12 ms·

I hate AI side projects

80 points by dcastm 8mo ago

selridge 8mo ago
[flagged]
- hu3 8mo ago
  Not to mention these people basically self declare as non-hireable or mark themselves a target on their back for the next layoff culling. Terrible for career. It's like complaining that power tools are bad because they promote industrialised products over hand made detailed work.
tehjoker 8mo ago
I think this problem will start to fix itself as people start to set a higher bar for what they share (or set policies restricting projects that don't show effort).
infecto 8mo ago
What I hate is people posting links to their blog post which upon viewing is really just an extended twitter sized rant.
- scubbo 8mo ago
  Why? What's the cutoff point of length that you would accept? If they'd used AI to artificially increase the length of their content, would you be happier?
  - infecto 8mo ago
    My delivery could have been better. It was half satire and half a jab since it’s a self promoted post pointing out AI slop without much thought behind it. Even if human written it carries probably even less weight than an AI slop side project. To write such quick note about AI slop a few days after they had a show hn with something that looks a bit like AI slop amused me.
simonw 8mo ago
I think the main effect of the current influx of low effort AI side projects is that it's going to significantly increase the bar for what's worth showing people. 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.
- tyleo 8mo ago
  I’ve felt the same. I’ve had two things on the pre-LLM front page after about a month of work each. Those exist in the framework of my personal site which I’d been building out for a year. 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.
  - simonw 8mo ago
    Yeah, that's probably a good way of thinking about this. If your side project took a couple of hours it's not worthy of a Show HN. If it took at least a few days or a few weeks or longer and it's novel (not something many other people have built already) then it's a much better bet.
- janice1999 8mo ago
  The problem is that the effort required to understand the quality of a project has also gone through the roof (and not just due to the number of them). Good looking READMEs and docs, large test suites, well constructed code - LLMs can generate credible versions that take time to digest and understand the limitations of. AI is fantastic at faking the outward signals of a good project and hyping it up. I've lost count of the projects that appear here and on Reddit that initially look good but fall apart once a domain expert spends the time to dig into it.
  - insin 8mo ago
rspoerri 8mo ago
I dont think the side projects or the ai is the problem. It's the perception of the quality and our filtering that needs adaption. Ai has changed the amount of content that is generated by a huge margin, and it is generally difficult to tell how much work went into something. And lesser experienced people do an even worse job in that. 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.
dvt 8mo ago
Upvoting not because I necessarily agree, but because I think it's a conversation worth having. I personally think it's great that "everyone can build" now. I don't have to deal with "product people" telling me about their "billion dollar idea" anymore. Just go build it, bro. 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.
khalic 8mo ago
It’s funny because I hate these “I hate stuff” articles.
- chuckadams 8mo ago
  You should write an article about them.
  - sodapopcan 8mo ago
    Then I can write a "I hate people who hate 'I hate stuff' articles" article!
    - hamdingers 8mo ago
      Recommended title: "Let people enjoy stuff"
      - card_zero 8mo ago
        "Let people enjoy hating stuff"
  - j45 8mo ago
    With and without ai slop. Also write another javascript framework in case it seems easier to create one than take the time to learn one.
- acheron 8mo ago
  “I hate stuff” articles considered harmful.
  - sodapopcan 8mo ago
    The internet is only for training data and praising any and all technological progress. If you don't like it, keep it to yourself. Self-expression has no place here!
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
quietsegfault 8mo ago
This is some Andy Rooney whine-fest. Who cares? Don’t do it. Don’t read it. You don’t have to announce your displeasure to the world.
- webdood90 8mo ago
  Oh, the irony.
- acedTrex 8mo ago
  > You don’t have to announce your displeasure to the world. If your spaces that were previously full of interesting things suddenly become deluged with uninteresting things then that is something to complain about.
  - quietsegfault 8mo ago
    I’d find someplace else to spend my time if I no longer found someplace interesting,
- krapp 8mo ago
  Where do you think you are, right now?
getnormality 8mo ago
Blog posts by authors claiming AI has transformed them into godlike engines of productivity: 103728369129 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
- candiddevmike 8mo ago
  I feel like the things I've built have gotten better since ChatGPT, but I don't use LLMs, just iterating and realizing how naive/terrible my old code is. Maybe I should write a blog post on How I (Don't) Use LLMs for Coding.
- snicky 8mo ago
  I agree with you in general, but come on - learning is easier (unless you need to dive into highly specialized stuff), writing shorter chunks of code is faster, simple photo editing ("remove this and that from the background") doesn't need any skills now. Image generation isn't terribly too if you put some effort and don't stick with the same 3-4 drawing styles that all the cheapskate companies use.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  To be fair there is this persistent paradox about programming methodologies is that no matter how much they seem to speed you up, or how effective they seem to be at reducing bugs, this doesn't seem to give you any material competitive advantage over companies going for the most conservative language and methodology choices.
  - AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
    It's almost like writing the code isn't the hard part.
- tjr 8mo ago
  I don't think it's quite at trillions to zero, but I do think the numbers are way, way out of balance so far. I'm still at the point where, if AI disappeared tomorrow, I would be, at worst, mildly inconvenienced.
jrob1 8mo ago
[dead]
theturtletalks 8mo ago
Posts like this really irk me. There were shitty side projects before AI (trust me, I made a couple), but those people knew how to code so somehow you were able to separate the noise and signal easily. Now, coding is no longer some crazy skill and anyone can make side projects. 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.
- acedTrex 8mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - theturtletalks 8mo ago
    I just gave you two Vibetunnel and Openclaw. If you think those are worthless, I don't know what else to tell you.
    - acedTrex 8mo ago
      Yes both of those are beyond worthless and largely uninteresting. 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.
Mongoose 8mo ago
I think this is less about the projects themselves and more about distribution channels like HN and ProductHunt being dead. When the zone is flooded by vibecoded apps of all kinds, the "build it and they will come" era of getting your thing on a popular website's homepage is over. But other distribution strategies exist. You just have to be smarter about finding and getting in front of your core audience.
- elliotbnvl 8mo ago
  What kinds of other distribution strategies are you thinking of?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
r1chardnl 8mo ago
I love AI side projects, it allows for quick iteration and finishing on ideas that weren't feasible due to time constraints before. I just made one yesterday/today. I used Magit before and during the making of this I found out GitUI exists too but I think it's pretty powerful if the tool doesn't do exactly what you want and are opionated you can tailor your tools the way you want to. https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/tuide https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/tuide
socketcluster 8mo ago
AI exacerbates the slop it but it's an old trend. It boils down to "form over substance" which has been an issue in this industry since as far as I can remember; it just got worse and worse; especially over the past decade. 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.
- peacebeard 8mo ago
  Makes me think of how fancy framework and library websites have gotten. Surely, if the website has sumptuous animations, the code must be good.
  - socketcluster 8mo ago
    Haha yeah, sometimes the contrast between appearance and code quality is shocking. Most extreme case I experienced was in blockchain sector; all the software was beautiful, nice UI, smooth transitions, pixel-perfect graphics... But under the bonnet, nobody could even fully explain how anything worked and it was a real tangled mess worth billions in market cap at the time.
alphazard 8mo ago
This is exposing a problem that already existed, AI is just throwing gas on the fire. Most engineers, including the readership of this site, have terrible taste in software. 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.
- argee 8mo ago
  > 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. You could criticize a Michelin inspector the same way. The poor bastards have to actually taste the dish and can't decide merit based on menu descriptions alone.
latchkey 8mo ago
"The worst thing about AI is that EVERYONE can build now." 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 https://oj-hn.com AI isn't going to take your job. People who know AI are.
up2isomorphism 8mo ago
AI is just inconveniently reveal the situation in the current society: don’t share your stuff, sell your stuff, because they end up sold somewhere the only difference is who sold it.
acedTrex 8mo ago
The influx if these sorts of posts have largely pushed me out of all my previous "programmer" online spots. 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.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  Do you choose your food/car/housing/etc based on virtue signalling rather than utility as well?
  - acedTrex 8mo ago
    Well i generally look for signals that a place I might eat at knows how to cook. If I walk in and I see rats on the floor and theres no kitchen I probably won't be interested. I apply the same logic to software.
  - misnome 8mo ago
    Do you choose your software exclusively based on virtue signalling about which editor they used to write it in?
garyfirestorm 8mo ago
The author doesn’t pinpoint on why exactly he hates the AI side projects. Is it because they are low effort? But then he also says his past hobby projects could be done today in few hours with Claudecode.
j45 8mo ago
"If you don’t have something truly special.." 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.
CuriouslyC 8mo ago
If you're anti (AI) side projects, you're pro corporate feudalism.
- vermilingua 8mo ago
  Ah yes, because becoming totally reliant on a technology only made possible by weaponising the entire global economy looks nothing like corporate feudalism.
  - CuriouslyC 8mo ago
    Local models exist. Decouple your dislike of the companies from the technology they're trying to leverage.
    - xigoi 8mo ago
