Ask HN: Why is everyone here so AI-hyped?

Personally-speaking, there aren't that many different consumer technologies or tech applications over the past 2+ decades that truly gave me an 'aha' moment. The Palm Pilot, Google Maps on an early Android phone come to mind.

When I began playing around with LLMs, I had my initial aha moment. It was far above either of those for me. So, I think that collective aha moment we've been having the last few years (still) drives a lot of the excitement/hype.

If you view 'hype around [x]' as essentially a probability ranking problem, that is, whatever is most likely to give you your next aha moment generates the most hype, at any point in time. There's a decay element, too, if the reality doesn't match the expectations, then other technologies are viewed as more likely to produce that next big aha moment.

But for now I think this characterizes AI today more than other technologies.

I don’t think you’re missing anything. The hype cycle is real.

But I also don’t think the signal is zero. It’s just buried under capital and compute flexing.

The pattern I see isn’t AI is revolutionary. It’s: 1) The easy wins are done. 2) The marginal gains are getting expensive. 3) The distribution layer is shifting faster than the capability layer.

Most new model releases aren’t unlocking fundamentally new workflows. They’re compressing friction in workflows that already work. That’s useful, but not narrative-worthy.

The real shift isn’t GPT-5.3 vs GPT-5.2.

It’s: - AI replacing search as the interface layer. - AI compressing junior-level execution work. - AI reshaping how products are discovered (AI Overviews, summaries, agents).

That doesn’t make MoltBook any less absurd. Burning compute on bots talking to bots is peak theater.

But dismissing everything because of the theater might be like dismissing the internet because of Pets.com.

We may be at peak hype, but that doesn’t mean the substrate shift isn’t real.

The question isn’t, is AI overhyped? It’s, where is durable value forming?

That’s harder, and way less viral, to answer.

AI - in this case, LLMs and their ecosystem - is an incredibly impactful technology. I would put it up with:

- the printing press

- radio

- tv

- personal computers

- internet

in terms of important contributors to human civilization. We live in the information age, and all of these are significant advances in information.

The printing press allowed small organizations to create written information. It de-centralized the power of the written text and encouraged the rapid growth of literacy.

Radio allowed humans to communicate quickly across long distances

TV allowed humans to communicate visually across long distances - what we see is very important to the way we process information

PCs allowed for digitizing of information - made it denser, more efficient, easier to store and generate larger datasets

The internet is a way to transfer large amounts of this complex digital information even more quickly across large distances

AI is the ability to process this giant lake of digital information we've made for ourselves. We can no longer handle all the information that we create. We need automated ways to do it. LLMs, which translate information to text, is a way for humans to parse giant datasets in our native tongue. It's massive.

By "here", certainly you don't mean HN? HN feels muted and honestly, I haven't been on here because it's quite stale by the time it gets here, and people have just been vocal about not getting it.

> AI.com was sold for $70M

This news is everywhere elsewhere, and it's still going on in my WhatsApp groups. I can't even find the active HN thread. This was more because people were surprised about the actual owner of ai.com which everyone assumed was OpenAI or Sam Altman or something.

> OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot

This has been everywhere elsewhere too, and Clawdbot hit HN a few days late, after people have already set up videos on it. It's a security hole, but it's the first legitimately good automation tool we've had from AI. Moltbook is more fascination with moltbot+MCPs rather than something interesting in itself - it meant you had a tool that could use the internet from a CLI and such. It's a bit like the Wright Brothers' plane - nobody expects to fly to Japan on it, but it meant flight was possible.

> GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 2.6 were released

I think the only real news was Opus 4.6. I love it. It's like a PB&J sandwich. It's cheap. It's the combination of technology people take for granted. It's also something usable in daily life.

Opus 4.6 had better parallel command use - meaning it would search for all the files at once instead of 1 at a time. And it was better at going deeper. It helped me pin a bug by going into Android source code and finding the exact line causing a bug, then all the functions that were called by this bug. Most people don't need to look at the source code of the thing they built something on top of, and the people who are vibe coding don't care much for code. Nobody benchmarks how crunchy the peanut butter is.

gpt-5.3-codex benchmarked better, but I'm not seeing this translating to useful code. It failed with the first few requests I gave it. Maybe it's just me and my repo.

You are selection biasing towards the most extreme cases of AI absurdity.

> GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 2.6 were released. Reviewers note they're struggling to find tasks the previous versions couldn't handle. The improvements are incremental at best.

I have not seen any claims of this other than Opus 4.6 being weirdly token-hungry.

Most engineers I know are now picking off backlog items and tech debt //TODOs dating back several years.

Things that I had labelled "too hard, pain in the ass" I'm now finishing in half an hour or so with proper tests and everything.

It's an exciting time to be a product engineer IMO.

from a psychological stand point it is to do with Introjection.

Introjection occurs when a person unconsciously adopts the ideas, attitudes, or behaviors of another person or group, often an authority figure.

like someone with high status in the world of Big Tech. The CEO's we see selling their bullshit every day

The influencers, boosters and shills are perfectly places to create this type of environment.

The more you promote a product, the more likely people will introject that product even if it does not work work.

