iammrpayments
7 hours ago
Probably doing something similar here.
This place average post went from “look at this new javascript framework” to “I just became 100x more productive with AI” in the last 3 years
kmfrk
26 minutes ago
I understand why forums don't expose user IDs for scraping, but man it would be nice to just be able to tag users online with accounts created after the introduction of ChatGPT.
claaams
7 hours ago
I’ve noticed this too. I’ve seen a ton ai defenders and hype people here. It’s embarrassing.
bob1029
6 hours ago
It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.
If you did not perceive a step change in model capabilities in late 2025, it's possible you are working on problems that are just too hard or not well aligned (e.g., arts and crafts). If you are working on software and need to move the occasional mountain, it's really hard to argue with the capabilities of contemporary models and harnesses.
This space is evolving rapidly. Faster in some areas than others, but you should still keep an open mind and adapt to the new realities as they emerge. Wishing for a thing to fail can blind you to more opportunities than you would probably be willing to reject if they were presented directly.
UpsideDownRide
6 hours ago
Sure it's better. 100x productivity is pure nonsense and there are other claims of this order.
Rejecting exaggerated claims doesn't mean that someone is not seeing any value.
customguy
6 hours ago
We have access to and use the same tech, the difference is elsewhere.
> It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.
The things some people say, how they talk about "outraged AI critics" what they would prefer those to be, would be fucking stupid even in first grade.
These, and things like "AI-generated news sites to attack critics" really speak for themselves. There is something worth really calling out here, and it fell out naturally.
xeonax
6 hours ago
Nov'25-Dec-25 something changed. I believe that was the time when Opus 4.5 was launched. (we went from function auto-complete to module auto-complete) People came from the vacations, and were like, make AI do your work. One could actually start offloading work to LLMs.
asdfsa32
6 hours ago
Yeah, this is nonsense. No one is arguing that AI is useless, but that there is a coordinated marketing campaign hyping it up.
surgical_fire
4 hours ago
A year+ ago, LLMs worked nearly as good as they work today.
I say this as someone that uses LLMs on a daily basis. It is a moderately useful tool for software development, but it was already useful in January 2025 (to pick a random date). Check what models were available by then. There were improvements since them, but they were mostly marginal.
The thing is, ever since ChatGPT 4 days there are people claiming on a daily basis exactly what you are claiming now, and it feels pretty silly. Sometimes it's hard to not imagine the accounts breathlessly claiming 100x productivity as bots.
In other words, I presume that if you are 100x more productive now, you were a 1/100x developer before LLMs. I actually question the capabilities of anyone making claims like that.
matheusmoreira
6 hours ago
Please don't imply every "AI defender" is a bot.
LLMs are clearly world changing technology. I'm no fan of the big corporations but I'm very excited to see the models themselves develop. I'm looking forward to the day I can self host these things.
reilly3000
6 hours ago
You can? It’s pretty remarkable what you can do with Qwen 3.6 on decent hardware, and Gemma 12b on nearly anything. If you can’t own it, take something for a spin on vast.ai where you can get all kinds of machines on tap for ~$0.20/hour+
llama.cpp has gotten so good that you can really get optimized performance with a few flags or none at all, and serve any model on-demand. Spend $45 to have your own GLM 5.2 machine for an hour. If you can’t manage full utilization you’d get 33.2M tokens, retailing for $128.
It takes some smarts to use dumb models, but renting time for frontier tokens is easy math. Vast also lets you run on spot which is great for training or agents with harnesses that can accommodate uncertain model availability.
emsign
6 hours ago
It's the metrics though. I've noticed that AI topics get hundreds of votes, that means either someone is trying to beat the algorithm to stay in the top news, or suddenly this place is filled with thousands of AI enthusiasts who ignore all the rest, non-AI topics. (Thousands because not everyone will upvote, so if only a fraction upvotes hundreds of upvotes should translate to thousands.)
The imbalance is what is off.
CrimsonRain
6 hours ago
Or did it occur to you that there are a silent majority who just reads and upvotes and a great percentage of people actually support ai/finding it really useful? You anti ai luddites are like far left lunatics; scream at the top of your lungs and can't believe how "other side" keeps having support without much noise.
emsign
5 hours ago
No need to insult me. Or make unbased assumptions about me.
simianwords
6 hours ago
This kind of conspiratorial thinking is ridiculous.
My life is affected for better or worse because of AI - I’m forced to use it at my day job as an R&D. It is perfectly rational and expected and preferable for AI to be the front news in a technology forum.
You probably don’t like AI but that is completely different from being affected by it.
emsign
6 hours ago
I was talking about the metrics on HN you are talking about how AI improved you life (or didn't). Two different things in my opinion. I'm using AI myself btw. This isn't the point.
delis-thumbs-7e
6 hours ago
Conspiratorial like OpenAI creating a tech news service just to spread misinformation and attack critics?
DaSHacka
6 hours ago
I honestly think even the hypebros are less embarrassing than the full-on Luddites that think LLMs are an ontological evil.
It should really not surprise you that Hacker News, a community with an extremely technical audience, is interested in a bleeding edge technical tool that is literally completely reshaping the industry.
watwut
6 hours ago
Hypebros and full-on Luddites that think LLMs are an ontological evil believe exactly the same things about LLMs.
The primary difference is that hypebros brag about incoming promised apocalypse, 40% unemployment, economy ruled by unaccountable monopolies and permanent underclass. Luddites think that such development would be a bad thing.
I dont think apocalypse will happen, but I do think AI companies are massive assholes who deserves all the pushback they can get for the way they doom hype themselves up.
tokioyoyo
7 hours ago
It would be cool to see HN internal stats over the last 5 years. New users, posts from different accounts and etc.
woozyolliew
7 hours ago
Yeah. Could be astroturfing. Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.
