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Ask HN: Why people keep posting AI-generated projects around the Internet?

3 points by Eliah_Lakhin ↗ HN
Programming-related subreddits and other media platforms are current flooded by the waterfall of AI-generated projects. A typical post contains a problem description and the link to GitHub repo created just recently with sustainable amount of generated code in it. With the invite to review it, and to give a community feedback.

The quality of the projects vary, but very often these are codebases generated in a few days solely by the AI-agentic systems with little to no human review and prior history of development and recognition.

I'm asking this question not out of critiques. I genuinely don't understand motivation and the roots of this phenomena.

Asking for the professional code review seems to be pointless for the publisher. Many of them didn't have prior experience in the programming language in which the code has been generated. Furthermore, the code is seemingly not interested for the publisher either. It does not look to me as a good start for community-driven (F)OSS project anyway.

Another motivation that I can imaging is seeking for public recognition. But considering the amount of postings, I think it's highly unlikely in the current situation even for the genuinely high-effort works.

I can also assume that some are seeking for the self promotion by faking professional skills with AI assistance. That might be true for some, but the majority don't hide the fact that the presented code has been generated. It's unlikely the main motivation too.

So, I completely lost in understanding on what's going on, and what steams this never-stopping process. At a first glance the author doesn't gain anything in return, and I don't understand what they are seeking for.

13 comments

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colesantiago
Because the field of software is destroyed and full of slop by making it more and more and more accessible to more people.

This isn't inherently bad but it is much harder to see what is worth paying attention to.

We have done this to ourselves (as software engineers and those who work with code) because of FOSS.

The value of software completely has gone to zero.

Eliah_Lakhin
That might be an issue for the software dev in general, I fully agree with you here, but my question was not about it. I don't understand the motivation for publishers of those projects. They literally don't gain anything positive in return by announcing the project. Sometimes the community pushed back, but more often just ignores the posting as spam.
runningmike
There is no such thing as “the community” . There are people who like,dislike, use or neglect what you publish online. If you want positive feedback in public of published Foss software you will be disappointed very fast. Sharing is imho mostly not done for anonymous people, but for friends, colleagues or anyone in the universe who might benefit from the Foss software or idea!
NishanStepak
What is going on is you get a lot of people who pretend or actually have domain expertise who want to make something. The problem is that there is no real guarantee of actually having the expertise or taking the time to make something that is decent. Thus you get someone who either knows a lot about wine for example or has a hobby about wine who wants to make a wine site. They then try to make a wine site and depending on their motivation make something terrible or if they are obsessed something which is somewhat decent after a lot of effort. The other problem is that AI is very hard to make anything above B grade material. You need a technical person to help to make a commercial grade site. Thus you get a lot of mediocre sites, some truly awful sites, and a few slightly above average sites. The other thing that goes with this is that there is no control over the veracity, accuracy, normalcy, or radicalness of the sites being created. It is turly anything goes.
Eliah_Lakhin
I'm not fully confident that they truly want to show what they are interested in, even if they don't have deep expertise in it. My feeling is that there is a notable portion of projects being the result of prompting a chat-bot for ideas to develop. ChatGPT, what I can do? Make a website about wine. :)
jasondigitized
Anyone with an IQ over 110 can make a commercial grade grade site these days if they are generally curious and can ask good questions. Opus 5.5 + Cloudflare + Supabase/Neon/etc. will get you to thousands of users no problem. By the time enterprise scale becomes a problem, Opus 6.5 will solve it.
spottedmarley
The only problem I see is with people who don't understand why other people do things they don't understand. AI is changing everything, including how, what and why people share the things they generate using AI. It's foolish to think that, moving forward, anything will make sense seen through the lens of what was in the past. The landscape is changing and many people react by asking 'Why is this happening??'. It's happening because everything has changed and nothing will ever be the same again. You are experiencing paradigm turbulence. Measuring the new state of things against the old rubric.
runningmike
It’s fun to share what you create. A FOSS project enables use, reuse and make it better. Even from scratch again. I love seeing new nice Foss projects that work. It sometimes gives some inspiration and input for renewed thinking.
krapp
AI generated code isn't FOSS. No human created anything, no human understands the code (because no human wrote it,) and no human will learn from or edit the code, or even bother reading it. It will only ever be interacted with indirectly through a closed-source and proprietary code generating service, and actual human knowledge and experience will be lost. This is antithetical to everything FOSS stands for.
Eliah_Lakhin
I want to add that AI-generated code isn't FOSS because it's not a _source_ code at first place. This is a generated code. All other reasons, in my opinion, are secondary and may change over time.

Publishing generated code is not unique for AI. For example, it's a common practice to generate a parser using YACC from source grammar files, and then publishing both. The main thing here is that no one claims that this code is a "source code", no one saying that it has been written by someone. It is perfectly fine to put a comment directly in the file's text that it has been generated by YACC.

If people would be more accurate on this matter, and wouldn't publish generated code alongside with OSS projects, a notable part of the problems we discuss today wouldn't exist.

tilemarch
AI enables people to create the things they couldn't before, and they want to share their creations with the world. It's human nature and I think you're looking to deep for bad intentions around self promotion etc. So maybe you don't appreciate all that is being created.. doesn't mean there is some nefarious thing behind the projects.