      Who trained those local models?
- xigoi 8mo ago
  I love to resist corporate feudalism by making my entire development process fully dependent on SaaS offerings by corporations like Anthropic and “Open”AI.
tamimio 8mo ago
The whole idea of side projects is learning something while building something unique, authentic, and cool. Since AI hype, most side projects -that get published- now are solely built to grab your money one way or another, whoever built it thinks that a 3hrs vibe coded slop will make him millionaire by the end of the year, so you end up with so much garbage. It’s why I only focus on hardware actual “hacking” projects, more fun to read and follow, and I know it wasn’t vibecoded too.
jpmitchell 8mo ago
For me at least, the advent of coding AI has just forced me to finally accept a truth that I probably always knew: that I'm an average (at best) software developer, and that I don't have anything truly unique or impressive to contribute to the field. My side projects were always just for myself. I love computing, and programming. If anything I'm better able to appreciate that now that I no longer care if my work has any impact.
- chuckadams 8mo ago
  That was both depressing and uplifting at the same time. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
dang 8mo ago
Edit: for me the most practical insight to come out of these threads, so far, is that Show HNs for generated repos/sites/projects would be more interesting if submitters were required to share the prompts, and not just the generated output. For such projects, the prompts are the real source, while the GH repo or generated artifact is actually the object code, and if that's all that's shared, it's less interesting and there's less to discuss. I think we're going to implement this unless we hear strong reasons not to. The idea has already come up a lot, so there's demand for it, and it seems clear why. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22share%20the%20prompt%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22share%20the%20prompts%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052452 --- original comment --- Recent and related: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (423 comments; subthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421 is about what to do about it) AI makes you boring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076966 - Feb 2026 (367 comments)
- tombert 8mo ago
  It's not a terrible idea, but I'm not sure how that would work logistically. When I use Codex to do vibe coding stuff, I don't usually have one big prompt, I usually have it do small things piecemeal and I iterate with it later. Maybe I'm using it wrong but it tends to be more "conversational" and I think that would be harder to share, especially considering I'll do things over dozens of sessions. I suppose I could keep an archive of every session I've ever opened with Codex and share that, but thus far I haven't really done that. Granted, I don't really share my stuff with "Show HN".
frk_ai_8b2e 8mo ago
[flagged]
smitty1e 8mo ago
> Most of my past side projects would take me a few minutes or hours to build with Claude Code. Today, they’re not worth talking about. What, were the vibe coded in COBOL? That is: I don't understand why the use of Claude Code itself renders them unworthy of discussion.
erelong 8mo ago
I've been seeing a lot of posts like this and I don't tend to agree with the "anti-AI sentiment", but I think some of the problems identified might be like this: People may lack ideas of interesting projects to work on in the first place; so we need to think about how to help people to think of useful and interesting projects to work on Related to that idea, people may need to develop skills for building more "complex" ideas and we may need to think about how to make that more possible in the era of AI usage... even if some AI agent can take care of a technical side of things, it still takes a kind of "complexity of thought" to dream up more complicated / useful / interesting projects (I get the impression that there may be a need for some kind of training of the mind necessary for asking for an "automobile" rather than a "faster horse", by analogy... and that conception was often found through manually tinkering with intermediate devices like the bicycle. Hence an AI could "one shot" something interesting but what that thing is is limited by the imagination of the user, which may be limited by technical inability - in other words, the user may need to develop more technical ability in order to be able to dream up more interesting things to create, even if this "technical ability" is a more "skilled usage of AI tools") There needs to be some way to filter through "noise". That's not a new issue and... a lot of these questions or complaints often feel very "meta", as in - you could just ask AI how to make side projects more interesting or useful, or how to create good filters in the age of AI. In sports, there are hierarchical levels of competition - likewise here you might have forums that are more closed off to newcomers if you want to "gatekeep" things, and they have to compete in "local pools" of attention and if they "win" there, then their "qualified authority / leader" submits the project to a higher level, and so on. AI suggests using qualified curators to create newsfeeds or to act as filters of the "slop".
fud101 8mo ago
Why was this flagged? It's the best thing i've read here in a while.
nly 7mo ago
> Most of my past side projects would take me a few minutes or hours to build with Claude Code. Today, they’re not worth talking about. Chances are they were never worth talking about, but that doesn't mean the journey wasn't worth it.

