Tell HN: I'm tired of formulaic, "LLM house style" show HN submissions
by zahlman | 2025-08-03 22:05:39+00:00
You know the ones. They typically read just like:

> Hi HN, I have a history with some sort of problem — the common one which I'll describe here with some flowery prose that possibly makes gratuitous use of "quotation marks". I realized I was going some thing that reflects my fundamental limitations as a human. This demonstrates that something is wrong with our modern world, although the proliferation of AI slop is definitely not that thing.

> [Now something like:]

> To fight back, I built Software Name. It’s not just another program of the sort you might logically expect. It's something else, designed to implement a puffed-up description of solving the problem.

> [or perhaps:]

> I built hxxps://heck.no, an arbitrarily-described tool that helps you deal with the problem, instantly. You can interact with it in an intuitive way, and an AI does something for you.

> How it works is based on a few key principles from the problem domain:

> Formatting for Emphasis: Text that would make more sense as free-form prose is re-worked into a bullet-point list. Since each item includes multiple sentences, however, this doesn't actually reduce the total amount you'll be expected to read.

> Vague Explanation: This list contains exactly three items which seem generally aimed more at justifying how the product works rather than actually clarifying what will happen when you use it.

> Occasional Incoherence: LLM-generated lists of this sort often include items that don't all seem to belong in the same natural category. This confuses the reader and violates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_(grammar).

> The Tech (this would probably have some kind of emoji if HN supported them):

> It's built as fully buzzword-compliant software of some sort (which may be described with a word that doesn't quite fit in context), but some aspect of it is cool, interesting Other Buzzword which has some logical implication. Here's another logical implication. This might be several sentences that basically just mean "it's a web page where you can make an account, that is totally not going to crash if I suddenly get lots of business". Also I have no interest in ensuring you can see any content whatsoever without enabling JavaScript and I've probably vibe-coded a few off-the-shelf components together and launched it on Vercel.

> I wanted to share a personal story (and advertise my product) and thought others might find it useful too. I'm here to answer any questions about the problem domain, the tech, or the process of creating this thing. (I will remind you of this in a very formulaic way.)

> Would love to get your feedback!

> (Or perhaps I specifically "would love your feedback" — https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... — on some pre-selected aspects of the project, rather than soliciting arbitrary critique.)

> Check it out here [if not previously linked]: hxxps://heck.no/

None of this makes me want to try out these projects, nor does it give me the sense as an HN user that I could actually, well, hack or experiment with a cool software toy. It makes me feel like I'm being marketed to and that I'm being asked to sign up for a product or service intended to solve a problem I'm unlikely to have or care about. The UX I expect as a "hacker" is very different from what ordinary people would expect as clients or end users.

I can assure you that when my projects are ready to appear in Show HN, my write-ups will read very differently from this formula.