8 ms·

I 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 p

I 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 you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective. I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.

koakuma-chan 8mo ago
One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.
- numpad0 8mo ago
  Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway. You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
    - koakuma-chan 8mo ago
      Working? Maybe. Prompting? Unlikely.
      - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        And in some other domains it takes a few decades to get to the top technically, not just a few years.
mchaver 8mo ago
I see a lot of projects repeated: screen capture tool, LLM wrapper, blog/newsletter, marketing tool for reddit/twitter, manage social media accounts. These things have been around for a while so it is really easy for an LLM to spit them out for someone that does not know how to code.
- hypercube33 8mo ago
  Agreed. I'm over here working on Quake 2 mods and reverse engineering Off world trading company so I can finish an open source server for it using AI. Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.
  - 1123581321 8mo ago
    Whoa, that caught my eye. Offworld Trading Company is one of my favorite RTSes. What are you looking to do with the open source server?
- mmarian 8mo ago
  It's because the common belief that you should build copies of whatever SaaS makes decent money. What they don't mention is that people need to have a very good reason why they decide to go for your bare-bones MVP instead of a well-established solution.
airstrike 8mo ago
we need a Vibe HN
- reconnecting 8mo ago
  listen_to_what_the_man_said.stm
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  That may be something. Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)
  - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
    Sorry about that, didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings :( It's still early and easy to underestimate the number of visitors who would absolutely love to have the main page more covered in absolute pure vibe than it is recently. I would like to hear opinions as to why the non-human touch is preferred, that could add something that not many are putting into words. Hopefully it's not a case of the lights being on but nobody's home :(
    - airstrike 8mo ago
      Sorry you got downvoted. People downvote for the most inane reasons here. Don't take it personally!
- elcapitan 8mo ago
  Prompter News
  - layer8 8mo ago
    Hacker Slop
    - juanani 8mo ago
verdverm 8mo ago
> the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring concur, perhaps a dedicated or alternative, itch.io like area named "Slop HN:..."
zero_shift 8mo ago
One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile. Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much
- SCdF 8mo ago
  Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder. There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do. It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago
    People will build AI 'quality detectors' to sort and filter the slop. The problem is of course it won't work very well and will drown all the human channels that are trying to curate various genres. I'm not optimistic about things not all turning into a grey sludge of similar mediocre material everywhere.
    - joncoded 8mo ago
      Exactly, and we will have those who will "game" the "detectors" like they already "game" the social media "algorithms" :\
    - dimwiddle 8mo ago
      Is there a way to have a social media platform with hand-written letters, sent with ravens? That's AI proofed... for a while at least!
xnx 8mo ago
My favorite part about people promoting (and probably vote stuffing) their closed-source non-free app that clone other apps is when people share the superior free alternatives in the comments.
HugoDz 8mo ago
[dead]
rubslopes 8mo ago
I predict that now that coding has become a commodity, smart young people drawn to technical problem-solving will start choosing other career paths over programming. I just don't know which ones, since AI seems to be commoditizing every form of engineering work.
- argee 8mo ago
  When I was growing up (millennial) it seemed to me that the default for smart young people drawn to technical problem solving was something like aerospace, software or hardware was more or less a fun hobby, like it was for Steve Wozniak. Nobody cared whether or which of these were a commodity, which is what happens when you actually enjoy something. These days I do see a lot of people choosing software for the money. Notably, many of them are bootcamp graduates and arguably made a pivot later in life, as opposed to other careers (such as medicine) which get chosen early. Nothing wrong with that (for many it has a good ROI), but I don’t think this changed anything about people with technical hobbies. When you’re young, you tend not to choose the path the rest of your life will take based on income. What your parents want for you is a different matter…
Gigacore 8mo ago
I shared a well-thought vibecoded app on ShowHN last month. It took a few hours to get POC and two weeks to fully develop a product to meet my requirements. Nobody cared.
- ohyoutravel 8mo ago
  You’re part of the problem.
  - CuriouslyC 8mo ago
    The problem is we're all stuck in a cut throat game of musical chairs in an eroding industry, with almost all organic platforms locked down and billion dollar orgs trying their damnedest to funnel you into pay2play.
  - Gigacore 8mo ago
    How do you solve it?
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  Sqfty? I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already. I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.
  - kranner 8mo ago
    Also, just a URL with no explanation and no supporting text in the post. If the poster can't be bothered to talk about why they made it... actually it's not even that. Just say hello, at least a hello. Show your audience you're a person. Humans like to talk to other humans.
    - Gigacore 8mo ago
      I will take note of that. Thanks for pointing.
onetimeusename 8mo ago
I think that's a fear I have about AI for programming (and I use them). So let's say we have a generation of people who use AI tools to code and no one really thinks hard about solving problems in niche spaces. Though we can build commercial products quickly and easily, no one really writes code for difficult problem spaces so no one builds up expertise in important subdomains for a generation. Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? How will AI be able to do new things well if it was trained on what people wrote previously and no one writes novel code themselves? It seems to me like AI is pretty dependent on having a corpus of human made code so, for example, I am not sure if it will be able to learn how to write very highly optimized code for some ISA in the future.
- wreath 8mo ago
  > Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? I’ve seen variation of this question since first few weeks /months after the release of ChatGPT and I havent seen an answer to this from leading figures in the AI coding space, whats the general answer or point of view on this?
  - righthand 8mo ago
    The general answer is what they’re already doing: ignoring the facts and riding the wave.
  - lowbloodsugar 8mo ago
    Is it hard to imagine that things will just stay the same for 20-30 years or longer? Here is an example of the B programming language from 1969, over 50 years ago: printn(n,b) { extrn putchar; auto a; if(a=n/b) /* assignment, not test for equality */ printn(a, b); /* recursive */ putchar(n%b + '0'); } You'd think we'd have a much better way of expressing the details of software, 50 years later? But here we are, still using ASCII text, separated by curly braces.
    - 8mo ago
DrewADesign 8mo ago
