4 ms·
Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year
- direwolf20 8mo agoMore AI?
- peteforde 8mo agoI suspect that this will drive the folks who insist LLM productivity gains are the real hallucinations truly bonkers.
- fhennig 8mo agoIMO a productivity gain of about x2 seems about right!
- anonymous908213 8mo agoNo, 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 8mo agoRelated 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_announcement_introducing_vibe_code_friday/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qfp2t0/mod_ann...
- sepositus 8mo agoThis 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 8mo agoIt 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 8mo agoCounterpoint: 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?
- anonymous908213 8mo ago> You won't admit anything generated with LLMs is good? Nowhere in my comment did I say this, so this is quite a non-sequitur you've based the following personal attack upon. Regardless of whether it's possible to use LLMs to generate good things, the vast majority of things generated with them are not good, and if the good things exist, they are being drowned out in a sea of spam, increasingly difficult to discover along with the good human-generated content. I have to say, I would characterise both your comment and the original comment I replied to as being considerably more "unfair" than mine. The first comment was clearly written in such a way to get a rise out of people. Your reply is directly insinuating that I'm out-of-touch and ranting at clouds.
- 7777777phil 8mo agoI 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/ https://agentic-coding-survey.pages.dev/
- anonymous908213 8mo agoNote 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-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
- 7777777phil 8mo agoIf 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 8mo agoThe 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.
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo agoIt's slop disguised as productivity.
- Semaphor 8mo 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 8mo agoThe 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 8mo agoThey 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 8mo agoAI 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoNo, 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 8mo agoThanks for the reply. I'd strike that part of my comment if I could. Consider it taken back.
- jacquesm 8mo agoYou can, click 'edit'. Up to one hour after posting.
- alberto-m 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoJust 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 8mo 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.
- wheybags 8mo agoWould 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 8mo agosentiment analysis of comments?
- Normal_gaussian 8mo agoa 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 8mo agoOne of the reasons is that there are a lot of adverts masquerading as Show HN.
- hsuduebc2 8mo agoSome subreddits became polluted the same way. Pretty annoying.
- footy 8mo agoThere'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 8mo agoDo 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoProbably the same happening for websites being built or apps being published.
- Normal_gaussian 8mo agoThis is very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099 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-capsule-10e1269c63c5 https://dewmal.medium.com/hacker-news-is-a-living-time-capsu...
- freehorse 8mo agoAnd link to that analysis from the linked discussion https://snubi.net/posts/Show-HN/ 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 8mo agoLaid off people have more time on their hands, while on llm-powered steroids?
- captn3m0 8mo agoA better metric would be how many Show HN posts are reaching the front page.
- wumms 8mo agoRelated: "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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463249
- voidUpdate 8mo agoIsn't it posts/month? What's the p for?
- direwolf20 8mo agomaximum title length
- discreteevent 8mo agoEternal LLMber