Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

1. AI‑generated content contaminating training data
- “They’ll train on prompts and anything else you send in. Many LLM responses are sorta finger printable: I assume this is intentional.” – NegativeLatency
- “I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :)” – xpct
- “It’s optimizing for good writing. Therefore, it believes its outputs are good. Therefore, it believes inputs that look like its outputs are good.” – freeone3000

2. Declining quality of AI search assistants (e.g., Perplexity)
- “Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results… The links and references it gives frequently don’t match the text right next to them.” – Aurornis
- “I paid for perplexity pro for 3 years… I think they damaged themselves by going for a land grab of user base through freebies… Now there are reports of people being billed at the end of their trial period without warning.” – stranded22
- “Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast… Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.” – cheesecakegood

3. Rise of AI‑focused SEO/GEO/AEO manipulation driven by ad incentives
- “Manipulating training data so that models will recommend your product is undoubtedly a big industry.” – a2ff6eeb0
- “Begun, the AI SEO wars have.” – lukev
- “My friend works for a company called ‘profound’ whose whole job is ‘get found by ai’ by spamming reddit and other talk sites.” – dominotw
- “And it’s all because of ads. The incentives in an ad‑funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query.” – SoftTalker


🚀 Project Ideas

Generating project ideas…

SlopScan

Summary

  • Detects AI-generated text in web pages and documents to help platforms filter out LLM slop.
  • Core value proposition: restores trust in search results by providing a confidence score of human vs AI authorship.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Search engine operators, content moderators, publishers
Core Feature Real-time API that scores likelihood of AI generation using linguistic and statistical features
Tech Stack Python, FastAPI, HuggingFace Transformers (detectors like GPTZero, OpenAI classifier), Docker, PostgreSQL
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: Subscription tiered by API calls (e.g., $0.001 per 1k chars)

Notes

  • HN commenters lament AI slop flooding search: “If you don't already know what you are looking for, you're screwed.” – antiloper
  • Provides a practical tool to combat the “LLM training on LLM output” feedback loop discussed by sph and others.

HumanWeb

Summary

  • A search engine that indexes only human-verified, pre-2022 content and whitelisted trusted sources.
  • Core value proposition: delivers reliable, hallucination-free information by excluding AI-generated slop.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Researchers, students, professionals seeking trustworthy info
Core Feature Crawler that excludes domains known to host AI-generated content and boosts human-curated corpora (e.g., Project Gutenberg, arXiv pre-2022)
Tech Stack Go for crawler, Elasticsearch for index, React frontend, AWS S3 for storage, CI/CD pipelines
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: Freemium with premium API access ($9/mo) and ad-free experience

Notes

  • Users like coldpie have returned to library books: “I've mostly stopped using the Internet to learn new things and have gone back to books from the library.” – coldpie
  • Addresses the desire for a “low-background steel standard” of pre-2022 human knowledge mentioned by sph.

AEO Guard

Summary

  • Monitors brand mentions in LLM-powered search and answer engines, flagging AI-generated misinformation and suggesting corrections.
  • Core value proposition: protects brand reputation from AI slop and generative engine optimization attacks.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Brand managers, PR teams, SEO specialists
Core Feature Daily scans of Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Bing Chat, etc., using prompts to detect false claims and provide sentiment/truthfulness scores
Tech Stack Node.js, Puppeteer for browser automation, LLM API calls (OpenAI, Anthropic), Redis queue, Grafana dashboard
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: SaaS pricing $49/mo per brand, with enterprise custom plans

Notes

  • Mentions of AI SEO/GEO/AEO discussions: “GEO seems to be winning, Generative Engine Optimization.” – spiderfarmer
  • Brands already experiencing misinformation: “We have been in business for about 10 years, but asking any LLM about recommendations in this niche will not mention our tool at all.” – 8384727747478

Read Later