I floated that idea a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096202, although I used the word "prompts" which users pointed out was obsolete. "Session" seems better for now.

The objections I heard, which seemed solid, are (1) there's no single input to the AI (i.e. no single session or prompt) from which such a project is generated,

(2) the back-and-forth between human and AI isn't exactly like working with a compiler (the loop of source code -> object code) - it's also like a conversation between two engineers [1]. In the former case, you can make the source code into an artifact and treat that as "the project", but you can't really do that in the latter case, and

(3) even if you could, the resulting artifact would be so noisy and complicated that saving it as part of the project wouldn't add much value.

At the same time, people have been submitting so many Show HNs of generated projects, often with nothing more than a generated repo with a generated readme. We need a better way of processing these because treating them like old-fashioned Show HNs is overwhelming the system with noise right now [2].

I don't want to exclude these projects, because (1) some of them are good, (2) there's nothing wrong with more people being able to create and share things, (3) it's foolish to fight the future, and (4) there's no obvious way to exclude them anyhow.

But the status quo isn't great because these projects, at the moment, are mostly not that interesting. What's needed is some kind of support to make them more interesting.

So, community: what should we do?

[1] this point came from seldrige at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096903 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108653.

YoumuChan makes a similar point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213296, comparing it to Google search history. The analogy is different but the issue (signal/noise ratio) is the same.

[2] Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804 - Feb 2026 (422 comments)

My current thinking is based on boris tanes[1] formalised method of coding with Claude code. I commit the research and plan.md files as they are when I finally tell Claude to implement changes in code. This becomes a living lexicon of the architecture and every feature added. A very slight variation I do from Boris's method is that I prefix all my research and plan .md filenames with the name of the feature. I can very quickly load relevant architecture into context by having Claude read a previous design document instead of analysing the whole code base. I'll take pieces I think are relevant and tell Claude to base research from those design documents.

[1] https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/

Why does the regular voting system fail here? Are there just too many Show HNs for people to process the new ones, so the good ones get lost in the noise?

Unfortunately Codex doesn’t seem to be able to export the entire session as markdown, otherwise I’d suggest encouraging people to include that in their Show HNs. It’s kind of nuts that it’s so difficult to export what’s now a part of the engineering process.

I don’t have anything against vibe coded apps, but what makes them interesting is to see the vibe coding session and all the false starts along the way. You learn with them as they explore the problem space.

Regarding the noise you mention, I wonder if memento's use of the git 'notes' feature is an acceptable way to contain or quarantine that noise. It might still not add much value, but at least it would live in a separate place that is easily filtered out when the user judges it irrelevant. Per the README of the linked repo,

> It runs a commit and then stores a cleaned markdown conversation as a git note on the new commit.

So it doesn't seem that normal commit history is affected - git stores notes specially, outside of the commit (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes).

In fact github doesn't even display them, according to some (two-year-old) blog posts I'm seeing. Not sure about other interfaces to git (magit, other forges), but git log is definitely able to ignore them (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt--...).

This doesn't mean the saved artifacts would necessarily be valuable - just that, unlike a more naive solution (saving in commit messages or in some directory of tracked files) they may not get in the way of ordinary workflows aside from maybe bloating the repo to some degree.

> So, community: what should we do?

> Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

Is spam on topic? and are AI codegen bots part of the community?

To me, the value of Show HN was rarely the thing, it was the work and attention that someone put into it. AI bot's don't do work. (What they do is worth it's own word, but it's not the same as work).

> I don't want to exclude these projects, because (1) some of them are good,

Most of them are barely passable at best, but I say that as a very biased person. But I'll reiterate my previous point. I'm willing to share my attention with people who've invested significant amounts of their own time. SIGNIFICANT amounts, of their time, not their tokens.

> (2) there's nothing wrong with more people being able to create and share things

This is true, only in isolation. Here, the topic is more, what to do about all this new noise, (not; should people share things they think are cool). If the noise drowns out the signal, you're allowed that noise to ruin something that was useful.

> (3) it's foolish to fight the future

coward!

I do hope you take that as the tongue-in-cheek way I meant it, because I say it as a friend would; but I refuse to resign myself completely to fatalism. Fighting the future is different from letting people doing something different ruin the good thing you currently have. Sure electric cars are the future, but that's no reason to welcome them in a group that loves rebuilding classic hot rods.

> (4) there's no obvious way to exclude them anyhow.

You got me there. But then, I just have to take your word for it, because it's not a problem I've spent a lot of time figuring out. But even then, I'd say it's a cultural problem. If people ahem, in a leadership position, comment ShowHN is reserved for projects that took a lot of time investment, and not just ideas with code... eventually the problem would solve itself, no? The inertia may take some time, but then this whole comment is about time...

I know it's not anymore, but to me, HN still somehow, feels a niche community. Given that, I'd like to encourage you to optimize for the people who want to invest time into getting good at something. A very small number of these projects could become those, but trying to optimize for best fairness to everyone, time spent be damned... I believe will turn the people who lift the quality of HN away.

> people have been submitting so many Show HNs of generated projects

In this case, it was more of write the X language compiler using X. I had to prove to myself if keeping the session made sense, and what better way to do it than to vibe code the tool to audit vibe code.

I do get your point though

Plenty of commits link to mailing list discussions about the proposed change, maybe something like that, with an archive of LLM sessions?

> the resulting artifact would be so noisy and complicated that saving it as part of the project wouldn't really add that much value.

This is the major blocker for me. However, there might be value in saving a summary - basically the same as what you would get from taking meeting notes and then summarizing the important points.

Also the models change all the time and are not deterministic

> (2) there's nothing wrong with more people being able to create and share things

There is very clearly many things wrong with this when the things being shown require very little skill or effort.