Weird that people are floating the idea of kicking out of a tech forum the most important tech development of the last 10 years.
Not sure what that means about the community, but must mean something.
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The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.
Not sure what that means about the community, but must mean something.
So in practice, "AI" content ends up revolving around people bandying about opinions about whether or not we're all doomed, or whether or not we're all on the edge of a utopia, or how much productivity programmers (and which ones) have lost or gained, or what kinds of tasks the LLMs are or are not currently or still good at, or whether anyone still cares about the fact that the term "AI" is supposed to mean something broader than LLMs + tool use.
The emergence of the "vibe coding" concept has made things worse because people will just share their blog posts about personal experiences with trying to write code that way, or flood the Show HN section with things that are basically just "I personally found this specific thing to be 'the boring stuff' that's actually relevant to me, so now I'm automating it" with a few dozen lines of AI-generated code that perhaps invokes some API to ask another AI to do something useful.
To me it feels like golden age of hackers in the 60s-80s (which was before my time but I heard stories about) where everybody is doing their own home grown research to the best of their abilities and sharing insights of varying quality.
But somehow these days if it's not all polished, HN "hackers" aren't interested.
1. This is a great time to get your hands dirty with LLM tech and explore workflows and tooling that bring you joy.
2. The writing around this exploration is often low quality insights or low quality engagement bait that leads to flamewars. Engagement bait that often takes one of two forms. One being a novella on how surely this time the human race is doomed due to singularity/capture by the rich/fascism/etc. The other being how we're one cm away from utopia because automation/flourishing of creativity/etc.
I am enjoying playing around with the tech a lot but the presence of 2 is just annoying. I do think that's an HN problem and not a problem with tech writing as a whole. There's subreddits that, while they have their own problems, are a lot less flamey when discussing these topics.