” The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— but I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed. I think a lot of what we’re seeing are projects that were easy enough to reach MVP before encountering the final 90% of coding time, which AI is a lot less useful for.
- tyre 8mo ago
  > I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.) I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.
  - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
    You both have very good points here, but once I get finished with both of the 90% programming times, and everything seems to finally work with no more bugs (and it's true), then for my heavy industry work I look forward to spending 10X as much effort testing compared to coding.
    - plagiarist 8mo ago
      Oh yeah, especially if the domain is complex, trying to envision how it can fail is as fun of a puzzle as trying to make it correct.
  - DrewADesign 8mo ago
    > 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 quickly stands up really useful boilerplate and very convenient purpose-built scaffolding… but is a lot less useful helping you solve actual problems in a way that makes sense to people that have those problems. Especially if you’re using a less-mainstream language or some other component.
foxmoss 8mo ago
As someone who posts blogs and projects out of my own enjoyment, no AI for code generation, handed edited blog, I still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about. Every step of the process could’ve been done by an LLM, albeit worse, so I don’t have a way of signifying my projects as something different. Considering putting a “No LLMs used in this project” tag at the start but that feels a little tacky.
- PaulHoule 8mo ago
  Communicating that you know what you are talking about and that you're different is a lot of work. I think being visibly "anti-AI" makes you look as much of an NPC as someone who "vibe coded XYZ." It takes care, consistency and most of all showing people something they've never seen before. It also helps to get in the habit of doing in person demos, if you want to win hackathons it really helps to be good at (1) giving demos on stage and (2) have a sense of what it takes to make something that is good to demo. I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/ https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/ which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is. Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"
- righthand 8mo ago
  You’re not actually at risk of being labeled as LLM user until someone comes and make that claim about your work. So my advice is to not try to fight a preemptive battle on your tone and adjust when/if that day comes. Side note: I’d think installing Anubis over your work would go a long way to signaling that but ymmv.
jebarker 8mo ago
> a tool is a tool > author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”. So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code
ungreased0675 8mo ago
I had a light bulb come on reading your comment. Yes! When I read Show HN posts that are clearly missing key information, it makes me care less because the author didn’t care to learn the space they’d like to play in.
parpfish 8mo ago
i think that there are a few distinct usecases for ShowHN that lead to conflicting visions: * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a business they're trying to start and they want to get marketing * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's involves some cool tech under the hood and they want to talk shop * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a fun thing and they just want some people to have fun
ModernMech 8mo ago
> I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. Agreed. r/ProgrammingLanguages had to deal with this recently in the same way HN has to; people were submitting these obviously vibecoded languages there that barely did anything, just a deluge of "make me a language that does X", where it doesn't actually do X or embody any of the properties that were prompted. One thing that was pointed out was "More often than not the author also doesn't engage with the community at all, instead they just share their project across a wide range of subreddits." I think HN is another destination for those kinds of AI slop projects -- I'm sure you could find every banned language posted on that forum posted here. Their solution was to write a new rule and just ban them outright. Things have been going much better since. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j6c/vibecodedai_slop_projects_are_now_officially/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j...
- kranner 8mo ago
  r/macapps is also putting new requirements in place [1], requiring among other things a statement of what your app solves, how it's better than existing solutions and even a changelog/roadmap. I would bet just the first two text fields would be enough to catch out vibecoders. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_requirements_to_combat_low_quality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_r...
BananaPelican 8mo ago
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 is related to an existing open source tool in a particular scientific niche which flatly does not work on an important modern platform. My project, an open source repo, brings this important legacy tool to this modern platform and also offers a highly engaging visual demo that is of general interest, even to a layperson not interested in programming or this particular scientific niche. I genuinely believe I have something valuable to offer to this niche scientific community, but also as a general interest and curiosity to HN for the programming aspects (I put a lot of thought into the architecture) as well as the visual aspects (I put a lot of thought into the design and aesthetics). Do you have any advice on how to present this work in a compelling way to people who understandably feels as burned out on AI slop as you do?
- Otterly99 8mo ago
  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.
fdefitte 8mo ago
The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise. More's the pity. I'm prepping for a ShowHN with a completely hand-coded project I started in December. It will be finished around end-march. I vibe-coded all the docs, because I spent all the time on the code. I have no idea if the ShowHN is going to be at all useful, but I pivoted multiple times on various implementation things. Had it been coded by an AI, I don't think there would be any pivot. The value is precisely from the pivots. An AI would have plodded on ahead anyway with a broken model for the problem-space.
righthand 8mo ago
> the author (pilot?) Viber
barrell 8mo ago
I feel like my experience with Show HN has been pretty confusing. Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails. I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources. I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets. Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest. I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do. Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.
LoveMortuus 8mo ago
I don't mind AI, but one of the issues that I have noticed when using it, is that I can't ask you questions about how you built the project and how you overcame difficulties and much more importantly what you've learned from it so that those that follow can stand on the shoulders of giants. I feel that actual 'understanding' is still incredibly important and it'll probably always be important. I'm talking about people actually understanding what's happening and why it's happening. The main difference I've noticed when I built stuff with AI and without it, is that without it I understood and knew the code much more intimately, as the program was running, I could approximate with a fairly good degree of precision where in the code the program was at a given time - human based debugging. When I'm using AI to build stuff all of this is gone. It's very little different from just opening a random Git repo, basically foreign code to me. There are tasks that just need to be done, and then there are tasks one outta think about.

