Hacker News Thread Reveals Split Over AI Coverage Volume

A Hacker News thread titled "We need tech news sources which exclude AI" gathered 80 points and 41 comments around a frustration many developers recognize: aggregators like Techmeme feel, in the original poster's words, "completely overrun with AI stories," with HN itself trending the same way.

The post drew a pointed split in replies. The top response came from a commenter identifying over 30 years of professional coding experience, who wrote that "LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years," framing the coverage volume as roughly proportional to a real shift in the work itself. Another commenter offered a different angle: "AI now absorbs almost all of the oxygen from every category. A story about new chips becomes an AI story."

Several practical workarounds surfaced in the thread. One commenter pointed to hcker.news/?ai=exclude, described as offering daily-updated filters for AI-related content. Another flagged elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai as a filtered HN view. A third noted that /r/programming on Reddit already operates with explicit no-AI policies, showing the filtering impulse has institutional precedent elsewhere.

What the thread does not resolve is whether these tools work at the right layer. Community-built filters address volume without touching whether mainstream aggregators will ever add native controls. The original poster's complaints also bundle several distinct things: hype cycles, low-quality AI content, and genuinely substantive AI news, which a blunt filter handles poorly. One commenter added a wry note: "it's not AI that's the problem, it's that it was trained on LinkedIn."

For publishers and curators, the clearest signal here is demand. A thread reaching 80 points on a complaint about signal quality is also a product brief: there is a visible audience that wants selectivity over volume, and right now third-party workarounds are the only answer.