Categories: ai
It feels like something has changed in the last few months when it comes to building software. While AI code generation has been around for a while now (GitHub Copilot launched in June 2022), the tooling seems to have recently reached the point where it can build credible, releasable software.
To get beyond vibes and find some data here, let’s look at Y Combinator’s Hacker News. If you’re not familiar with the site, HN is a tech news aggregator with a heavy focus on startups. Y Combinator is the world’s premier startup accelerator, with alums like Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Twitch, OpenAI, and many many others. YC counts Paul Graham and Sam Altman among their former leaders.
HN has a type of post called “Show HN”, which is basically a show & tell for something you made that others in the community can try out. There are rules about what can be posted and mods will remove violations. HN users expect high signal and can be pretty cutting in their comments.
In other words, if you built something cool you want to share with others in the tech startup scene and possibly get some great exposure and smart feedback, you can make a Show HN post and hope it gets traction.
Getting that traction has always been challenging, but in the past 2-3 months it’s become much harder.
Here’s where I just jump ahead and show you the data:
(data from the HN Algolia search API: https://hn.algolia.com/api)
This graph shows a nearly 5x increase in Show HN posts in the last 3 years, and a 230% increase in just the last 3 months. Something has recently changed and the floodgates have opened.
There’s not more users on HN, in fact the traffic for Feb 2026 was actually down about 5% YoY according to SimilarWeb’s measure of US traffic. It’s just harder to get seen.
It’s always been hard to break through on HN. My graph above shows the average number of upvotes, but if we look at the median, it has only changed from 3 to 2. So most posts don’t go anywhere, and that hasn’t changed. It’s just become that much harder to gain real traction.
To be clear, this big increase in Show HN posts doesn’t mean that Claude Code et al. have reached the point where they can produce viable new software. It shows that devs think that what they’ve created is good enough to post on HN. That’s a subtle but important difference… and still a very important milestone.
There’s a limited amount of human attention to be had, and with the growing ease of building prototypes and MVPs, how does a new product break through? Does the firehose of new product released become so much that people tune out altogether or are just too busy building their own thing? It’s not enough that the product look good or even that it IS good, it needs credible humans out there showing us why it’s good and how it’s useful to us.