koakuma-chan 8mo ago

One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.

numpad0 8mo ago
Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway. You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.
  - koakuma-chan 8mo ago
    Working? Maybe. Prompting? Unlikely.
    - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
      And in some other domains it takes a few decades to get to the top technically, not just a few years.

mchaver 8mo ago

I see a lot of projects repeated: screen capture tool, LLM wrapper, blog/newsletter, marketing tool for reddit/twitter, manage social media accounts. These things have been around for a while so it is really easy for an LLM to spit them out for someone that does not know how to code.

hypercube33 8mo ago
Agreed. I'm over here working on Quake 2 mods and reverse engineering Off world trading company so I can finish an open source server for it using AI. Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.
- 1123581321 8mo ago
  Whoa, that caught my eye. Offworld Trading Company is one of my favorite RTSes. What are you looking to do with the open source server?
mmarian 8mo ago
It's because the common belief that you should build copies of whatever SaaS makes decent money. What they don't mention is that people need to have a very good reason why they decide to go for your bare-bones MVP instead of a well-established solution.

airstrike 8mo ago

we need a Vibe HN

reconnecting 8mo ago
listen_to_what_the_man_said.stm
fuzzfactor 8mo ago
That may be something. Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  Sorry about that, didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings :( It's still early and easy to underestimate the number of visitors who would absolutely love to have the main page more covered in absolute pure vibe than it is recently. I would like to hear opinions as to why the non-human touch is preferred, that could add something that not many are putting into words. Hopefully it's not a case of the lights being on but nobody's home :(
  - airstrike 8mo ago
    Sorry you got downvoted. People downvote for the most inane reasons here. Don't take it personally!
elcapitan 8mo ago
Prompter News
- layer8 8mo ago
  Hacker Slop
  - juanani 8mo ago

verdverm 8mo ago

> the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring concur, perhaps a dedicated or alternative, itch.io like area named "Slop HN:..."

zero_shift 8mo ago

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile. Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much

SCdF 8mo ago
Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder. There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do. It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago
  People will build AI 'quality detectors' to sort and filter the slop. The problem is of course it won't work very well and will drown all the human channels that are trying to curate various genres. I'm not optimistic about things not all turning into a grey sludge of similar mediocre material everywhere.
  - joncoded 8mo ago
    Exactly, and we will have those who will "game" the "detectors" like they already "game" the social media "algorithms" :\
  - dimwiddle 8mo ago
    Is there a way to have a social media platform with hand-written letters, sent with ravens? That's AI proofed... for a while at least!

xnx 8mo ago

My favorite part about people promoting (and probably vote stuffing) their closed-source non-free app that clone other apps is when people share the superior free alternatives in the comments.

