Comment by sillyfluke
4 days ago
I think you're missing the general point of the post.
>AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.
The trigger for the post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders, whatever their coding chops are. For Show HN posts, the sentence I quoted precisely describes the things that would be mind-numbingly boring to Show HN readers.
pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves and also have some biochemist commenting, "I'm working at a so-and-so research lab and this is exactly what I was looking for!"
Now the biochemist is out there vibe-coding their own solution, and now, there is no way for the HN reader to differentiate your "robust" entry from a completely vibe-code noobie entry, no matter how long you worked on the "important stuff".
Why? because the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated. What we took for granted was that "knowing how to code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the problem." And that filter allowed for high-quality posts.
That is why the observation that you know longer can guarentee or have any way of telling quickly that the posters spent some time on the problem is a great observation.
The very value that you gain from vibe-coding is also the very thing that threatens to turn Show HN into a glorified Product Hunt cesspool.
"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded." etc etc
Why do I care who made the thing showed to HN? If someone makes a tool that I like or a project that’s amazing, but they did so with a robot, who is harmed?
Like all we need to do is decouple “I made this” from “I can compose all parts in my mind”, which were never strongly coupled anyway. Is the thing that is being shown neat? Cool! Does it matter if it was a person or 20 people or a robot? I don’t think so, unless it’s special pleading for humans.
I think this is quite a strange argument. Any technical show-and-tell in the form of 'I wrote a cool implementation of such-and-such algorithm' is obviously much less impressive if someone/something else wrote it, but that's always been true, and I think the Show HN format is largely used for tools or products that someone has created, in which case what's more interesting is the problem it solves and how it solves it. It's exactly as you say with your hypothetical biochemist; they've been looking for a tool like this! I don't think they spent much time worrying about how it was written or what the REST API would look like.
There is a proliferation of frameworks and libraries supplying all kinds of mundane needs that developers have; is it wrong for people Showing HN to use those? Do libraries and frameworks not lower the barrier to entry? There have been many cases of 'I threw this together over a weekend using XYZ and ABC', haven't there? What's interesting is how they understand the domain and how they address the problems posed by it - isn't it? Sure, the technical discussion can be interesting too but unless some deep technical problem is being solved, I don't care too much if they used Django or Flask, and which database backend they chose, unless these things have a significant impact on the problem space.
> the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated
I was very interested in 3D graphics programming back in the DOS days before GPUs were a commodity, and at that time I felt the same about hardware accelerated rendering - if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. Turns out that lowering barriers to entry doesn't magically make everything easier, but does allow a lot more people to express their creativity who otherwise would lack the knowledge and time to do so. That's a good thing! Pre-made engines like Godot remove an absolute ton of the work that goes into making a game, and are a great benefit to the one-man-bands and time-strapped would-be game designers out there whose ideas would otherwise die in the dark.
You seem to be insisting on arguing against arguments that have not been made and ignoring the whole point of the original post.
I am having to repeat the beginning of my previous comment:
>>The trigger for the [original] post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders.
The topic is: The drop in quality of post-AI Show HN. It is specifically about this community. Please read the context the OP has referenced in their own post:
Is Show HN Dead? No, but it's Drowning
https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/
Instead of adressing the specifics of that post you seem to ignore the points that were made there and seem to prefer to talk about why vibe-coding solutions should be interesting to pre-AI programmers. Ok, let's go there.
>if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. [Turns out that's not the case.]
Here in this context, you are confusing "easy" with "non-human". Specifically, when people here decry the banality and tediousness of perusing and reviewing vibe-coded solutions by "everyone and their dog" the emphasis is on and their dog. Let's be clear, a non-deterministic non-human entity that is coding something by approximating the intentions of a human is not the same thing as a human developing a 3D engine or SDK end-to-end with human intentionality no matter how "easy" coding a 3D engine has become. So it leaves it to the HN reader to figure out what level of ownership the human poster has over their 90% vibe-coded solution. It's no surprise that HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space instead of engaging with the Show HN post itself. When hard-pressed, I can think of very few instances where programmers would not prefer to vibe-code there own solution instead of test-running and reviewing someone else's AI slop. Some of the casual statistics that the original posters have bothered to look at seem to bear this out.
Sorry, with respect I think you've missed the point of my comment (which was a reply to your comment, and not a reply to the original post).
You asserted that
> pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves...
and latterly
> ... HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space
and my point is that I disagree - the implementation of an idea in terms of the actual coding is far less interesting to me (and my assertion is: by extension, less interesting to the average reader) than the implementation in terms of the behaviour of the thing. Perhaps you're concerned about someone opening Claude Code and typing "Write me an application that does XYZ" but it's pretty obvious that so far that doesn't produce anything useful, and I think is more of a problem for sites like Stack Overflow where an answer is a small singular thing rather than an entire system.
There is a spectrum between 'writing it all yourself' and 'YOLO vibe-coding' and if you're only arguing about the latter end of the spectrum then, sure, those tend to suck, but I don't think we're really at risk of being drowned in those projects; that's a kind of slippery-slope argument. This is why I talked about 3D graphics; I earlier feared the 'YOLO 3D game' projects taking over, and that just hasn't happened. I believe we (humans) had similar discussions around the time that typewriters and the printing press were invented - 'if you're not handwriting your ideas then you're not really thinking!' but the ideas are the point, not the process of writing them down.
> knowing how to code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the problem."
Also: Actually made the thing. I know how to code, but have 0 Show-HNs because my ideas and fun side-projects never get to that stage.
Now, "making the thing" is not a good proxy either