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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
AI isn't going to take your job. People who know AI are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
32 comments
[ 0.83 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] threadSix 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
But other distribution strategies exist. You just have to be smarter about finding and getting in front of your core audience.
https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/tuide
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.
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.
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
AI isn't going to take your job. People who know AI are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077840
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050590
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47077555
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061571
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058187
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052452
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Recent and related:
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (423 comments; subthread 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 - Feb 2026 (367 comments)
Terrible for career.
It's like complaining that power tools are bad because they promote industrialised products over hand made detailed work.