't a weekend vibe-coded project - it involves actual physical production, printing, and shipping. But from the outside it probably looks like "another AI wrapper," which I think is the core problem: the flood of low-effort AI projects has made people reflexively skeptical of anything that mentions generation, even when there's real infrastructure behind it.
- Children's books, at least the well-reviewed ones, are pretty good
- This is AI generated, so I expect the quality to be significantly lower than a children's book. Flipping through the examples, I am not convinced that this will be higher quality than a children's book.
- At 20 euros for a paperback, this is also more expensive than most children's books
- Your value prop, as I take it, is that your product is better because it is a book generated for just one child, but I am not convinced that's a solid value prop. I mean, it is kind of an interesting gimmick, but the book being fully AI generated is a large negative, and the book being uniquely created for my kid is a relatively smaller positive.
Those are definitely the highiest-order bits you need to prove to me in order to get traction. A couple of smaller things you should fix as well:
- As an English speaker, almost all the examples are not in English. You should take a reasonable guess at my language and then show me examples in my language
- It's difficult to get started: "Create your own book" leads to a signup page and I don't want to go through that friction when I am already skeptical
As someone who taught their kid to read using the DISTAR alphabet, and then moved on from there, your idea just doesn't sound like it has any value.
I wrote (without LLMs) about 2 dozen "books" for 3.5yo to 5yo; none of them had any pictures in them, so having them professionally printed is a waste of time and money.
When it comes to teaching kids to read, what you need is volume, not prettiness. Your idea is appealing to only to the people who teach reading the wrong way (schools, mostly). Kids learning to read from books with pictures in them learn slower.
If you (or Disney or Hasbro) shipped ebooks that unfolded when you tell it a prompt (in the format of "bibbidi bobbity boop tell me a story about an elephant"), then I'm sure it would fly off the shelves this Christmas. It doesn't even have to be expensive hardware; I'm sure you can build it with a Pi Zero with 2 cheap screens paired to an app on the parent's phone. But perhaps that's not the business you had in mind.
Maybe if people did Show HN for projects that are useful for something? Or at least fun?
There's a disease on HN related with the latest fad:
- (now) "AI" projects
- (now) X but done with "AI"
- (now) X but vibecoded
- (less now, a lot more in the recent past) X but done in Rust
- (none now, quite a few in a more distant past) X but done with blockchain
If the main quality of the project is one of the above, why would it attract interest?
The thing in show HN has to do something to raise interest. If not even the author/marketer thinks it does something, why would anyone look at it?
This really bothers me, coming here asking for human feedback (basically: strangers spending time on their behalf) then dumping it into the slop generator pretending it is even slightly appreciated. It wouldn't even be that much more work to prompt the LLM to hide its tone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393992#46396486) but even that is too much.
How many non-native English speakers are on HN? If it's more than 30%, why should they have to use a whole new language if they can just let an LLM do it in a natural sounding way.
It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding
The difference now is that there is even less correlation between "good readme" and "thoughtful project".
I think that if your goal is to signal credentials/effort in 2026 (which is not everyone's goal), a better approach is to write about your motivations and process rather than the artefact itself - tell a story.
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.
I'm wondering how much of it is portfolio building to keep or find a new job in a post-Ai coding world
C'est la vie and que sera. I'm sure the artistic industry is feeling the same. Self expression is the computation of input stimuli, emotional or technical, and transforming that into some output. If an infallible AI can replace all human action, would we still theoretically exist if we're no longer observing our own unique universes?
These days I guess we don't want a library? I can create an MIT-licensed repo with some charts you can point your AI agent to, if it helps?
The font is Gaegu.
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.
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?
Though I guess this makes Show HN essentially like the rest of HN where interesting content gets buried and the outcome is entirely random chance. As an example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648740 went more or less unnoticed, then someone else shared the exact same link less than 10 hours later with the opposite result in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46654749
Any manual efforts to combat AI won't scale as models get better and better. Show HN is a place to show-case cool projects, I don't see why a 100% AI generated project can't be shown. AI has allowed many to rob themselves of their retirement projects and the uptick reflects that. My hunch is once we settle into the new shift, we can perhaps tweak the parameters around decay of Show HN posts.
Or we could allow upstanding members to signal-boost Show HN posts. Something along the lines of "Hey guys I _really_ want you to see this post so here is it (again)".
Trane (good post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069
Pictures Are For Babies (lame post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805
Yet most of the time, if I spend five minutes a day on Show HN, I’ll find something new that I find interesting. I wouldn’t say that Show HN is drowning, but creativity should be on life support. I’m sure that’s somewhat a generative AI problem, but they’re pretty good rubber ducks and so I’m surprised by how acute the issue has gotten so quickly.
