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Comment by jdauriemma | Hacker News Reader

I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them for wanting to share it. A significant part of the problem is that it's much harder nowadays to find "prior art" because keyword/boolean web searches have been FUBAR.

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I've seen this across so many other subreddits as well /r/formula1 /r/cycling etc

And its always very obvious that its an AI developed front end, they all look so similar.

It's certainly software being developed at speed by anyone with a level of tech interest. Which is great but its frustrating when the native solution provides said feature.

Hopefully now that AI provides quick answers, web search can go back to providing and respecting boolean and more advanced techniques. If web search is no longer the go to tool for most users, then search can do better what it can do uniquely?

One can hope!

Have you tried kagi? It's payed, but I definitely get my money's worth!

It's a breath of fresh air being the customer instead of the product.

I've used a lot of free features that I would have implemented differently, and now I can (if I weren't so lazy).

No doubt, but I'd expect that to be accompanied by something like "I know App X and App Y do $THING, but here's the distinction between how they do it and how my App Z does it." I don't think I've ever seen that sort of nuance expressed in this context, which makes me doubt that they grasp the ecosystem.

Same phenomenon for the game Satisfactory, lately I've seen so many vibe-coded tools that just do the exact same thing as already existing tools.

> A significant part of the problem is that it's much harder nowadays to find "prior art" because keyword/boolean web searches have been FUBAR.

I’m surprised this isn’t discussed more. I find most major search engines are basically unusable since the top search results are overwhelmed with AI slop. Trying to find anything useful is like looking for a key in the mud.

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