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.
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.
We are likely going to get better in judging this new communication and media. But we need much more experience in it, until we can do that properly.
It will be annoying for quite a while, as it was with social media, until we found the places that are still worth our time and attention. But i am hopeful that we will be able to do that.
Until then i am going to work on my AI side project every evening until i deem it ready and bug free. It already works well enough for my own purposes (which i made it for) and my requirements were heavily influenced by my work process. I would never have been able to finish such a project, even with full time working on it over a year without AI.
Productizing anything is hard and writing code with AI is basically impossible to do reliably, securely, and at scale unless you're already an expert in what you're trying to do. For example, working on a project now, and it's kind of endearing watching my AI buddy run into every single pothole I ran into when I first started working with Tauri or Rust.
Unless you know what you're doing (and why you're doing it), AI suggestions are in the best case benign, and in the worst case architectural disasters. Very rarely, I'm like "hm that might be a good idea."
I think AI-aided development will raise the bar for products and makes expert engineers like 10x more valuable. Personally, I'm elated that I don't have to write my 4000th React boilerplate or Rust logging helper anymore.
And the real, actual hard work (as in: coming up with new algorithms for novel problems, breaking problems down so others can understand them, splitting up code/modules in a way that makes sense for another person, etc.) will likely never be doable by AI.
Also write another javascript framework in case it seems easier to create one than take the time to learn one.
If your spaces that were previously full of interesting things suddenly become deluged with uninteresting things then that is something to complain about.
Interviews by celebrities predicting AI will revolutionize the economy: 2837191001747
Software and online things I've used that seem to be better than they were before ChatGPT was introduced: 0
I don't think you can really get any sort of a signal on this?
Nobody is all that sensitive to the amount of features that get shipped in any project, and nobody really perceives how many people or how much time was needed to ship anything. As a user, unless that means a 5x difference in price of some service, you don't really see or care about any of that - and even if there were savings on the part of any developer/company, they'd probably just pocket the difference. Similarly, if there's a product or service that exists thanks to vibe coding and wouldn't have existed otherwise, you probably don't know that particular detail.
Even when fuckups and bugs do happen, there's also no signal whether it's explicitly due to AI (or whether people are scapegoating it), or just management pushing features nobody wants and enshittifying products and entire industries for their own gain.
Well, maybe StackOverflow is a bit easier to host now: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
Just because you can't separate the noise from signal with that easy check doesn't mean these people can't get the joy of side projects. It's especially lazy when that project is open-source and you can literally ask CC, hey dig into this code, did they build anything interesting or different? Peter's side projects like Vibetunnel and Openclaw have so many hidden gems in the code (a rest API for controlling local terminals and Heartbeat, respectively) that you can integrate into your own project. Neglecting these projects as "AI slop" is stopping you from learning what amazing things people are building, especially when those people have different expertise. Lest we forget, the transformer model came from Alphafold and sometimes the best discoveries come from completely unrelated fields.
I would love to meet these people that are getting joy out of seeing other peoples random fucking vibe coded apps that have zero rigor or skill applied to them lol.
That being said, THOSE projects at this point have enough "activity" around them to make them at least somewhat worthy of a post. Which none of the vibe code posts have going for them.
There's more projects I suspect are made predominantly using AI, but I don't want to speculate.
But other distribution strategies exist. You just have to be smarter about finding and getting in front of your core audience.
Solid solutions are being overshadowed by AI slop alternatives which were assembled in a few months with no long term vision; the results look great superficially, but under the bonnet, it's inefficient, expensive, closed, lacks flexibility, experience degrades over time. All the essential stuff that people don't think about initially is what's missing.
It feels like the logical conclusion of peak attention economy; the media fully saturated with junk where junk beats quality due to the volume advantage.
What I mean by that is: after reading through a brief description of a project, or a conceptual overview, they are no better than noise at predicting whether it will be worthwhile to try out, or rewarding to learn about, or have a discussion about, or start using day-to-day.
Things on the front page used to be high quality software, research papers, etc. And now it is entirely driven by marketing operations, and social circles. There is no differential amplification of quality.
I don't know what the solution is, but I imagine it involves some kind of weighted voting. That would be a step towards a complicated engagement algorithm, instead of the elegant and predictable exponential decay that HN is known for.
Come on. This site keeps promoting negative content.
It wasn't like I couldn't build before, it just makes it easier and a hell of a lot more fun now. I just did an AI side project and it was a blast. https://oj-hn.com
AI isn't going to take your job. People who know AI are.
I have zero interest in seeing something that Claude emitted that the author could never in a million years have written it themselves.
Its baffling to me these people think anyone cares about what their claude prompt output.
I'm not sure if this article deserves all that much attention if the standard is a subjective interpretation of what is truly special.. human made, human directed, or not.
Is there some sort of spectrum of not special, kind of special, pretty special, and truly special?
Does it have to be special for everyone or just some people?
Is it trying to say that people by default build and share things for external validation?
The argument about how people are using AI to solve a problem is akin to how people might feel about someone using a spreadsheet to solve a problem.
Sometimes projects are for learning. Sometimes projects are for solving a problem that's small to others, but okay to you to solve.
Insecurity about other people learning to build things for the first time and then continue to learn to build them better might be what this is about, period.
There's always been a great number of problems that never could could quite get the attention of software development.
I've genuinely met non-software folks who are interested in first solving a problem and then solving it better and better. And I think that type of self-directed learning in software is invaluable.
AI makes slop, but humans sure seem to like creating the same frameworks over and in every language and thinking it's progress in some way. But every so often, you get a positive shift forward, maybe a Ruby on Rails or something else.
tehjoker•50m ago