Ask HN: Where has creativity in software gone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where has creativity in software gone?

I sometimes read Show HN, and there is literally no creativity at all: note-taker app after note-taker clone. Everyone is essentially looking at what’s already there, and they say, “Why can’t I create the exact same product, but worse, and add an AI suffix?”

There is nothing creative about AI. Show HN might as well be renamed “Prompt HN.” These promoters always say, “Prompting makes me efficient; I don’t have to write code by hand anymore.”

Great. What has your “efficiency” gotten you? Yet another note-taker with an “AI” suffix? I could take notes in 1990.

Where did the actual engineers go? Surely they aren’t all selling ads at Facebook’s spyware empire? Where are the transistor, the C programming language, Emacs, and SQLite developers of our time?

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For no particular reason, I've been browsing HN posts from before November 30, 2022. There's a treasure trove of content from that era. Maybe I've just been hit by a wave of nostalgia.

Similar, except I am so exhausted reading AI content on the web that I am now using wayback machine to read old articles before 2023.

I'm trying to collect those special digital assets, i create https://wunderkammer.page.

if you have time and will, please help me add special projects there.

Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/show right now, it's not too bad. The #1 (Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard) is definitely creative. The next 3 (budgeting, AI monitor, scraper) are boring, the next (How Random Are You?) is so-so...and the pattern continues like this.

The pessimist says creative projects are rare nowadays, an optimist says they're still coming out. You may also dislike the vibe-coded "...Craft" projects, but seemingly building a production-capable software in days is something that has never been done before and IMO inspiring.

Not to be a Debby Downer, but GarageBand on iOS had a guitar like that ages ago. It is cool to see something like it in the browser, but here is a 15 year old video showing it on the iPad. While it may not be a common project, it certainly isn’t new.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=E_KYUF6pxR8

Edit…

I looked at that site some more and found the songs area. That’s pretty cool.

I think we are at the beginning of a new golden age of software engineering, but not in the way we think. The cost of creating software might go down to zero with AI. That doesn't mean that no skills are needed. Quite the opposite. If AI would create outstanding code, then it would win every Kaggle coding competition on the planet. But it doesn't.

]1] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft [2] https://huggingface.co/blog/a2aprotocol/universal-modder-a-p... [3] https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/jamming-with-jev-and-claude-... [4]

> The cost of creating software might go down to zero with AI

Keep hearing this, but I think people focus too much on only the first part of software engineering: the producing part. But one also needs to make sure that produced software works as intended… and here engineers (as of October 2026) are as much as needed as pre AI times, if not more (one could argue that more skilled engineers are needed to review the work of decent LLMs spitting decent software but with subtle bugs)

Look here: https://100r.co/

I've worked in C, used Emacs for almost two decades now, and work(ed) on plenty of SQL. We're tired, older. You either were part of the cohort who rode the wave of 150K starting salaries out of college or a bootcamp 15-20 years ago or not. And if you were, you now have graduated to making upwards of that and displacing locals out of their small rural communities because the economy is bad there and you can. Or you weren't part of that cohort and your work and hobby, which was never making tons of money, is now less likely than ever to make money and you're being displaced the former group pretending like programming is gauche.

C is the most perfect language, so simple yet so powerful. That’s why I like C and Arch Linux, made by and for programmers, with no stupidity tolerated. I wish I could use Arch on mobile. That would be epic.

> I wish I could use Arch on mobile.

You totally can. I've got a Termux with NixOS installed on my Android handset. There's also Phosh if you want a fully Arch-native install on your phone.

Wouldn't be my choice for a mobile OS, but I don't see any roadblocks to using it.

Someone got Arch working (natively, no Android) on their Pixel 9 recently. Was posted to r/Linux, you should check it out.

Occasionally you will see a post or comment from someone with less than 5 karma whining about why their hundreds of AI generated ShowHN posts keep getting flagged as dead on arrival.

My comment reply explaining this to one of these instances was itself flagged, so I guess just let it burn and let the mods figure it out.

If your project is too creative no one will pay attention to it and you need a crazy amount of attention to get funding now

Only if it doesn't use AI. If it uses AI you're basically guaranteed an audience and support at the moment.

You say this like there's nobody out there working on transistors or C or Emacs or Sqlite. There definitely are.

Look at Show HN. Literally an infant could prompt and post every single thread. It’s so simple, so stupidly repetitive, and these are so-called “products.” I wonder what the man who built SQLite for the US Navy would think when he sees someone calling themselves a software engineer while prompting a machine to build a note taker app for dogs. I would be ashamed to be seen as their equal.

HN is not the entire universe it turns out

> Where did the actual engineers go?

They have left for the "no AI allowed" spaces.

One reason is that AI seems to be pushing everyone to be "fast" than "better".

I thought mine was very creative, but it never got off new show hn.

Sorry no C, Emacs. Just some database stuff.

What is it?

I have to question if things are less creative, or whether we're just getting more 'uncreative' projects released on a regular basis. There's a flood of software being released now that AI models have become 'good' enough to build basic stuff without any prior technical knowledge, and since most software is being built by folks looking for a quick buck, it's probably not going to be all that original.

Original software is still being made, it's just buried under a flood of AI generated slop.

The average person or company's idea for a piece of software is an unoriginal spin on a likely already overdone concept.

Add this to the more technically original projects perhaps not being posted on Hacker News as often (many folks here would say the site's experienced its Eternal September moment, and a fair few of them have almost stopped using it altogether), and well, you're just seeing what moderately technical people are making with the tools of the moment.

creativity for some people is about architecting solutions, teams or getting an idea to the ground, so there will be always creativity in any field in life

Its not gone, just that the bar has been increased.

Survivorship bias.

I was talking to someone about game development this morning. The scheduling to make a simple commercial indie game five years ago was roughly 20 hr market research, 10 hr gameplay prototyping, 10 hr art prototype, 20 hr vertical slice, 80 content & level development, 60 hr on polish. Plus some more on marketing.

Now today with AI, what has changed?

Those who follow a process may instead be spending 5 hrs on market research, 3 on prototyping, 30 on levels, and 100 hrs on polish.

These games are a little better and less painful to make. But the output is roughly the same as before.

Those who don't follow a process will spend 15 hours prototyping, 10 on polish, then find that nobody buys it and blames distribution.

But back in the past, these same people would have never reached a release point. The output of slop has multiplied enormously.

It's not gone, it's just flooded with people who, with the new era of ai, can build whatever they want.. we need to either dig deep to find the creative stuff, or wait for the current wave of ai slop to die out, for some products to win the "obvious" products market and then i think we will see a new era of creative products (since only creative product can shine in a world of obvious slop)

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