Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now
orangecrumbs.com73 points by oyster143 19 hours ago
73 points by oyster143 19 hours ago
Remember that "Where's the Shovelware?"¹ post?
¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
I think one look at the flood of vibe-coded projects (like decomps, mods, etc) hitting the retrogaming scene now proves this article wrong already. You literally see a major project blow up in one day, then immediately get 'busted' for AI.
And it's almost certainly hitting other fields too. Games on Steam, mobile apps, websites and web apps, etc.
Busted? I’d think that AI would be a godsend for retro computing, a field always starved for programmer support especially in emulating obscure stuff.
People do it for the pleasure of figuring out obscure stuff. The point is dealing with that old unsupported tech as much as the games themselves.
There's a lot of hatred for AI in these communities, to the point half of Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit goes ballistic when they learn the developer used Claude or Codex at some point. Media outlets and influencers are doing the same thing too.
Yes I’ve seen this. The hatred is easily as unhinged as some of the stuff from the “AI will soon learn to fold space and access infinite energy from the zero point after it recursively becomes god” delusional AI utopia crowd, or the “nuke data centers” crowd.
AI seems to break a lot of peoples’ brains. It’s like it totally bypasses nuanced thinking and understanding and normal curiosity and goes straight to some kind of overflow state.
The hatred stems from retrocomputing enthusiasts wanting an escape from modern computing. When someone's having fun with their retrocomputing hobby, they don't want what they see as the worst part of modern computing playing any role in that hobby. They're trying to get away from the hype, but it's inescapable.
Oh yes, first thing that sprung to mind when I started to see games being made with Ai on itch and then steam and of course the posts showing up daily on certain subreddits.
A lot of friends who were not computer illiterate but also definitely not coders are now publishing websites regularly with whatever comes to their mind at the time.
Quality could be questionable but quantity-wise I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth.
Yeah, I think the ideal AI user for coding is the one who is not so ignorant that they can't even explain what they want done, but not so knowledgeable that they could simply do it themselves. It's like a crutch: if you don't have legs it's completely useless, but it can let you hobble around if yours don't work perfectly, and if they do work then it's also pretty much useless.
My wife plays the web games from the New York Times.
There was one she liked but she wanted to change the rules.
Of course it took Claude Code about 10 minutes to do it, and she was delighted.
Is it just my impression, or programming language posts took a hit. I think I don't see them as often as before.
Most everything took a hit. Roughly half of the front-page content throughout the day is AI press releases, AI product marketing, vibecoded projects, and essays about AI. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but there's not much room left for anything else.
not just those but programming stuff in general I feel like? except for maybe some mini projects which again are kinda Show HN..
Instead we get anthropic and openai system status pages or marketing posts constantly.
I don't even feel the effect as much because my brain filters these posts out nowadays, like ads. I have essentially zero interest in clicking on Show HN posts anymore.
I feel like there was an attached covenant with the "Show HN" concept that implied someone had likely put some level of painstaking craft and creativity into whatever their project was. It felt like a reasonable bargain to give your own time to looking at the post and seeing what they had spent time and effort in creating.
I'm struggling to see what the point is to looking at Show HN projects these days. It's like inviting your family in to see your latest bowel movement before the toilet gets flushed.
Did you see the project that displays the birds it's heard onto an e-paper display that looks like a print?
It was pretty cool. Nothing at all like a bowel movement.
Exactly how I felt reading this comment. This site is dead, no point anymore.
There’s more noise, but also more signal.
I’ll take it.
Let the AI renaissance begin!
If only the AI renaissance didn't mean a dark age for everything else...
Yeah. But I'd argue that it really isn't possible to know what is going to happen.
But yeah. I'm trying to focus on the positive aspects. Because what else can you do?
I, for one, am fine with witnessing what changes ´neocoding´ will bring us.
Yes - I am delighted with what I can now do.
Simultaneously I am terrified of what others will be able to do.