Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year

https://petegoldsmith.com/2026/01/26/2026-01-26-show-hn-trends/

28•theraven•1h ago

Comments

direwolf20•1h ago

More AI?

peteforde•1h ago

I suspect that this will drive the folks who insist LLM productivity gains are the real hallucinations truly bonkers.

fhennig•1h ago

IMO a productivity gain of about x2 seems about right!

anonymous908213•59m ago

No, the fact that Show HN is spammed with LLM-generated garbage is what drives me bonkers. The Show HNs are in fact living proof of how illusory LLM productivity gains are, because we are overwhelmed with trivial proof-of-concepts that have no merit, not even the merit of a human having put effort into creating something neat, rather than actually interesting software anybody would try or discuss.

as1mov•48m ago

Related that r/selfhosted has banned AI built projects except on Fridays[1] to keep up with the increased deluge of garbage, which are mostly built for CV padding rather than making anything useful for the community.

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qfp2t0/mod_ann...

sepositus•43m ago

This is a valid observation. I wonder though if people who have been coding for decades, but choose to use AI assistance, would fall under the same AI slop category. It’s an interesting dilemma because the overwhelming amount of content getting posted just ends up breeding a ton of negative feelings towards any amount of AI usage.

jacquesm•40m ago

It will if you let it. The number of times the AI has come up with 'I can write you 'x', 'y' or 'z' in a heartbeat, just say the word' and I keep on having to steer it back to the track of being a repository of knowledge rather than an overeager very junior co-worker that can't help themselves to want to show off their skills.

It's very tiresome. Like an idiot/savant, they're an idiot most of the time and every 10th try you go 'oh, but that's neat and clever'.

CuriouslyC•17m ago

Counterpoint: You won't admit anything generated with LLMs is good? I don't see any evidence of your fairness in your comment, so why should I consider you any differently than the angry dude at the bar complaining over his drinks about how things were in his day?

7777777phil•51m ago

I feel like HN is quite divided about that actually, A couple of days I started a survey which I plan to run monthly to see how the community feels about "LLM productivity etc". Now I have ~250 answers, need a couple more to make it significant but as of now it looks like >90% report productivity gains from AI tools - happy if you participate, only takes a minute: https://agentic-coding-survey.pages.dev/

anonymous908213•43m ago

Note that self-reporting productivity gains is a completely unreliable and unscientific metric. One study[1], small in scope but a noteworthy data point, found that over the course of the study that LLMs reduced productivity by ~20% but even after the fact the participants felt that on average their productivity had increased by ~20%. This study is surely not the end-all be-all and you could find ways to criticise it or say it doesn't apply or they were doing it wrong or whatever reason you think the developers should have had increased productivity, but the point is that people cannot accurately judge their own productivity by vibes alone.

[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

7777777phil•40m ago

If you look at the survey it's not only about productivity it's also about usage, model choice etc. But I agree with you self reported productivity gains is to be taken with a grain of salt. But then what else would you propose? The goal is to not only rely on benchmarks for model performance but develop some kind of TIOBE Index for LLMs.

direwolf20•6m ago

The ever-present rebuttal to all LLM failure anecdotes: you're using the wrong model, you're prompting it wrong, etc. All failures are always the user's fault. It couldn't possibly be that the tool is bad.

illegalbyte2•42m ago

Really like the ux of that survey - super easy to fill out, is it just a custom web form or you used a library?

7777777phil•38m ago

Yes exactly, it's a standalone cloudflare page with some custom html/css that writes to a D1 (Cloudflare SQL DB) for results and rate limits, thats's it. I looked at so many survey tools but none offered what I was looking for (simple single page form, no email, no signup, no tracking) so I built this (with claude) Thanks for the feedback!

xyzsparetimexyz•49m ago

It's slop disguised as productivity.

Semaphor•49m ago

/r/selfhosted also got tons of new submissions, all unmaintainable AI slop. Now that they are only allowed on Fridays, it calmed down again. But I guess folks who insist on AI superiority think that’s a productivity gain.

CuriouslyC•13m ago

The people spamming built bad stuff because they don't know any better. They would have built zero software without AI, so to the extent that anyone built anything working at all, it's basically an infinite productivity increase for those people.

Tade0•48m ago

They are, but in the sense of net productivity gains.

Responsible people who use their knowledge to review LLM-generated code will produce more - up to their maximum rate of taking responsibility.

