No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.
The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
Did this happen?
Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.
The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.
Check out these heatmaps of the average/mean post score versus hour/day of post and you can see the trends: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=archive
How do you choose what to change? No interaction means no feedback.
Don’t overthink it. Don’t get obstructed by choice.
is this a violation of rules, and you simply take attention by spamming from those who follow rules?
I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.
I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.
I suspect for some of the non-engaging posts it's just throwing it out there, inexperience or part of the product hunt playbook
I don't think that's right, it's visible in both places, it's not "either or". Currently /new shows 5 "Show HN"s, which are also visible on /shownew.
> but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time, but best of all, the users who engage with you are in a different mindset for the "Show HN" posts.
On a normal submission, you get a whole range of top-level posts that are mostly tangible related to the topic at hand. It's basically a free-for-all, as long as it's at least a bit related to the submission's theme and topic.
On "Show HN" posts you get users who view it and comment about it as a way of providing feedback what they think of the idea itself, and its implementation. Completely different mood and input, that is much more about what you're actually sharing, than a submission.
That's my experience of "Show HN" at least, YMMV.
Yeah I corrected myself in another comment. But I find with submissions to `shownew` they don't enter `top` straight away, or at all.
> You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time
With a regular submission, it gets on `top` for at least a short period of time as well as `new`, whereas that doesn't seem to always be the case for a Show HN. And certainly not in my case. That said, many Show HNs do make it to top with less votes than the tiny few I got organically, so maybe I tripped some HN's filters? Or maybe it was bad timing? But if I post again, it'll be without the Show HN.
It all depends on your goals but I've had similar thoughts and I decided I'm just making opinionated tool for myself that I'm perfectly fine with never making public. Since deciding on such path I think I actually moved closer to something that may be useful to others (but I'm still staying on that path for now).
I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed (testing along all those which does not quite fit, which I did), than creating a version custom tailored for myself. It's... interesting times.
Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries. For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.
For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)
Right here. The problem is right here.
Unfortunately, the internet is a race to the bottom. You need to hustle (euphemism for "shamelessly spam") for attention.
I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).
Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise. But we should be aware of what we're giving up when we overall tend to behave in such a way, even if it's the inevitable outcome.
why even post that?
The fact that it’s all genAI stuff puts me off, but that might not be the same for everyone.
I think crucially, if I wanted to do this kind of challenge, I would have a better experience just using an LLM chat directly, like “Generate me an image, then judge my description of it in <language>, and give me useful language learning hints according to my level of <level>”
Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.
> using AI that people are fatigued from it
I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.
I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it
All of the fun has been sucked out of it.
Like, If we are using AI to build yet another next.js App, then perhaps its me but I personally find it doesn't satisfy my curiosity.
I want to see projects be written in niche languages and new languages and AI can be perfect for that. See which language you like the most and each language/idea has their own tradeoffs but just follow what you want and now you are less likely to be stuck.
Of course though sometimes I create a python script first (I recently made a code where your png's/jpg's can automatically be updated in a slideshow like thing which I built with a custom youtube screenshot and I watched some lectures, pressed shift A and it can now have slides and I compile them to pdf and built another where I can have a pdf and then I can have a laser tool on pdf's because I love to study with notes where I can draw random things on page like whiteboard and erase them without hurting the text below for understanding._
I think converted that python tkinkter gui to fyne golang out of curiosity yesterday and I feel both tools are great fwiw
I think my point here is I'd much rather be willing to see some niche projects for ourselves and have it first meaningfully improve our lives & just experiment. I don't know not much for monetary gains but out of curiosity and seeing how far you can and cannot go.
Just build things you like/want to exist in any way that you like till AI's so damn subsidized (I don't use any agents, just claude web's free version or aistudio for free, my projects are usually around 600-700locs so I can ask it to regenerate it completely and I am fine with much of it, Perhaps I just follow KISS to its core)
You would find it funny but the problem's not in code generation but dependency management etc. atleast to me which is why I love uv scripts a lot but sometimes especially chatgpt doesn't know about uv script feature or hallucinates it hard on their web version so If I am building python applets I would paste uv script's complete docs to the LLM website I would be using.
Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point.
>The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion.
They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.)
Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.
Some people do want their food to be made by a chef sometimes even in front of them explaining them everything and the journey to them makes it worth it
For some people, it can be that the food that they buy from a shop nearby in front of them is good
For some, they want the cooking to be done out of their visible range and just want the food served
And the last categories probably the ones who will go to supermarkets to get some chips with 3 months expiry date created in a large factory
Hackernews to me feels like its 1 & 2 for me. What you describe as birdwatching is much rather only 1st category to me.
Like, in the 1st category people want to eat the special dish created by the trials of countless nights and passion
On the 2nd category, you are still witnessing a person but they are probably following a much more experience and in the start by say following tutorials or watching recipes. But they are much more democratized
I don't know, I don't go in hotels that much so I don't know the 1st part and how possible it is but I do go to 2nd category and I go around my local shops and see people make french fries and chat with them and ask how long have they been here and making french fries etc., they are willing to tell you everything.
I do feel like "AI slop" is kind of the 2nd category because like I am not only just interested in whether or not this recipe's entirely unique but I am rather interested in everything around it, what infrastructure choices they make and what coding tech stack they used & are they passionate about the project or what did they end up creating the prototype for.
the 3rd part is what I despise where think burger king or mcdonald etc. where the recipes come from franchise and everything comes and the person just serves you. All decisions are bland (think yet another nextjs app).
I don't think much of us want HN to be a supermarket or another macD but do we want this to be a cooking show where chefs build the whole recipes to serve us or do we want it to be a lot of neighbourly shops who have friendly people working who will chat with us and we can eat the french fries they make :)
(I love the french fries my neighbourhood makes, they are really spicy combine them with spring rolls and some drink or a good yogurt and it feels soo good lol, plus all of this costs less a 1$ or 2$ at most 3$ where I live, I can go and eat without worrying at all about the cost of eating outside usually if picked from the right shops)
Although I have never had the opportunity of seeing a chef cook his own dish in such sense but I can imagine that its great & I would like them as well but to me hackiness includes both, them hacking around with recipes to build something nice and the other hacking around with infrastructure like what logo and how close they are to me and even things like pricing imo.
I consider the latter to be like much more reachable than the former and to me I don't know how to explain but the idea of hackiness isn't just some clean final product, its also like just building something and gluing things and its messy too. And I love both of them both clean and messy hacking, I just want to know how much an human has been in the loop, where'd they get the idea and what they implemented in etc.
I don't know I live in a small city connected to a large city and I feel like I enjoy much more the messy aspects whereas people from large cities are much more likely to want to go to a large hotel for a dine or have a more artisanal taste.
So I have seen my fair share of people who want both.
Right now, I feel like it honestly depends on how large or small community you feel HN is.
If you consider HN to be too large aka you find it less likely to trust projects who get to here in the first place, you would want an artisanal person to build things for hand for you to enjoy
But if you consider HN to be small and there is just this idea of treating each person more individually and just this unwritten rule of law which generates more trust and faith in trying out new options even if they are hacky as long as I can sort of trust them decently and they are still involved in the loop and not completely 100% detached unlike say a large conglomerate franchise imo
Honestly I want HN to be a small place and not a large place but I feel like even HN is a large place for me but the problem with completely small places or building one's own is that you don't get visitors at all. We probably need something in between HN and no social media promotions (only via word of mouth) imo.
I have been trying to replace HN for quite a while now for something more nicher but still well connected place as well. Honestly have thought multiple times to create an HN alternative with the same UI and everything and same rules but just smaller and probably federated (ironically Gonna have it be vibe coded in single main.go golang :) hosting on a cheap recurring deal netcup server I got) but moderation of >0 people is hard and getting >0 people interested in a new website is hard as well which is precisely what the main post is about.
Honestly, I used to be one of them. I recently saw a great library (atcute) that changed my opinion. I think most AI sceptics haven't had this experience. They saw AI slops and set their opinion: AI-generated codes are bad. I can't really blame them, though, because there are so many of AI slops.
> anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back.
It's true. However, I think people who create AI slops are worse than those who don't use it. They are diligently making this world a worse place.
More often than not that is the case.
If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.
That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.
So what are you really sharing at that point?
Noise.
"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.
There was no warning / taster of this. AI just dialed up to 11 real quick.
Seems like there should be a restriction on greenies (from posting) until they've lurked more, here.
Thus the rise of the influencer economy. What better way is there to learn about something than from somebody you trust?
However bad thing are or will be, trusting "influencers" is the last thing you should do.
AI may be the largest bubble yet in history, and it has the ability to sustain itself directly via online hype-bots.
tulips can't specifically target all of your replies and explain why you're a cunt and should buy more
the bubble might be a thing of concern, but the phenomenon behind it is much bigger then most can comprehend. even among hackers, we see a very naive and superficial understanding. most are still thinking in the current framework of the game while the game fundamentally changed. the lemon market will persist regardless of an imminent burst!
even if the average tone changes, the fabrics of this game is forever eroded. hacker news current structure makes no sense when consensus can be fabricated (automated karma farming + targeted "collective action" is cheap, people have already realized this and soon will become intolerant). showing a project means nothing, showing the equivalent of a prompt has negative value. people will still urge for care and passion, discovery, interesting ideas. people will urge for a way to separate a vibed nothing-project, valued at 25 Claude sonnet prompts, in response to the latest Simon wilinson new hot take in 35 minutes. people will want a way to separate a good faith idea cultivated with passion from a "look what I did to promote myself while spending 75 cents" idea.
AI DOS practically. Unfortunate for those that have curious projects that end up drowning in slop.
That being said, I sometimes write projects with AI to get feedback fast and prototyping for my own personal use cases and share it here sometimes
But since the community doesn't show support in some cases, I move on with anything new which catches my curiosity/troubles me and build it again
I open source most of the stuff but I know that its probably gonna get lost in a sea of AI slop & mine might not be better (I just ask LLM bots to create a simple main.go file to solve X and usually much of my simple projects end up being around 600 loc)
I do feel like personal computing or making projects in domains you aren't familiar in to prototype just out of curiosity/your own pragramatic use case is probably what I feel like but long term, there should be a focus on actually transitioning from AI slop to something real if anyone plans to monetize something imo
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish
Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code
Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)
Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?
Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.
You can look down the list of most highly-ever upvoted Show HNs here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.
There are likely to be a number of possible explanations for this that offset the lower average score. The obvious one is that the filtering effect of the front page with a higher amount of content. Perhaps we are also seeing higher standards—a project that used to take 6 weeks and a ton of conviction now wraps up in a few hours, and people are resetting their expectations.
The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README.
Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works.
[1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
It's not uncommon to see people showing off their website traffic graph on Twitter after hitting HN. You can also find people asking for advice on how to use HN to market their shitty SaaS on places like reddit.
Another kind of marketing you see quite often is people replying with a post that starts off reasonable, until the third paragraph where the commentator says "this is why we built blah" and makes you feel you are staring at an half eaten Apple with half a worm in it.
a. this week, someone teaching how to launch a language followed by a few tries (git repository created few hours before I saw it)
b. in this thread
IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit.
Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.
Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/
> Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders).
Last visual in the following section: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-int...
It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?
I’m not even remotely equipped to judge the veracity of your work, but they are, and that you care at all is, like, 0.000001%. Take the plunge and write them a note (or simply link them your comment thread here with a one sentence FYI email!). It’ll be fine :)
why would it be different here?
the struggle is to build consensus in an open and democratic forum and we've solved that problem via LLMs.
How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable.
You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).
I recently saw a Show HN [1] that had no link to anywhere, but it did have a project name. It currently has 13 points.
[removed]
It's weird because it's named similar to a popular Android logging library: https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber
Lesson learned. Extension uninstalled. Sorry for the noise.
Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
Months ago, I didn't refrain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780249
the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first. using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived. it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020.
if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately.
nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.
Rotten lemons all the way down.
Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.