He built a Hacker News with every AI story filtered out
Elijah Potter shipped a stripped HN front page with the AI content removed. Half the commenters first misread the title as a font announcement — "Sans" — which says something about how saturated the feed has gotten.
A front page with the AI scraped off
Elijah Potter's "Hacker News, Sans AI" is exactly what the title says: a filtered view of the HN front page with AI-related stories stripped out. It climbed the real front page even while the site itself buckled — one commenter noted it "keeps moving up the front page when the site is inaccessible because it's hosted on a baked potato." The page returned a 403 to our fetch during the traffic spike, so the build details below lean on the author's framing and the thread.
What it actually does, and the irony baked into it
The premise is a content filter over HN's data, surfacing only the non-AI stories. The immediate question in the thread was how it decides what "AI-related" even means — and whether the answer is itself AI:
"Does this use an LLM to categorize 'AI-related' vs 'not-AI related' articles? Would be ironic. Lol" — a commenter quoting the obvious paradox
It isn't airtight either way. One reader caught it leaking: "The filter doesn't appear to be perfect, one of the top posts right now is 'My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development'." The misclassification is the point — keyword matching under-catches, and LLM classification makes the tool depend on the thing it removes.
The title alone revealed how trained everyone has become to skip the topic. Multiple people read "Sans" as typography:
"I've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans)." — a reader who misread it as a font change
Why people actually want this
Under the jokes was real exhaustion. One developer made the stakes personal:
"I stopped coming to HN as often as I used to because there has been too much AI talk. It's like a dang AI subreddit… I have lost 2 jobs to AI budgets and stupid executive decisions." — a developer who left HN over the AI saturation
And it turns out Potter wasn't first or alone. Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, had already vibe-coded a static version:
"I built (well, vibe-coded) a version of this a while back that runs against the Hacker News API, it's static HTML on GitHub Pages so I don't have to run a server for it." — Simon Willison
Others maintain more robust ones — an LLM-systems developer pointed to a filter on hcker.news that "does more than just keyword filtering." The most honest note came from someone running their own LLM-classifier extension, who admitted he stopped using it "because seeing half of the front page disappear when I enable it is a bit disheartening."
The filter is a thermometer, not a cure
The tool is small; what it measures isn't. A community whose own jokes assume "AI" must be ignored on sight, where half the front page evaporates the moment you filter the topic, and where the cleanest way to remove AI is to run more AI — that's the actual finding. Potter built a knob to turn the volume down. The reason it resonated is that so many people had already quietly built the same knob for themselves.
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