Irresponsible people will just smear shit all over the codebase.

The jury is out what's the net effect and the agents' level of sophistication is a secondary factor.

jacquesm•44m ago

AI productivity gains are not found in the slop bucket with projects tossed off after five prompts and zero intention of keeping them alive for the longer run.

alberto-m•1h ago

I think I read some days ago another stat, that the average rating of “Show HN” posts is going down. So the pessimistic take is that people feel the bar to present their product in a “Show HN” is lowering.

(edit: striked) <strike>Is it deliberate that this post appears as “Show HN” itself? I hope not to be too negative, but to qualify as such I would expect much more that a page with two graphs.</strike>

theraven•50m ago

No, it wasn’t deliberate to be a Show HN itself, it seemed to be auto updated to that based on the prefix. I’ve tried updating it back.

alberto-m•46m ago

Thanks for the reply. I'd strike that part of my comment if I could. Consider it taken back.

jacquesm•42m ago

You can, click 'edit'. Up to one hour after posting.

alberto-m•40m ago

I can edit the post and delete that part, but this would make OP's reply seem out of context. But HN markup does not support striking. I put some HTML tags there anyway, the sense should be clear.

jacquesm•38m ago

Just mark your edit 'edit:'. I often have the same happen where I write a comment and then think 'oh, that's no good, I need to improve on it' and then in the meantime multiple people will comment and hopefully quote the original. That way at least you can see what they replied to rather than the version that I'm finally happy with. I've suggested HN increase the default size of the reply box but so far no takers on that.

captn3m0•1h ago

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

This is an interesting post, but not a Show HN.

theraven•1h ago

I didn’t submit it that way, it got auto massaged into that format because of the ‘Show HN’ prefix I believe

rco8786•40m ago

The Show HN prefix is submitting it that way.

> To post [to Show HN], submit a story whose title begins with "Show HN".

wheybags•1h ago

Would be nice to see some qualitative analyis to know if it's just slop, or actually more interesting projects. Not sure how to do that though. I think just looking at votes wouldn't work. I would guess more posts causes lower average visibility per post which should cause upvotes to slump naturally regardless of quality.

Edit: maybe you could:

- remove outliers (anything that made the front page)

- normalise vote count by expected time in the first 20 posts of shownew, based on the posting rate at the time

carimura•1h ago

sentiment analysis of comments?

Normal_gaussian•56m ago

a weighted sampling method is probably the best. Segment by time period and vote count or vote rate, then human evaluate. This could be done in a couple of hours and it gives a higher degree of confidence than any automated analysis.

jacquesm•1h ago

One of the reasons is that there are a lot of adverts masquerading as Show HN.

hsuduebc2•26m ago

Some subreddits became polluted the same way. Pretty annoying.

footy•18m ago

There's a subreddit for software people with adhd and it's terrible, every second post is about a New and Exciting Tool to manage adhd. Most of them are vibe coded, all of them come from randos I wouldn't trust with what I had for breakfast, let alone a whole life management system.

I check in every few weeks and I don't understand how anyone can use that subreddit more frequently.

etothepii•1h ago

Do you have any numbers on the number that get some number of upvotes? What about a chart of upvotes on Show HN?

I assume the vast, vast majority never get any upvotes.

rfarley04•52m ago

I have a little bit of data on that from my post last summer. It's pretty easy to query the data: ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/

seinvak•57m ago

Probably the same happening for websites being built or apps being published.

Normal_gaussian•54m ago

This is very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099 posted 4 days ago.

And there is also this https://dewmal.medium.com/hacker-news-is-a-living-time-capsu...

freehorse•51m ago

And link to that analysis from the linked discussion https://snubi.net/posts/Show-HN/

which also includes the average voting scores, which actually fall at the same time the quantity increases (while the average story scores remain the same), which is interesting.

galkk•46m ago

Laid off people have more time on their hands, while on llm-powered steroids?

captn3m0•44m ago

A better metric would be how many Show HN posts are reaching the front page.

wumms•30m ago

Related: "Data on AI-related Show HN posts"

Original title: "Data on AI-related Show HN posts More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related, but get less than half the votes or comments."

6 months ago, 155 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463249

voidUpdate•25m ago

Isn't it posts/month? What's the p for?

direwolf20•8m ago

maximum title length

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