If you can't get atleast 20 stars then its probably not ready for the wider world to see it.
I'm sure there's problems with that approach but the current situation doesn't seem to be working.
Disclaimer: I tried to do a Show HN today and it didn't make it (and to be fair I wouldn't have made it past the filter I proposed above so I guess its working).
Something rapid fire, fun, categorized maybe. Just a showcase to show off what you've done.
Show HN: Clawntown – An Evolving Crustacean Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255
Because video games of poor quality are too many, consumers simply refuse to spend time identifying the high-quality ones from the enormous poor-quality ones.
I wonder if the software industry would experience the similar thing?
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.
Something like that. Of course adjust as needed to prevent gaming it. And AI will not always be "fair". But since it is a computer, it should be equally unfair to all.
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.
https://joeldare.com/how-i-plan-to-write-better-show-hn-post...
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.
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.
I was a skeptic last year, and now... not so much. I am having Claude build me a distributed system from scratch. I designed it last week as I was admitting to myself the huge failure of my big "I love to code" project that I failed to get traction on.
It took me a week to even give the design to claude because I was afraid of what it meant. I started it last night, and my jaw is dropped. There is a new skill being grown right now, and it... is something.
It certainly isn't nothing, and I for one am curious to simply see what people are making with vibes alone. It's fascinating... and horrifying.
But, I have learned to silence that part of me that is horrified since the world never cared for what I find beautiful (i.e. terrible languages like JavaScript)...
And the comments should start with the day/month the project was first launched.
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 linked one of my projects in a post and it got some really good responses. I did a bit more work on it and posted a Show HN thinking a few people might be interested but it got 0 traction.
I even made it a point to go on the new Show HN and checkout some peoples projects (how can I expect anyone to check mine out if I'm not doing the same) and it is hard to keep up.
I have another app that I've been working on for the past 3 months and whilst I want to do a Show HN to discuss how I built it, the moments I was banging my head on the wall working on a bug etc, I sadly wonder if there's any point.
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.
Not everything has to revolve around HN.
The market is saturated with superficial solutions that look amazing at a glance but don't work at all in the medium or long term yet it doesn't matter at all; they don't even have an incentive to improve, ever, because the founder cashes out/exits before they need to worry about the stuff under the hood. Customer support is replaced by AI agents so nobody can feel the customer's pain anymore. Then investors find ways to financialize the product so that it doesn't depend on consumers anymore and can just tap into big contracts from big institutions... And yet they still spend big on ads, just to prevent new entrants from entering the market.
It reminds me of my time in crypto; the coins were sold as one thing but all the big well known projects barely had less than half of the features implemented (compared to what was advertised)... And 10 years in, most of those projects cashed out big time and still don't have the features promised. Many shut down completely. Doesn't matter. The whole thing existed and succeeded as a pure shell project.
Even before AI got so strong, some of the translations were fairly abnormal in their own way.
>The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!
I really think this is the best too :)
Maybe for the non-English speakers, or anyone really, if a project means a lot, have a number of people who are smart in different ways look over the text a number of times and help you edit beforehand.
To make sure it's what you the human want to really say at the time.
That would be the pg way.
I've been told it was probably shadowbanned because I shared the direct link in a small community (I didn't _ask_ to upvote, I shared the post, and mentioned people could upvote if they thought it was worth it), but I don't see it as flagged or anything. It just seems like there's too much volume nowadays, indeed.
If it's clear for someone else I've done something wrong in the post, I'd love to be told and learn from it.
Show HN: My Project - A description for my vibe coded project [3 weeks]
A lot of the good stuff I see on Show HN are projects that have been worked on for a long time. While I understand that vibe coding is newer trend, I also know that vibe coded projects are less likely to stand the test of time. With this, we don't have to worry about whether a project is AI assisted or not, nor do we ban it. Instead just incentivize longer term projects. If the developer lies about how long they worked on the project, they will get reported and downvoted into oblivion.
Where the vibe coders with their slop cannons aren't present though is in things that require hard won domain knowledge. IE, stuff that requires you to actually create a new idea, off an understanding of actual areas of need.
And that kind of thing probably isn't going to do well on Show HN, because your audience probably isn't on HN.
I always appreciate the alternative point of view, I've changed my mind about something many times from those kind of comments in hackernews.
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.
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.
This is still possible. Vibe coders are just not interested in working on a piece of software for years till it's polished. It's a self selection pattern. Like the vast amount of terrible VB6 apps when it came out. Or the state of JS until very recently.
Just saw one go from first commit to HN in 25m
