Developer builds near-exact Hacker News clone with AI comment plan

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Oct 7, 2026, 19:50 UTC

In early October 2026, a developer published a near-exact clone of Hacker News at news.ycombinator.lol and released the source code on GitHub under the repository shawwn/sharc. The project took roughly four months to build. Hacker News moderator dang contributed to the effort and suggested the codebase name sharc. The site currently mirrors real Hacker News comments rather than generating its own, which the developer openly describes as making it completely pointless.

The original concept was more provocative than the finished product suggests: the developer intended to replace every comment on the clone with AI-generated ones, effectively simulating a parallel Hacker News where the community voice is synthetic. That ambition is what gives the project its significance beyond a technical exercise. A fully realized version would have raised pointed questions about whether AI can reproduce the texture of a specific online community well enough to be convincing, and what it means for trust in discussion platforms if such clones become easy to operate. The developer has now said they are unlikely to complete that feature, leaving the more interesting experiment unrun.

None of the three camps have published reactions to this story yet. Pro-AI voices would typically highlight the technical achievement of replicating a complex platform and frame the AI comment concept as a legitimate research or creative project worth exploring further. Anti-AI voices would likely treat the original plan as a cautionary example of how AI could be used to manufacture fake community consensus at scale, and might argue that even an incomplete project normalizes the idea. Middle-ground observers would probably focus on the transparency the developer showed, noting that publishing the source code and admitting the limitation openly is precisely the kind of disclosure that separates acceptable experimentation from deceptive deployment.

The detail worth watching is whether the developer or anyone who forks the sharc repository eventually builds out the AI comment layer. If that feature ships in any form, the conversation about synthetic online communities would shift from hypothetical to concrete very quickly.