Because we are a forum of craftspeople. The Show HN system is a good faith system for showing something that you built and can presumably engage with us about what you built.
We want to engage with the person who engineered the thing, not someone who is just going to pipe our feedback into an LLM and see what pops out.
Just like I'd consider it deceptive if it turned out that HN populated the comments with an LLM. I want to engage with humans using their own brain.
That said, I would also consider it acceptable if you mentioned that your Show HN was vibe-coded if it were. But consider the vibe shift (pun) that would happen. We'd be curious about your vibe-code workflow and the experience of vibe-coding it if it was impressive, not necessarily curious about the thing the LLM built because that part isn't necessarily interesting anymore.
Finally, it's inevitable that these lines will quickly blur over time as AI becomes increasingly centerpiece in our lives. But in this transitionary phase so far, it kinda feels like you've been actually playing on a bot server in Quake 3 when you catch yourself admiring something that you thought the OP made: it's not rewarding to realize you're just stomping bots that you thought were human.
This may not be entirely the right metaphor but I kinda see it as the difference between fast food, a top rated restaurant, and home made cooking —with fast food being AI.
Generic, does the job, not the highest quality, bleak, fast repetitious output
Because we are a forum of craftspeople. The Show HN system is a good faith system for showing something that you built and can presumably engage with us about what you built.
We want to engage with the person who engineered the thing, not someone who is just going to pipe our feedback into an LLM and see what pops out.
Just like I'd consider it deceptive if it turned out that HN populated the comments with an LLM. I want to engage with humans using their own brain.
That said, I would also consider it acceptable if you mentioned that your Show HN was vibe-coded if it were. But consider the vibe shift (pun) that would happen. We'd be curious about your vibe-code workflow and the experience of vibe-coding it if it was impressive, not necessarily curious about the thing the LLM built because that part isn't necessarily interesting anymore.
Finally, it's inevitable that these lines will quickly blur over time as AI becomes increasingly centerpiece in our lives. But in this transitionary phase so far, it kinda feels like you've been actually playing on a bot server in Quake 3 when you catch yourself admiring something that you thought the OP made: it's not rewarding to realize you're just stomping bots that you thought were human.
This may not be entirely the right metaphor but I kinda see it as the difference between fast food, a top rated restaurant, and home made cooking —with fast food being AI.
Generic, does the job, not the highest quality, bleak, fast repetitious output
While I agree, because I like writing code, I do wonder if this is how assembly writers felt when automated compilation started to take off.
>not the highest quality
I bet AI writes better code than 80% of developers out there.
But all developers think they are in the 20%.
It literally doesn't matter, if your product sucks. Only end result for the user matters.
It matters to me. If it doesn't matter to you? That's fine and you are fully entitled to that view.
Asking tech people not to care more about the software they use than the average person seems pointless though.