Comment by JohnMakin
5 days ago
> The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had
Honestly, I agree, but the rash of "check out my vibe coded solution for perceived $problem I have no expertise in whatever and built in an afternoon" and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this" is kind of schadenfreude, but I feel guilty a little for enjoying it.
From what I can tell, domain experts mostly don't directly respond like that. They just make separate meta-level commentaries about Show HN getting flooded. Most submissions get little or no response.
I agree with this, and personally I don't even go to the comment section of those posts. What's the point? There is nothing to learn and no one willing to learn anything.
>and the flurry of domain experts responding like "wtf, no one needs this"
People have been saying this about Show HNs for time eternal. There have been an insane number of poorly thought out, poorly considered, often Get-Rich-Quick type of creations, long before AI. Things where the submitter clearly doesn't understand the industry they're targeting, doesn't provide any sort of solution, etc. Really strange if people actually think this is a new phenomenon.
Indeed, a recent video that I rather loved touches on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg
Its subject is "Everything was Already AI", the point being that everyone is quantizing and simplifying and reflecting everyone else and the consensus, in such a fashion that people acting like AI ruined everything...yeah, it was already ruined. We already have furry artists drawing furry art just like countless other furry artists, declaring it an outrage that someone used AI to draw furry art, and so on. As the video covers, the whole idea of genres is basically people just cloning each other.
Be right back, going to put on a cowboy hat and denim and sing in a drawl about pickups and exes.
While I agree with your overall point, I think art is quite different.
I don't personally consume furry art but I am a fan of Studio Ghibli and the anime medium in general. And even within that medium, certain artists have a very different style than others. I can usually tell Makoto Shinkai's style vs Hayao Miyazaki's style vs Akira Toriyama's style. I don't think any of them ever claimed to have copied each other. But they have all worked thousands of hours to perfect their craft.
With AI, you get people like me, who can't draw stick figures, tell Chatgpt or nano banana to make an anime version of themselves and then voilà! You get something that could probably pass as Miyazaki's in a minute.
No artist has a claim or monopoly on a genre, but they do have a claim on their own art style. With AI being trained on artists' styles, the artists whose works literally trained the AIs are now being inundated with low effort copycats of their creations.
That being said, I wrote in another thread comment that AI is an accelerator of what already exists. In a codebase, if you have crappy code patterns, AI will just accelerate that.
In business, like you said, people who had crappy ideas have always been able to submit crappy business ideas. Only a few of them actually tried to execute on them. With AI, more of them can execute on them.
I think this "boringness" the article is talking about always existed. It just becomes more prevelant because AI reduces the barrier to entry.
On the whole you're right, but it's also the case that scale matters. Show HNs have always been mostly bullshit, but producing a bullshit Show HN was on the same order of magnitude difficulty of producing a good one. If LLMs were to provide 10x productivity, we'd have the same number of good Show HNs, and 10x more bullshit ones.
> schadenfreude
I’ve been partaking in my fair share, but more and more I’m just feeling sad for my fellow coders ‘cause a lot of what I’m hearing is about bad local choices and burdensome tech stacks.
Sure, it’s kinda hilarious watching a bunch of fashion obsessed front-end devs discover bash, TDD, and that, like, specifications, like, can really be useful, you know, for building stuff or whatever.
But then I think about a version of me who came up a bit later, bit into some reasonable sounding orthodoxy about React or Node as my first production language and who would be having the same ‘profound’ revelations. I never would have learned better. I wouldn’t be as empowered from having these system programming concepts hammered into me. LLMs would be more ‘magic’, I’d extrapolate more readily…
I’ve found myself thinking a lot of thoughts tantamount to “why don’t you dummies just use Haskell, or Lisp, or OCaml, or F#, or Kotlin for that?!”, and from their PoV I’m seeing a broken ladder. A ladder that was orthodoxy and well-documented when I was coming up.
LLMs should ideally bring SICP and Knuth and emacs to the masses. Fingers crossed.
Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too?
I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?
I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding.
The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one account, then exported it all to another account for reasons that didn't make any sense at all. These are already solved problems (in multiple ways) and it seemed like the person just didn't realize terraformer was already an existing, proven tool.
I am not trying to say these things don't allow you to prototype quickly or get tedious, easy stuff out of the way. I'm saying that if you try to solve a problem in a domain that you have no expertise in with these tools and show other experts your work, they may chuckle at what you tried to do because it sometimes does look very silly.
I'm building an education platform. 95% is vibe coded. What isn't vibe coded though is the content. AI is really uninspiring with how to teach technical subjects. Also, the full UX? I do that. Marketing plan? 90% is me.
But AI does the code. Well... usually.
People call my project creative. Some are actually using it.
I feel many technical things aren't really technical things they are simply a problem where "have a web app" is part of the solution but the real part of the solution is in the content and the interaction design of it, not in how you solved the challenge technically.
> or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding
You might be on to something. Maybe its self-selection (as in people who want to engage deeply with a certain topic but lack domain expertise might be more likely to go for "vibecodable" solutions).
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I've read opinions in the same vein of what you said, except painting this as a good outcome. The gist of the argument is why spend time looking for the right tool and effort learning its uses when you can tell an agent to work out the "problem" for you and spit out a tailored solution.
It's about being oblivious, I suppose. Not too different to claiming there will be no need to write new fiction when an LLM will write the work you want to read by request.
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we need a stackoverflow "dupe" structure, something meme-worthy
I do believe you, but I have to ask: what are these incredibly tedious "easy, time consuming parts of projects" everyone seems to bring up? Refactoring I can see, but I have a sense that's not what you mean here.
That's actually a great point. I feel like unless you know for sure that you will never need something again, nothing is disposable. I find myself diving into places I thought I would never care about again ALL the time.
Every single time I have vibe coded a project I cared about, letting the AI rip with mild code review and rigorous testing has bit me in the ass, without fail. It doesn't extend it in the taste that I want, things are clearly spiraling out of control, etc. Just satisfying some specs at the time of creation isn't enough. These things evolve, they're a living being.
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For me, the answer to this question is: parts that involve no architectural decisions, and that won't need to be extended or built upon significantly in the future.
When I'm working on a greenfield project that I intend to build out further (which is what I am currently doing), I find that there's not a lot of work that fits those criteria. I expect that can change drastically when you're working on something that is either more mature, or more narrowly scoped (and thus won't need to be extended too much, meaning poor architectural decisions are not a big issue).