[clktmr]

The advent of coding agents killed Hacker News to some degree for me. Before I could always come here to get a pause from the hype, scandal and bait. Top comments were usually insightful; I really had this feeling to learn while browsing the feed. Today every brainfart about AI makes it to the frontpage. I know this sounds very dismissive, but most pieces really have no substance at all.

The good content is still there buts it drowns in noise and I'm not very good at filtering it out. I even suspect Hacker News is one of the prime advertisement targets of coding agent companies.

I would love to see if this is just my perception or if it can be found in the data.

[bdcravens]

Personally I don't care about what news articles end up on the front page - it's AI now, but there have been other trends in the past that did the same.

The bigger problem is the effect that it's had on "Show HN" postings, which in the past were things you could depend on were built by the person submitting it. That's why those posts tended to be more strongly moderated, because they often were seen as attacks on the person's art. Now I feel like most of the credibility has left the room on those posts.

Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with "vibe coding". I do plenty of it myself these days, for commercial purposes. But I feel it cheapens and waters down someone presenting work as their own.

[discreteevent]

A project was one of the easiest ways to evaluate a stranger. It was a great bullshit detector. If they can make something like this then they are probably someone with ability and experience and so the rest of what they have to say is probably worth listening to. But I also agree with the parent. HN seems to be flooded with hustle and rubbish since AI has taken off. It's eternal LLMber.

[Cthulhu_]

I'm just going to wait it out, as these trends come and go; before AI it was Rust, before Rust it was IoT, before IoT it was big data, crypto was weaved through it, etc.

I'm sure someone's done the numbers on HN trending topics over time aaand yup http://varianceexplained.org/r/hn-trends//.

[elliotbnvl]

I agree... I wrote an essay about this: https://joinkith.com/#the-internet-is-dead

tl;dr of the essay, we need to move back to human-to-human recommendations and trust systems, and people are already doing that a lot of ways by retreating to DMs (iMessage, email, in-person conversations) and personal recommendations rather than relying on Google + the algorithm. What this means for public forums I don't know. I think they're gone and will never come back, probably.