HugoDz 8mo ago

[dead]

rubslopes 8mo ago

I predict that now that coding has become a commodity, smart young people drawn to technical problem-solving will start choosing other career paths over programming. I just don't know which ones, since AI seems to be commoditizing every form of engineering work.

argee 8mo ago
When I was growing up (millennial) it seemed to me that the default for smart young people drawn to technical problem solving was something like aerospace, software or hardware was more or less a fun hobby, like it was for Steve Wozniak. Nobody cared whether or which of these were a commodity, which is what happens when you actually enjoy something. These days I do see a lot of people choosing software for the money. Notably, many of them are bootcamp graduates and arguably made a pivot later in life, as opposed to other careers (such as medicine) which get chosen early. Nothing wrong with that (for many it has a good ROI), but I don’t think this changed anything about people with technical hobbies. When you’re young, you tend not to choose the path the rest of your life will take based on income. What your parents want for you is a different matter…

Gigacore 8mo ago

I shared a well-thought vibecoded app on ShowHN last month. It took a few hours to get POC and two weeks to fully develop a product to meet my requirements. Nobody cared.

ohyoutravel 8mo ago
You’re part of the problem.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  The problem is we're all stuck in a cut throat game of musical chairs in an eroding industry, with almost all organic platforms locked down and billion dollar orgs trying their damnedest to funnel you into pay2play.
- Gigacore 8mo ago
  How do you solve it?
marginalia_nu 8mo ago
Sqfty? I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already. I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.
- kranner 8mo ago
  Also, just a URL with no explanation and no supporting text in the post. If the poster can't be bothered to talk about why they made it... actually it's not even that. Just say hello, at least a hello. Show your audience you're a person. Humans like to talk to other humans.
  - Gigacore 8mo ago
    I will take note of that. Thanks for pointing.

onetimeusename 8mo ago

I think that's a fear I have about AI for programming (and I use them). So let's say we have a generation of people who use AI tools to code and no one really thinks hard about solving problems in niche spaces. Though we can build commercial products quickly and easily, no one really writes code for difficult problem spaces so no one builds up expertise in important subdomains for a generation. Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? How will AI be able to do new things well if it was trained on what people wrote previously and no one writes novel code themselves? It seems to me like AI is pretty dependent on having a corpus of human made code so, for example, I am not sure if it will be able to learn how to write very highly optimized code for some ISA in the future.

wreath 8mo ago
> Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? I’ve seen variation of this question since first few weeks /months after the release of ChatGPT and I havent seen an answer to this from leading figures in the AI coding space, whats the general answer or point of view on this?
- righthand 8mo ago
  The general answer is what they’re already doing: ignoring the facts and riding the wave.
- lowbloodsugar 8mo ago
  Is it hard to imagine that things will just stay the same for 20-30 years or longer? Here is an example of the B programming language from 1969, over 50 years ago: printn(n,b) { extrn putchar; auto a; if(a=n/b) /* assignment, not test for equality */ printn(a, b); /* recursive */ putchar(n%b + '0'); } You'd think we'd have a much better way of expressing the details of software, 50 years later? But here we are, still using ASCII text, separated by curly braces.
  - 8mo ago

DrewADesign 8mo ago

” The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— but I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed. I think a lot of what we’re seeing are projects that were easy enough to reach MVP before encountering the final 90% of coding time, which AI is a lot less useful for.

tyre 8mo ago
> I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.) I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.
- fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  You both have very good points here, but once I get finished with both of the 90% programming times, and everything seems to finally work with no more bugs (and it's true), then for my heavy industry work I look forward to spending 10X as much effort testing compared to coding.
  - plagiarist 8mo ago
    Oh yeah, especially if the domain is complex, trying to envision how it can fail is as fun of a puzzle as trying to make it correct.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
  > 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 quickly stands up really useful boilerplate and very convenient purpose-built scaffolding… but is a lot less useful helping you solve actual problems in a way that makes sense to people that have those problems. Especially if you’re using a less-mainstream language or some other component.

foxmoss 8mo ago

As someone who posts blogs and projects out of my own enjoyment, no AI for code generation, handed edited blog, I still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about. Every step of the process could’ve been done by an LLM, albeit worse, so I don’t have a way of signifying my projects as something different. Considering putting a “No LLMs used in this project” tag at the start but that feels a little tacky.

