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A Developer Built a Tool to Track What HN Thinks About AI Coders

A scraper collects Hacker News comments to rank which AI coding models developers actually discuss.

A developer built a tool that scans Hacker News discussions and ranks coding models by how often they appear in comments. The site aggregates mentions of models like Claude, GPT-4, and various open-source alternatives. It tracks both positive and negative sentiment, so you can see what people actually like versus what's just getting hype. The data comes from a public Google Sheet.

Benchmarks tell you how models perform on controlled tests. This tells you which ones developers are actually using and complaining about in the wild. It's a useful counterweight to vendor marketing — real usage patterns, messy and biased as they are. And it reveals what's actually gaining traction in conversations, not just what's being advertised.

The site admits it's a rough snapshot and lacks proper statistical rigor, so treat it as a starting point for investigation rather than definitive ranking. It uses HN comment scores as a crude sentiment proxy, which works but isn't perfect. The next iteration plans to track which evaluation harnesses people use and what hardware they recommend for self-hosting.

TR

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