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.
The bird frame project has all the signatures of something developed with thought, care and effort put behind it, and the fact that it involves physical hardware is part of that. There's a reason it reached the front page.
My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subscription, and we should not pretend that software developed in 2026 is the same as software developed in 2021. Everything has changed, including incentives to post, and that has changed the level of attention I can devote to that category of HN post.
In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.
And you still seem to be exaggerating - I suspect that the number of projects that can be recreated easily is much lower than 90%.
And you sound extremely angry about it. Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
And... as a final point - I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
> In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.
My apologies, I assumed that it was implied that I was speaking generally. I will try to be clearer going forward.
I stand by my 90% figure based on what I observe from the full corpus of daily "Show HN" submissions.
> And you sound extremely angry about it.
I can't even begin to imagine what part of my very plainly written comments are communicating "extreme anger" but I guess it's difficult to communicate tone online!
> I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
It depends on what you mean by "terribly difficult".
To provide some clarity on my view:
Just because something can be recreated easily does not automatically make it terrible or bad, but the fact that we can now generate software as easily as we generate a bowel movement (to borrow from my previous comment) means the bar for quality and attention has changed.
> Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