PaulHoule 8mo ago
Communicating that you know what you are talking about and that you're different is a lot of work. I think being visibly "anti-AI" makes you look as much of an NPC as someone who "vibe coded XYZ." It takes care, consistency and most of all showing people something they've never seen before. It also helps to get in the habit of doing in person demos, if you want to win hackathons it really helps to be good at (1) giving demos on stage and (2) have a sense of what it takes to make something that is good to demo. I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/ https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/ which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is. Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840 I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"
righthand 8mo ago
You’re not actually at risk of being labeled as LLM user until someone comes and make that claim about your work. So my advice is to not try to fight a preemptive battle on your tone and adjust when/if that day comes. Side note: I’d think installing Anubis over your work would go a long way to signaling that but ymmv.

jebarker 8mo ago

> a tool is a tool > author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”. So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code

ungreased0675 8mo ago

I had a light bulb come on reading your comment. Yes! When I read Show HN posts that are clearly missing key information, it makes me care less because the author didn’t care to learn the space they’d like to play in.

parpfish 8mo ago

i think that there are a few distinct usecases for ShowHN that lead to conflicting visions: * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a business they're trying to start and they want to get marketing * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's involves some cool tech under the hood and they want to talk shop * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a fun thing and they just want some people to have fun

ModernMech 8mo ago

> I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. Agreed. r/ProgrammingLanguages had to deal with this recently in the same way HN has to; people were submitting these obviously vibecoded languages there that barely did anything, just a deluge of "make me a language that does X", where it doesn't actually do X or embody any of the properties that were prompted. One thing that was pointed out was "More often than not the author also doesn't engage with the community at all, instead they just share their project across a wide range of subreddits." I think HN is another destination for those kinds of AI slop projects -- I'm sure you could find every banned language posted on that forum posted here. Their solution was to write a new rule and just ban them outright. Things have been going much better since. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j6c/vibecodedai_slop_projects_are_now_officially/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j...

kranner 8mo ago
r/macapps is also putting new requirements in place [1], requiring among other things a statement of what your app solves, how it's better than existing solutions and even a changelog/roadmap. I would bet just the first two text fields would be enough to catch out vibecoders. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_requirements_to_combat_low_quality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_r...

BananaPelican 8mo ago

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 is related to an existing open source tool in a particular scientific niche which flatly does not work on an important modern platform. My project, an open source repo, brings this important legacy tool to this modern platform and also offers a highly engaging visual demo that is of general interest, even to a layperson not interested in programming or this particular scientific niche. I genuinely believe I have something valuable to offer to this niche scientific community, but also as a general interest and curiosity to HN for the programming aspects (I put a lot of thought into the architecture) as well as the visual aspects (I put a lot of thought into the design and aesthetics). Do you have any advice on how to present this work in a compelling way to people who understandably feels as burned out on AI slop as you do?

Otterly99 8mo ago
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.

fdefitte 8mo ago

The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

lelanthran 8mo ago
> The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise. More's the pity. I'm prepping for a ShowHN with a completely hand-coded project I started in December. It will be finished around end-march. I vibe-coded all the docs, because I spent all the time on the code. I have no idea if the ShowHN is going to be at all useful, but I pivoted multiple times on various implementation things. Had it been coded by an AI, I don't think there would be any pivot. The value is precisely from the pivots. An AI would have plodded on ahead anyway with a broken model for the problem-space.

righthand 8mo ago

> the author (pilot?) Viber

barrell 8mo ago

I feel like my experience with Show HN has been pretty confusing. Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails. I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources. I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets. Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest. I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do. Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.

LoveMortuus 8mo ago

I don't mind AI, but one of the issues that I have noticed when using it, is that I can't ask you questions about how you built the project and how you overcame difficulties and much more importantly what you've learned from it so that those that follow can stand on the shoulders of giants. I feel that actual 'understanding' is still incredibly important and it'll probably always be important. I'm talking about people actually understanding what's happening and why it's happening. The main difference I've noticed when I built stuff with AI and without it, is that without it I understood and knew the code much more intimately, as the program was running, I could approximate with a fairly good degree of precision where in the code the program was at a given time - human based debugging. When I'm using AI to build stuff all of this is gone. It's very little different from just opening a random Git repo, basically foreign code to me. There are tasks that just need to be done, and then there are tasks one outta think about.