HN for me is a bit..hmm kind of site. I can comment, but my comment have to be yes yes man comment. I have sometimes need to speak against of something, but comment and user account get minus and... Nothing comes from that. So for me.. I'm just limiting my reading when I remember it and not comment anything.. hmm that's the world we are now living.
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
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Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#442HN for me is a bit..hmm kind of site. I can comment, but my comment have to be yes yes man comment. I have sometimes need to speak against of something, but comment and user account get minus and... Nothing comes from that. So for me.. I'm just limiting my reading when I remember it and not comment anything.. hmm that's the world we are now living.
To be fair, internet points are worth as much as you choose to value it.
I always appreciate the alternative point of view, I've changed my mind about something many times from those kind of comments in hackernews.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#443To be honest, I’m feeling mildly discouraged from sharing on HN — there is stuff I think is interesting and got received well when shared elsewhere like Reddit, but appears to not be of interest to other people here.
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
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion. That’s not really the part I’m talking about. My gut says that if tests are a blocker for weekend projects, people just don’t bother writing them. I certainly wouldn’t imagine them taking much longer to code than the core functionality. In my experience, which seems to resonate with a lot of people, AI…
My experience is that the AI is surprisingly good in providing solutions which fall in the last 20%. Examples are annoying ui challenges like proper placements or flow challenges. Or caching strategies. Or certain algorithm optimizations.
Having a design background, I find it to be a hindrance to quickly creating work that meets industry standards for things like user flow, or communicating state or purpose of UI elements through placement. I’d likely find it quite useful doing low-level bare metal stuff because I don’t have much experience doing that, but my output would probably be substandard from an expert’s standpoint.
It’s really great at making us think we’re better and more productive than we really are.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#445This reminds me of the video game crash of 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
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?
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but Opus 4.6 is crazy good at writing. I generated a 500 page book, and it took until around page 275 for things to... go off rails. My strategy was to leverage ralph and a bunch of personas, and it good my act structure, major points and was able to just GO. For the first part, it was, by far, the best sci-fi book I've read. The problem is that I can tell in the writing where context collapse happened. It's…
This matches our experience. For a 28-page children's book there's no context collapse - the entire story fits comfortably in context. The format actually plays to LLMs' strengths: short, structured, clear emotional arc. It's a very different problem than generating 500 pages.
I believe. Im going to finish the book, but it was so good until the details got confused.
I will say that a skill is developing but it requires oversight and ... honestly, i should probably read the book before buying it on Amazon.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#447I built my share of AI stuff (although more using AI in the product than vibe coding ), so I won’t complain. But I did got frustrated when I recently posted a Show HN that I thought HN community would like and no one did. 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…
I don't think it's a case that no one liked it, there's just too much going on that it probably never came across the right eyes. 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 expec…
I feel the same way, wondering if there’s a point.
That said, I shared a cool post I came across (not a Show HN) about drone hacking. It basically got 0 traction. Not even 10 hours later someone else shared the exact same link and got 100+ upvotes and decent discussion. Which seems to point to a giant element of luck and the right eyes seeing the thing shared.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
The appearance of execution is much easier, quality execution (producing something anybody wants to use) might be easier, maybe not.
This is something that I was thinking about today. We're at the point where anyone can vibe code a product that "appears" to work. There's going to be a glut of garbage. It used to be that getting to that point required a lot of effort. So, in producing something large, there were quality indicators, and you could calibrate your expectations based on this. Nowadays, you can get the large thing done - meanwhile the in…
To play devil's advocate, if you were serious about building a product, whether it was hand-coded or vibe-coded, you would iterate through the work and implement functionalities step-by-step.
But with vibe-coding, you might not give enough thoughts about the product to think of use cases. I think you can still build good software with varying degrees of AI assistance, but it takes the same effort of testing and user feedback to make it great.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vibe coding as a term is really annoying. At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded? If I spent a year iterating on a design and implementation using Claude code, in a domain I’m an expert in, will that still be considered vibe coded?
I'll counter you this: I don't use AI at all, but in a way I am a vibe coder, even though I'm five years of full time work into one OSS project. I have no code review. I move fast and ship bugs. I roll forward. I see no reason to disrespect your work from what you say, but I also see no reason that AI would be much help to you after you had been learning for a year. If you are in the loop, shouldn't this be just abou…
I would counter your counter :)
I don't think vibe coding is about moving fast, shipping bugs, and not having reviews. That's the default state of pretty much all projects and is perfectly fine!
Vibe coding definitely has a different social meaning than just scrappy. I expect the term will die in some time as Claude Code equivalent becomes more popular, but right now I do find it pretty frustrating.
I do have a bunch of project prototypes done from scratch using Claude Code to explore ideas that I would qualify as vibe coded, but also some other projects that are done ~99% with Claude Code (I mean, the implementation, the design is mine), started as very scrappy prototypes, and evolved to something that is best in class in their specific somewhat niche domains (for things where I have expertise and feel confident I can judge). It's good software, reliable, strong focus on user experience, tested in prod, based on a few years of thinking what would actually fix once and for all a common issue in my niche at work. That's what makes me ask: at what point do you drop the vibe coded term?
It's not really about my personal perception of the project's value, more like... the idea that great software is rejected because it was written by an agent.
PS: congrats on sticking to your project for 5y, wishing you the best :)
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#450I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN is…
I have a project that I'm hoping to launch on show HN in the next few days which was built entirely with the help of AI agents. 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 i…
Just my opinion, but if you present it in a way that first explains the problematic, then explain what other similar tool fail to solve, and have a genuine understanding of the tool in the sense that you can understand and answer questions to generate a discussion, it doesn't matter much how it was coded. The "slop" part of the AI really comes down to having a vague idea for a tools, barely doing any research if the problem has been solved and generating a tool that nobody asked for and that you barely know, there is not much room for an interesting discussion.