Ask HN: Blog with no marketing effort – what's the likely amount of traffic?

Yes.

You'd have to do a little promotion to get that level of traffic. Drop links where you think interested people might see them, find excuses to link your posts where they answer someones question, etc. Post links to your own social media, "i write a thing."

The "base load" traffic of bots and crawlers and script probes will be 10x "real" traffic, and it may be hard to see that people are visiting your site.

If all you do is push it onto google index and no other marketing, it will take 1 or 2 years to get to 10 people a day. My blog has been going for more than 10 years and gets about 10 people a day at least consistently. There are a few pages that rank very well on the search engine and drive 99% of the traffic. Its seems that they value being the first one to write about something ALOT as that is the only thing I can see special about those high traffic pages. pretty much everything else gets zero.

First one in terms of I wrote about a very common error on K8s but I just happened to be using a bleeding edge version so I was the first to write about that specific error.

First one to write about an AWS feature because I found it in API by chance and it became GA weeks later (I guess they were waiting for the initial roll out to complete before posting Geoff's blog).

no, it's pretty much zero. But you will get attention from a lots of bots.