Your analysis by account age might be telling
OccamsMirror
4 hours ago
I want to push back on this. Hacker News was way more interesting before 75% of the submissions were about AI.
bossyTeacher
7 hours ago
> Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.
No. I distinctly remember HN being fairly skeptical of LLMs the way they were sold back in 2023. Then, the astroturfing began happening gradually. First in the comments and then in the posts.
tokioyoyo
7 hours ago
To be very fair, I was also very skeptical about LLMs in 2023. Not so much anymore.
Edit: ok, i guess this account is from 2024, but been around a while. I guess can’t defend myself like this :)
loeg
6 hours ago
I share the same sentiment, and my account is at least ten years old.
asdfsa32
6 hours ago
Suites are still in trend, but Suites are not "in". That is the point here. AI is being marketed beyond what it is honestly capable.
tokioyoyo
6 hours ago
Our jobs are basically sifting through PR garbage and making use of what it’s actually capable of. Obviously there’s a lot of fluff, but there is real use cases for myself as well.
Barbing
6 hours ago
Check Ars. Commenters hated it. Commenters are still 15-20 y/o accounts, but less blind hate.
Obviously, in my opinion, based on reporting of truthfulness someone like Sam Altman would not be entirely opposed to astroturfing here.
But people should probably appreciate at the least running free local software that has a few tricks up its sleeve.
doix
6 hours ago
Yeah, I was very skeptical and now I've drank the kool-aid. Got multiple parallel cloud agents with independent loops making PRs and me reviewing them. AI is also reviewing PRs and sometimes even catches useful things.
LLMs in 2023, from what I remember, were slightly better auto complete. It's pretty different now.
leptons
6 hours ago
I'm using AI in many ways but I'm not ignoring that it has some real costs. The code AI writes is too voluminous to fully review. I'm quite disconnected from it, and probably won't be able to maintain it myself. The more we use AI to code, the more our real skills atrophy (already feeling that). And when AI pricing finally catches up with the astronomical spending going into it, people are going to have a rude awakening. Nothing good is coming from any of this, unless you're able to cash in before the economy collapses when this bubble finally bursts.
doix
4 hours ago
I guess it depends, but what are you doing with all your time if you aren't reviewing the code and trying to make it maintainable?
The time I previously spent writing code is now spent reviewing code and giving feedback so that it gets written differently if don't like it.
The skills required have changed completely imo. You need to be able to context switch efficiently and review "better". Also identify which tasks require lots of supervision of what the AI generates and which don't.
I think AI is here to stay. Open models keep the costs at a certain level. If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost. Even if models never improve beyond today, the open ones are good enough at this point to provide immense value.
Just my opinion of course.
simianwords
6 hours ago
AI pricing finally catching up? What do you mean? Every few months prices are going down by 5x. Your price correction will not happen and it’s time to accept it.
gerhardi
6 hours ago
I'm interested in which model prices have went down 5x on multiple occasions? Are you talking about subscription or API/Token pricing?
tokioyoyo
6 hours ago
If you think of what you could do for $200 last year vs today, I could argue the prices went down.
gerhardi
5 hours ago
Yes I agree with this - models today are better than they were a year ago. But not sure if I can "do for $1 what used to cost $25" across the board (meaning two times occurred 5x price reduction). But it's maybe not that simple to compare as there are some simple things also that just were not feasibly possible at all some time ago.
simianwords
6 hours ago
You know how this reads right? Most people updated beliefs. While you couldn’t do it, so you think people are conspiring against you behind your back.
defrost
6 hours ago
I had the same thought as lovich re: your defence.
Sure, it's obvious to all how the GP comment reads, just as it's obvious to all how this rapid defensiveness appears. <shrug>
lovich
6 hours ago
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151741
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151732
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151719
Multiple comments made by this account in a timeframe I at least would personally have a hard time reading the comment I’m responding to and then and replying to this quickly, and from an account made in 2025.
Kind of making the point for the people you disagree with, assuming you are an actual human and not a bot tasked with pushing a narrative.
broodbucket
6 hours ago
I'm not gonna say where we're at now is better, but as someone who has never had any interest in webdev, the perpetual JavaScript frameworks baffled me. How could they still be interesting and how was there not one that was good enough yet?
weird-eye-issue
7 hours ago
Yeah but that's just how things have gone. My enthusiasm about a new JavaScript framework is practically zero these days compared to several years ago, and I do genuinely use AI for all of my coding especially since I developed a health issue that prevents me from typing
raincole
6 hours ago
Or, you know, many people genuinely find it exciting to see AI pumping their long overdue side-projects, just like many people once found bikeshedding their frontend frameworks exciting?
dzhiurgis
5 hours ago
Neither was true. It is most skeptical community ever, including AI. To the point I'm convinced astroturfing is done by malicious parties.
antonvs
6 hours ago
I don’t suppose that could have anything to do with the fact that AI has become a huge part of day to day business in the tech industry and elsewhere? Totally mystifying that anyone would say anything about that!
OtomotO
6 hours ago
What's missing is a balanced view.
People are easily divided and suddenly in a binary position.
You're either totally pro AI and can't stop talking about it all the time, it's like your new god.
Or you're a hater. And old-school person, who deceived themselves and got a good portion of their self-worth from typing strange invocations in an even stranger electronic device.
Both are bullshit, but if you're not in either camp you get flack from both.
My (!) reality is that it's useful technology, but far from the claims that were made by the people trying to sell (!) it.
I've seen quite some improvements over the years, but I haven't seen the claims materialized in any release in the last 18+ months.
Yes, it's impressive, yes, it's probably here to stay in some form or another.
But it's not Skynet, GLaDOS or even HAL ...