HN is obviously very pro-ai and many top-level comments mention that blocking AI submissions will leave r/selfhosted in the digital stone age. That's not at all what they are doing.
The vast majority of vibe-coded apps submitted lately have been simply either very low quality, inferior clones of existing apps, or just incomplete non-sense with a good readme. Redditors are rightfully rejecting that but the trend has been to reject it because it is vibe coded and not for the right reason: the low quality.
In a sense they are protecting ai assisted apps from being lumped in all the crap and auto-rejected by the community.
If you rephrase the announcement as Limiting low-quality/low-effort submissions instead of vibe coded, nobody would object.
I've noticed many posts hitting the hn front page in the last few years trending first on r/selfhosted so there's a good overlap between the communities. Before judging I'd encourage you to take a look. I've discovered many apps I use daily through it (immich, jellyfin, frigate-nvr for examples).
If you ever want to see how bad vibe coded software can be. This subreddit unfortunately had been a gold mine full of it.
Hoping this turns it around.
> In order to determine the difference (as going by code & commits alone can be a great indicator but by itself does not make a great case for what constitutes a vibe-coded or AI-assisted project) we've set the following guidelines: [...] With obvious signs of vibe-coding*
Gonna be interesting to see how deep those accusation-threads will go, people trying to determine the "obvious signs".
The negative side of this however is the influx of AI generated posts, vibe-coded projects over a weekend and many others. Normally, the community votes with its voice. But with the high amount of posts flooding in every day, we've noticed a more negative and sometimes even hostile attitude towards these kinds of projects.
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I wonder what HN's reception to a similar rule would be.
It's a natural backlash of anti AI sentiment.
Eventually they will reverse course as living in seclusion like that often doesn't work very well.
A lot of the little vibe coded self hosted utilities were made by folks with zero software development experience, over a weekend. These are apps where people need to be able to trust them to be exposed to the internet, and trust them with their data. Allowing zero-experience, purely vibe coded software in this environment is a recipe for disaster.
I've no problem with folks vibing their own little tools for use at home, but that doesn't mean it needs to be shared, and it a lot of cases, it probably shouldn't unless you really know what you are doing.
No one cares though, as Reddit is steadily becoming trash.