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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT.

Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for 15 years or more—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, there must be some positive impact in having it running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on them!

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Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons?

Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up.

But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.

I fear this is not the only reason even if it is true. The more negative reason is a loss of skill/talent. We used to be able to know what to do in these situations, and how to fix things when they went wrong. Companies like Y Combinator used to be able to hire talented systems engineers who knew how to minimize the risk of things going wrong, and fix them when they did.

Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.

I take your point! But the positives are still positive. I've been amazed by how much LLMs have helped us do.

None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.

that new traffic likely was from AI and their scrapers. So no, not much of a net positive.

I mean, scraper traffic should be pretty easy to tell.

Now, AI posting bots are much more difficult.

I think the scrapers have gotten pretty good and can imitate real traffic. And it isn’t just scraping for model training. A large amount would be LLM tool calls searching the web (and HN) for info about some prompt.

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