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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ? Would we see an increase in the number of GitHub projects ? In the number of stars (given the ai is so good) ? In the number of start up ipos (surely if all your engineers are 1000x engineers thanks to Claude code, we'll have plenty of googles and Amazons to invest in) ? In the price of software (if I can just vibe code everything, than a 10$ fully compatible replacement for MS Windows is just a few months away, right ?) In the the numbers of app published in the stores ?

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Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate, you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic.

Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well marketed.

Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors put money into products that have traction, or founders that look impressive, and both of those are mostly marketing.

People actually are vibe coding stuff rather than using SaaS though, that one's for real. Your example is hyperbolic, but the Tailwind scenario is just one example of AI putting pressure on products.

Yes definitely. The average quality of Github projects, startup code may improve but there will probably not be many more stars on them or successful startups because it's immaterial and so easy to switch, the best project to do X becomes 100x more successful than the second-best project.

You cant vibe code users or traction. If you make they will come is not a strategy for 2026. In fact, the amount of money needed for marketing will wipe out any savings from not having a Software dev.

If you make they will come has never been a valid strategy. And marketing is fucking miserable now because of the proliferation low quality software people are trying to turn into SaaS.

If you don't have a halo already, you need to be blessed or you're just going to suffer. Getting a good mention by someone like Theo or SimonW >> 1000 well written articles.

I get annoyed that no one mentions software for just the user. Part of the joy of programming is making stuff you want not just to sell or to get famous. I vibe coded so many chrome extensions I lost count. Most apply just to one site, they save me one click or something. It's fun!

Wouldn't it be easier and/or faster to create a userscript? I've "vibe coded" tens myself, but never really saw the use case for making a full extension out of any of them. Genuinly curious what you made.

I allegedly know someone who allegedly uses a pirating site for watching the NFL. The site has every kind of clickjacking and malwarey trick. The extension makes only the correct buttons work, the volume controls the volume, the full screen button controls the screen size etc.

Another one (I've open sourced, you can check it out here https://github.com/luvchurchill/mani-gpg) A site I use (manifold.markets) announced they are getting rid of DMs due to spam (they've since brought it back) so I made an extension which makes it easy to use pgp & age encryption on the site so we can do pseudo DMs. It injects "Decrypt" buttons next to exncrypted text etc etc. You can see screenshots at https://manifold.markets/post/an-extension-to-assist-with-so...

(Look at the comments for the latest look)

Besides for that, there are a few I'm sure can be scripts

Someone should really take AI to these task. Let the agents run wild. Let them astroturf every possible platform in existence. Especially like this one here HN. Insert marketing messages to every post and every thread.

There is not bad publicity. More you spam more you will be noticed. Human attention is limited. So grab as much as you can. And also this helps your product name to get into training data and thus later in LLM outputs.

Even more ideas. When you find an email address. Spam that too. Get your message out multiple times to each address.

HN has been astroturfed for a while. Ever notice low quality linkedin blogspam that hits the front page before people would even have had time to finish reading it?

It's hard to disambiguate this from people who have a "fanbase." People will upvote stuff from people like simonw sight unseen without reading. I'd like to do a study on HN where you hide the author, to see how upvote patterns change, in order to demonstrate the "halo" benefit.

I was looking my homebrewed product hunt data and this week we had 5000 projects submitted, in 5 days. Thats more than a entire month in 2018.

> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ?

Falling salaries?

All the other tools before that made programming more efficient results in rising salaries. I imagine salaries would only fall if AI can 100% replace a human, which currently it cannot. It remains to be seen what happens in the future of course.

Remember that an average software engineer only spends around 25% of their time coding.

> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ?

Instead of asking "where are the AI-generated projects" we could ask about the easier problem of "where are the AI-generated ports". Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training set, so the fact that this isn't easy yet must mean something.

According to claude, wordpress is still 43% of all the websites on the internet and PHP has been despised by many people for many years and many reasons. Why no python or ruby portage? Harder but similar, throw in drupal, mediawiki, and wonder when can we automatically port the linux kernel to rust, etc.

> Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training

We have a smaller version of that ability already:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

I need to write these up properly, but I pulled a similar trick with an existing JavaScript test suite for https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript and the official WebAssembly test suite for https://github.com/simonw/pwasm

So extrapolating from here and assuming applications are as easy as libraries, operating systems are as easy as applications.. at this rate with a few people in a weekend you can convert anything to anything else, and the differences between different programming languages are very nearly effectively erased. Nice!

And yet it doesn't feel true yet, otherwise we'd see it. Why do you think that is?

Because it's not true yet. You can't convert anything to anything else, but you CAN get good results for problems that can be reduced to a robust conformance suite.

(This capability is also brand new: prior to Claude Opus 4.5 in November I wasn't getting results from coding agents that convinced me they could do this.)

It turns out there are some pretty big problems that works for, like HTML5 parsers and WebAssembly runtimes and reduced-scoped JavaScript language interpreters. You have to be selective though. This won't work for Linux.

I thought it wouldn't work for web browsers either - one of my 2026 predictions was "by 2029 someone will build a new web browser using mostly LLM-code"[1] - but then I saw this thread on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1q4xfm0/over_chr... "Over christmas break I wrote a fully functional browser with Claude Code in Rust" and took a look at the code and it's surprisingly deep: https://github.com/hiwavebrowser/hiwave

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-202...

> you CAN get good results for problems that can be reduced to a robust conformance suite.

If that's what is shown then why doesn't it work on anything that has a sufficiently large test-suite, presumably scaling linearly in time with size? Why should we be selective, and based on what?

It probably does. This only become possible over the last six weeks, and most people haven't yet figured out the pattern.

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