Ask HN: Where has creativity in software gone?
piratesAndSons · hn · 2026-10-14
An Ask HN thread laments the state of Show HN: endless clones of note-taking apps with an "AI" suffix, built by prompting rather than real engineering. The author asks where today's equivalents of the people who built C, Emacs, and SQLite have gone, arguing that prompting alone isn't creativity. The thread touches a nerve in an ongoing debate about whether AI has commoditized—or killed—originality in indie software development.
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