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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

> brands injecting themselves into conversations on Reddit, LinkedIn, and every other public forum.

Don't forget HackerNews.

Every single new release from OpenAI and other big AI firms attracts a lot of new accounts posting surface-level comments like "This is awesome" and then a few older accounts that have exclusively posted on previous OpenAI-related news to defend them.

It's glaringly obvious, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least a third of the comments on AI-related news is astroturfing.

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I personally always love the “I wrote an entire codebase with claud” posts where the response to “Can we see it?” is either the original poster disappearing into the mist until the next AI thread or “no I am under an NDA. My AI-generated code is so incredible and precious that my high-paying job would be at risk for disclosing it”

Honestly I've generated some big ISH codebases with AI and have said so and then backed off when asked.. because a) I still want to try to establish more confidence in the codebase and b) my employment contract gleefully states everything I write belongs to my employer. Both of those things make me nervous.

That said, I have no doubt there are also bots setting out to generate FOMO

Everything you wrote belongs to them. But it's not you, it's Claude is the author.

NDA on AI generated code is funny since model outputs are technically someone else’s code. It’s amazing how we’re infusing all kinds of systems with potential license violations

If anyone actually believed those requests to see code were sincere, or if they at least generated interesting discussion, people might actually respond. But the couple of times I've linked to a blog post someone wrote about their vibe-coding experience in the comments, someone invariably responds with an uninteresting shallow dismissal shitting all over the work. It didn't generate any interesting discussion, so I stopped bothering.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing went round here recently, so clearly LLMs are working in some cases.

Haters gonna hate, but the haters aren't always wrong. If you just want people to agree with you, that's not a discussion.

And I think, in this blog post, the author stated that he does heavy editing of what’s generated. So I don’t know how much time is saved actually. You can get the same kind of inspiration from docs, books, or some SO answer.

And they are usually 10x more productive as well!

Someone posted these single file examples: https://github.com/joaopauloschuler/ai-coding-examples/tree/...

Sam Altman would agree with you that those posts are bots and lament it, but would simultaneously remain (pretend to be?) absurdly oblivious about his own fault in creating that situation.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/sam-altman-says-that-bots-...

> "This is awesome"

Or the "I created 30 different .md instruction files and AI model refactored/wrote from scratch/fixed all my bugs" trope.

> a third of the comments on AI-related news is astroturfing.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more than that.. And, ironically, probably aided in their astroturfing, by the capability of said models to spew out text..

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