[simonw]

I think the main effect of the current influx of low effort AI side projects is that it's going to significantly increase the bar for what's worth showing people.

Six months ago no-one would post a "Show HN" for a static personal website they had built for themselves - it wouldn't be novel or interesting enough to earn any attention.

That bar just went through the ROOF. I expect it will take a few more months for the new norms to settle in, at which point hopefully we'll start seeing absurdly cool side projects that would not have been feasible beforehand.

[janice1999]

The problem is that the effort required to understand the quality of a project has also gone through the roof (and not just due to the number of them). Good looking READMEs and docs, large test suites, well constructed code - LLMs can generate credible versions that take time to digest and understand the limitations of. AI is fantastic at faking the outward signals of a good project and hyping it up. I've lost count of the projects that appear here and on Reddit that initially look good but fall apart once a domain expert spends the time to dig into it.

[insin]

LLM READMEs and websites immediately stick out an absolute mile.

[tyleo]

I’ve felt the same. I’ve had two things on the pre-LLM front page after about a month of work each. Those exist in the framework of my personal site which I’d been building out for a year.

I suspect a month of AI accelerated work is still enough to make the front page. I don’t see the competition as steeper. I bet it’s about the same per unit time.

[simonw]

Yeah, that's probably a good way of thinking about this. If your side project took a couple of hours it's not worthy of a Show HN. If it took at least a few days or a few weeks or longer and it's novel (not something many other people have built already) then it's a much better bet.

[Bukhmanizer]

I agree that’s kind of what should happen. What seems to have happened is that people have figured out it’s easier to game the system than produce more complicated or technical projects.