Crazy idea, but maybe change the rules of Show HN so that you are required to include in the headline how long you have been working on the project. As an example, something like:

Show HN: My Project - A description for my vibe coded project [3 weeks]

A lot of the good stuff I see on Show HN are projects that have been worked on for a long time. While I understand that vibe coding is newer trend, I also know that vibe coded projects are less likely to stand the test of time. With this, we don't have to worry about whether a project is AI assisted or not, nor do we ban it. Instead just incentivize longer term projects. If the developer lies about how long they worked on the project, they will get reported and downvoted into oblivion.

I think yComb is showing its age in terms of venture and new products/industry/ and ultimately profit not reading the room, and now that free money is gone hopefully you need an actual new product vs undercutting and existing market. IMHO

Show HN is now the equivalent of "Look at me!" on Instrgram, Tik-Tok. Graph submissions that start "Show HN:I " and or just "I ". There's 2 on the top 30 right now. Go back 10 years and they were much less as a percentage of all posts.

There should probably be "Show Vibe:" simply because this is something new. This is something radical.

I was a skeptic last year, and now... not so much. I am having Claude build me a distributed system from scratch. I designed it last week as I was admitting to myself the huge failure of my big "I love to code" project that I failed to get traction on.

It took me a week to even give the design to claude because I was afraid of what it meant. I started it last night, and my jaw is dropped. There is a new skill being grown right now, and it... is something.

It certainly isn't nothing, and I for one am curious to simply see what people are making with vibes alone. It's fascinating... and horrifying.

But, I have learned to silence that part of me that is horrified since the world never cared for what I find beautiful (i.e. terrible languages like JavaScript)...

I'm not sure I agree with the Sideprocalypse idea linked in the blog. Granted, there is a lot of "hustle" content out there about how all you need to do is vibe code an existing business idea and pay for their SEO course. And if you're one of those people selling that, or one of the people believing it... well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Where the vibe coders with their slop cannons aren't present though is in things that require hard won domain knowledge. IE, stuff that requires you to actually create a new idea, off an understanding of actual areas of need.

And that kind of thing probably isn't going to do well on Show HN, because your audience probably isn't on HN.

Time for a new category? "Slop HN: Claude built this mini tool for me" - would be lol to see the "slop" in the header right in the middle of "show | jobs" -> "show | slop | jobs"

It's turning into an influencer economy, similar to twitch streaming, youtube or only fans.

I've long wanted something like Blog HN as a way to post things things that I wrote without feeling guilty of submitting my own site. Things that authors themselves write and post are often a good signal. But this should be completely separate from any new products, etc.

I think that Show HN should be used sparingly. It feels like collective community abuse of it will lead to people filtering them out mentally, if not deliberately. They're very low signal these days.

Thank you so much for the statistics!

Great article btw, really loved to see these kind of numbers, thanks.