Imagine how a child learns the rules of life from parents.

These are introjected by the child without question or any consideration whether the rules are right or wrong, the child just takes it all in to become part of them

They aren’t so hyped, HN is very divided. Many think it’s the next best thing, many others think it’s terrible and sloppy, and others are in between.

Relative to non-HN users, I find they’re a lot more opinionated and less bull-ish than non-tech folks I’ve discussed it with.

Hyped because I chose to pursue an MFA and dabble in CS on the side instead of getting a CS degree and dabbling in art on the side. The human subjective experience, knowing how to properly communicate it will be a future source of meaning for people who have honed the skill, and the imperfect but passable AI programming infrastructure will help support the bones of the operation

Hype combined with a community of excited engineers is a great innovator. People are hyped about these new tools and its popularity is pushing them to create new projects, discover new uses, solve challenges that before were unattainable and in general push the frontier forward. Hype is almost a prerequisite to this.

By the way, good job at pointing out some low hanging fruit for your example cases.

The human brain seeks novelty and excitement. It’s why new projects are always exciting, new companies to join etc. This obviously extends to most trends. Cloud, crypto, AI. Obviously, there’s some utility(debatably with crypto), but overall it’s moreso that new stuff is just more fun and interesting

It's the 2026 version of this https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

HN tends to amplify tools that change leverage. AI feels like a multiplier, so the hype follows. The real question is which parts of it remain useful once the novelty fades.

Because coding is dead. Coding models are very good for most tasks. If you're building a new kernel then AI will probably only help partially, but for most coders out there, AI just replaces them, or at least makes 1 coder like 5 coders.

The high-tech bubble is going to burst, and only the best will be in it.

For what will happen next, no one knows. My guess is: more people will drift away from technology seeking for human contact as AI internet control is escalating; Dead internet theory will become fully true; The internet addicts will become more addicted and the less addicted will become less. Obviously, it's just a guess, and probably a wrong one statistically, but it's not even the worst case.

So you ask why everyone are so AI-hyped? Because for many, coding is their job, and it's taking their job now.

The AI hype, like everything else in software, falls into one of two camps:

1. People that can’t do more than follow trends

2. Young people trying to predict their own future

Everything else is the silent majority.

Some are placing their bets and hoping to win big, some are just having fun and exploring the new technology and most are probably like me and have found those few areas that the technology works for them and ignores everything else. It is a fairly amazing technology, as a humanities sort that has no clue when it comes to programming but also has some things I want to make, LLMs are invaluable and not in the sense that they can write them for me—I am not capable enough in programming to get them to do what I want—but in the sense they can present things in a way a humanities sort can understand so I can write those programs I want.

A recent prompt of mine:

>Write a dialogue where H.P. Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace are tasked with developing a DSL for audio synthesis and composition, they are trying to sell each other on their preferred language, Lovecraft wants rust, Wallace Zig. Their discussion should be deeper than just the talking points and include code examples. Thomas Pynchon is also there, he is a junior dev and enamored with C, he occasionally interjects into the discussion and generally fails to follow the discussion but somehow manages to make salient points; Lovecraft never address Pynchon or C but alludes to the horror, Wallace tries to include and encourage Pynchon but mostly ignores him.

I pretty much knew how ChatGPT would use each of them; Lovecraft would view everything other than rust as some lurking unnameable horror, Pynchon would seem random and nonsensical, and Wallace would vainly attempt to explore all options without weighing in, and that is exactly what happened. Being able to get this sort of information within contexts I understand is amazing, 15 or 20 minutes later I had more direction than I ever had before and it answered a dozen or so language agnostic questions I had regarding implementing such a DSL which is really what I was after. And it gave me some good laughs.

A year ago I thought these projects would never move beyond being ideas, when ever I tried to get help from people they just told me what I was doing wrong and tried to send me down the path of their ideals, how they think things should be done, which was probably more a failure on my part than theirs with my being a humanities sort and incompetent programmer. LLMs have infinite patience and time, those people who I sought help from in the past were not completely wrong but they did try to lead me down a wrong path for what ever reason, partially because they don't have infinite time and patience but also because they thought they were right.

Henry James has been walking me through the PureData source code this past week.

Everyone is not hyping AI/LLM, that is just the bias of tech communities and the like, most of us see it about the same as we see a blender or toaster. Can't remember the last time AI/LLMs came up in general conversation for me.

maybe people are not hyped, just benefitting from it

The bubble framing misses something: the people who are "hyped" are often the ones shipping things that actually work now. Not hypothetically — right now.

I build tools for freelancers and indie makers. The shift in the last year has been real. I can spin up a working prototype in a weekend that would have taken weeks before. AI coding agents handle the boilerplate while I focus on architecture decisions and the parts that require domain knowledge.

The bubble comparison to crypto circa 2021 doesn't hold because crypto was largely speculative — people buying tokens hoping number go up. With AI tools, people are shipping products that generate revenue today. The value creation is immediate and measurable.

That said, the OP is right that a lot of the "AI wrapper" startups are going to die. The moat for most of them is nonexistent. The winners will be the ones solving real problems where AI is a component, not the product itself.