80 points by dcastm 8mo ago

selridge 8mo ago

[flagged]

hu3 8mo ago
Not to mention these people basically self declare as non-hireable or mark themselves a target on their back for the next layoff culling. Terrible for career. It's like complaining that power tools are bad because they promote industrialised products over hand made detailed work.

tehjoker 8mo ago

I think this problem will start to fix itself as people start to set a higher bar for what they share (or set policies restricting projects that don't show effort).

infecto 8mo ago

What I hate is people posting links to their blog post which upon viewing is really just an extended twitter sized rant.

scubbo 8mo ago
Why? What's the cutoff point of length that you would accept? If they'd used AI to artificially increase the length of their content, would you be happier?
- infecto 8mo ago
  My delivery could have been better. It was half satire and half a jab since it’s a self promoted post pointing out AI slop without much thought behind it. Even if human written it carries probably even less weight than an AI slop side project. To write such quick note about AI slop a few days after they had a show hn with something that looks a bit like AI slop amused me.

simonw 8mo ago

I think the main effect of the current influx of low effort AI side projects is that it's going to significantly increase the bar for what's worth showing people. 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.

tyleo 8mo ago
I’ve felt the same. I’ve had two things on the pre-LLM front page after about a month of work each. Those exist in the framework of my personal site which I’d been building out for a year. 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.
- simonw 8mo ago
  Yeah, that's probably a good way of thinking about this. If your side project took a couple of hours it's not worthy of a Show HN. If it took at least a few days or a few weeks or longer and it's novel (not something many other people have built already) then it's a much better bet.
janice1999 8mo ago
The problem is that the effort required to understand the quality of a project has also gone through the roof (and not just due to the number of them). Good looking READMEs and docs, large test suites, well constructed code - LLMs can generate credible versions that take time to digest and understand the limitations of. AI is fantastic at faking the outward signals of a good project and hyping it up. I've lost count of the projects that appear here and on Reddit that initially look good but fall apart once a domain expert spends the time to dig into it.
- insin 8mo ago

rspoerri 8mo ago

I dont think the side projects or the ai is the problem. It's the perception of the quality and our filtering that needs adaption. Ai has changed the amount of content that is generated by a huge margin, and it is generally difficult to tell how much work went into something. And lesser experienced people do an even worse job in that. 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.

dvt 8mo ago

Upvoting not because I necessarily agree, but because I think it's a conversation worth having. I personally think it's great that "everyone can build" now. I don't have to deal with "product people" telling me about their "billion dollar idea" anymore. Just go build it, bro. 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.

khalic 8mo ago

It’s funny because I hate these “I hate stuff” articles.

chuckadams 8mo ago
You should write an article about them.
- sodapopcan 8mo ago
  Then I can write a "I hate people who hate 'I hate stuff' articles" article!
  - hamdingers 8mo ago
    Recommended title: "Let people enjoy stuff"
    - card_zero 8mo ago
      "Let people enjoy hating stuff"
- j45 8mo ago
  With and without ai slop. Also write another javascript framework in case it seems easier to create one than take the time to learn one.
acheron 8mo ago
“I hate stuff” articles considered harmful.
- sodapopcan 8mo ago
  The internet is only for training data and praising any and all technological progress. If you don't like it, keep it to yourself. Self-expression has no place here!

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

quietsegfault 8mo ago

This is some Andy Rooney whine-fest. Who cares? Don’t do it. Don’t read it. You don’t have to announce your displeasure to the world.

webdood90 8mo ago
Oh, the irony.
acedTrex 8mo ago
> You don’t have to announce your displeasure to the world. If your spaces that were previously full of interesting things suddenly become deluged with uninteresting things then that is something to complain about.
- quietsegfault 8mo ago
  I’d find someplace else to spend my time if I no longer found someplace interesting,
krapp 8mo ago
Where do you think you are, right now?

