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by alabhyajindal 99 days ago
100%. Not sure what the solution is but I have lost interest in Show HNs these days. Part of it is because when someone posted before, it usually meant they spent a fair amount of time thinking, and found it worthwhile to spend energy on the project. This was a nice first filter for bad ideas and now no longer exists.

Even for posts that are interesting to me, I get the feeling that it's not worth looking at because it was probably made using LLMs. Nothing against them, but I personally thought of Show HNs as doing something for the love of it, the end result being a bonus.

4 comments

I certainly hope they do something.

I'm not opposed to AI automating away stuff no one liked doing, or even more utilitarian things in general, but robots posting on social media and discussion sites seems antithetical. I don't know what the point of talking to a robot would be when I could talk to Claude if I wanted to do that.

I'm not even 100% sure why people are doing Show HN for low-effort stuff shit that was done in 45 minutes in Claude. I guess it's trying to resume-pad or build a brand or something?

> I'm not even 100% sure why people are doing Show HN for low-effort stuff shit that was done in 45 minutes in Claude. I guess it's trying to resume-pad or build a brand or something?

Github star farming, SEO, etc

Here to say I'm one of those people who did my first Show HN recently, and it was 100% due to the lowered activation energy to build something awesome with Claude. Not 45min, but took about 6 hours of my time, and benefitted from testing against a 10yr old firmware codebase at my startup.

So I guess I'm saying, the ideal rate of Show HN posts has probably gone way up. Unfortunately its also resulting in lower SNR. Not sure what to do about it tho.

Someone telling you about their AI created project is like someone telling you their dream they had last night.
Don't be so hard on dreams. They are a creative work of a humans subconsciousness.
I'm not sure if LLM projects doesn't mean they were not made with love. It just makes programming accessible to more people, but essentially it's still just a tool.

It does take the handcraft out of it, in that sense an LLM-made tool would be more akin to IKEA stuff compared to a handcrafted work of art (though I struggle to call even hand-made electron crap a work of art, lol).

But yeah I know what you mean, they are usually half-finished solutions.

> I get the feeling that it's not worth looking at because it was probably made using LLMs

This is the big one for me. Small toy website someone has made as a passion project used to be the big draw of HN for me but now I just a assume it's a vibe-coded mess that'll 404 in 7 months.