getnormality 8mo ago

Blog posts by authors claiming AI has transformed them into godlike engines of productivity: 103728369129 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

candiddevmike 8mo ago
I feel like the things I've built have gotten better since ChatGPT, but I don't use LLMs, just iterating and realizing how naive/terrible my old code is. Maybe I should write a blog post on How I (Don't) Use LLMs for Coding.
snicky 8mo ago
I agree with you in general, but come on - learning is easier (unless you need to dive into highly specialized stuff), writing shorter chunks of code is faster, simple photo editing ("remove this and that from the background") doesn't need any skills now. Image generation isn't terribly too if you put some effort and don't stick with the same 3-4 drawing styles that all the cheapskate companies use.
marginalia_nu 8mo ago
To be fair there is this persistent paradox about programming methodologies is that no matter how much they seem to speed you up, or how effective they seem to be at reducing bugs, this doesn't seem to give you any material competitive advantage over companies going for the most conservative language and methodology choices.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
  It's almost like writing the code isn't the hard part.
tjr 8mo ago
I don't think it's quite at trillions to zero, but I do think the numbers are way, way out of balance so far. I'm still at the point where, if AI disappeared tomorrow, I would be, at worst, mildly inconvenienced.

jrob1 8mo ago

[dead]

theturtletalks 8mo ago

Posts like this really irk me. There were shitty side projects before AI (trust me, I made a couple), but those people knew how to code so somehow you were able to separate the noise and signal easily. Now, coding is no longer some crazy skill and anyone can make side projects. 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.

acedTrex 8mo ago
> 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 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.
- theturtletalks 8mo ago
  I just gave you two Vibetunnel and Openclaw. If you think those are worthless, I don't know what else to tell you.
  - acedTrex 8mo ago
    Yes both of those are beyond worthless and largely uninteresting. 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.

Mongoose 8mo ago

I think this is less about the projects themselves and more about distribution channels like HN and ProductHunt being dead. When the zone is flooded by vibecoded apps of all kinds, the "build it and they will come" era of getting your thing on a popular website's homepage is over. But other distribution strategies exist. You just have to be smarter about finding and getting in front of your core audience.

elliotbnvl 8mo ago
What kinds of other distribution strategies are you thinking of?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

r1chardnl 8mo ago

I love AI side projects, it allows for quick iteration and finishing on ideas that weren't feasible due to time constraints before. I just made one yesterday/today. I used Magit before and during the making of this I found out GitUI exists too but I think it's pretty powerful if the tool doesn't do exactly what you want and are opionated you can tailor your tools the way you want to. https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/tuide https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/tuide

socketcluster 8mo ago

AI exacerbates the slop it but it's an old trend. It boils down to "form over substance" which has been an issue in this industry since as far as I can remember; it just got worse and worse; especially over the past decade. 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.

peacebeard 8mo ago
Makes me think of how fancy framework and library websites have gotten. Surely, if the website has sumptuous animations, the code must be good.
- socketcluster 8mo ago
  Haha yeah, sometimes the contrast between appearance and code quality is shocking. Most extreme case I experienced was in blockchain sector; all the software was beautiful, nice UI, smooth transitions, pixel-perfect graphics... But under the bonnet, nobody could even fully explain how anything worked and it was a real tangled mess worth billions in market cap at the time.

alphazard 8mo ago

This is exposing a problem that already existed, AI is just throwing gas on the fire. Most engineers, including the readership of this site, have terrible taste in software. 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.

argee 8mo ago
> 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. You could criticize a Michelin inspector the same way. The poor bastards have to actually taste the dish and can't decide merit based on menu descriptions alone.

latchkey 8mo ago

"The worst thing about AI is that EVERYONE can build now." 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 https://oj-hn.com AI isn't going to take your job. People who know AI are.

up2isomorphism 8mo ago

AI is just inconveniently reveal the situation in the current society: don’t share your stuff, sell your stuff, because they end up sold somewhere the only difference is who sold it.

acedTrex 8mo ago

The influx if these sorts of posts have largely pushed me out of all my previous "programmer" online spots. 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.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago
Do you choose your food/car/housing/etc based on virtue signalling rather than utility as well?
- acedTrex 8mo ago
  Well i generally look for signals that a place I might eat at knows how to cook. If I walk in and I see rats on the floor and theres no kitchen I probably won't be interested. I apply the same logic to software.
- misnome 8mo ago
  Do you choose your software exclusively based on virtue signalling about which editor they used to write it in?

garyfirestorm 8mo ago

The author doesn’t pinpoint on why exactly he hates the AI side projects. Is it because they are low effort? But then he also says his past hobby projects could be done today in few hours with Claudecode.

j45 8mo ago

"If you don’t have something truly special.." 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.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago

If you're anti (AI) side projects, you're pro corporate feudalism.

vermilingua 8mo ago
Ah yes, because becoming totally reliant on a technology only made possible by weaponising the entire global economy looks nothing like corporate feudalism.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  Local models exist. Decouple your dislike of the companies from the technology they're trying to leverage.
  - xigoi 8mo ago
    Who trained those local models?
xigoi 8mo ago
I love to resist corporate feudalism by making my entire development process fully dependent on SaaS offerings by corporations like Anthropic and “Open”AI.

tamimio 8mo ago

The whole idea of side projects is learning something while building something unique, authentic, and cool. Since AI hype, most side projects -that get published- now are solely built to grab your money one way or another, whoever built it thinks that a 3hrs vibe coded slop will make him millionaire by the end of the year, so you end up with so much garbage. It’s why I only focus on hardware actual “hacking” projects, more fun to read and follow, and I know it wasn’t vibecoded too.

jpmitchell 8mo ago

For me at least, the advent of coding AI has just forced me to finally accept a truth that I probably always knew: that I'm an average (at best) software developer, and that I don't have anything truly unique or impressive to contribute to the field. My side projects were always just for myself. I love computing, and programming. If anything I'm better able to appreciate that now that I no longer care if my work has any impact.

chuckadams 8mo ago
That was both depressing and uplifting at the same time. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

dang 8mo ago

Edit: for me the most practical insight to come out of these threads, so far, is that Show HNs for generated repos/sites/projects would be more interesting if submitters were required to share the prompts, and not just the generated output. For such projects, the prompts are the real source, while the GH repo or generated artifact is actually the object code, and if that's all that's shared, it's less interesting and there's less to discuss. I think we're going to implement this unless we hear strong reasons not to. The idea has already come up a lot, so there's demand for it, and it seems clear why. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22share%20the%20prompt%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22share%20the%20prompts%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052452 --- original comment --- Recent and related: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (423 comments; subthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050421 is about what to do about it) AI makes you boring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076966 - Feb 2026 (367 comments)

tombert 8mo ago
It's not a terrible idea, but I'm not sure how that would work logistically. When I use Codex to do vibe coding stuff, I don't usually have one big prompt, I usually have it do small things piecemeal and I iterate with it later. Maybe I'm using it wrong but it tends to be more "conversational" and I think that would be harder to share, especially considering I'll do things over dozens of sessions. I suppose I could keep an archive of every session I've ever opened with Codex and share that, but thus far I haven't really done that. Granted, I don't really share my stuff with "Show HN".

frk_ai_8b2e 8mo ago

[flagged]

smitty1e 8mo ago

> Most of my past side projects would take me a few minutes or hours to build with Claude Code. Today, they’re not worth talking about. What, were the vibe coded in COBOL? That is: I don't understand why the use of Claude Code itself renders them unworthy of discussion.

erelong 8mo ago

I've been seeing a lot of posts like this and I don't tend to agree with the "anti-AI sentiment", but I think some of the problems identified might be like this: People may lack ideas of interesting projects to work on in the first place; so we need to think about how to help people to think of useful and interesting projects to work on Related to that idea, people may need to develop skills for building more "complex" ideas and we may need to think about how to make that more possible in the era of AI usage... even if some AI agent can take care of a technical side of things, it still takes a kind of "complexity of thought" to dream up more complicated / useful / interesting projects (I get the impression that there may be a need for some kind of training of the mind necessary for asking for an "automobile" rather than a "faster horse", by analogy... and that conception was often found through manually tinkering with intermediate devices like the bicycle. Hence an AI could "one shot" something interesting but what that thing is is limited by the imagination of the user, which may be limited by technical inability - in other words, the user may need to develop more technical ability in order to be able to dream up more interesting things to create, even if this "technical ability" is a more "skilled usage of AI tools") There needs to be some way to filter through "noise". That's not a new issue and... a lot of these questions or complaints often feel very "meta", as in - you could just ask AI how to make side projects more interesting or useful, or how to create good filters in the age of AI. In sports, there are hierarchical levels of competition - likewise here you might have forums that are more closed off to newcomers if you want to "gatekeep" things, and they have to compete in "local pools" of attention and if they "win" there, then their "qualified authority / leader" submits the project to a higher level, and so on. AI suggests using qualified curators to create newsfeeds or to act as filters of the "slop".

fud101 8mo ago

Why was this flagged? It's the best thing i've read here in a while.

nly 7mo ago

> Most of my past side projects would take me a few minutes or hours to build with Claude Code. Today, they’re not worth talking about. Chances are they were never worth talking about, but that doesn't mean the journey wasn't worth it.