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№ 5 The State of AI Writing on Hacker News · August 2026

August's front page averaged 19% AI-generated.

Pangram flagged 19% of the month's 1,842 analyzed stories as AI-generated. That's 2pp higher than the month before.

Issue №5 Analyzed 1,842 stories Across 31 days From 1,121 distinct domains By HN AI Detector
1 in 5
front-page stories was AI-generated

Pangram flagged 357 of 1842 analyzed stories as AI this month.

+2pp
change versus the previous month

The front page ran more AI than July 2026.

100%
of writemd.app was AI-generated

Of domains with at least three stories this month, writemd.app had the highest AI share.

— The trend

AI % on the HN front page, every day of Aug

31 days · daily rolling avg
Prev. avg: 17% · this month: 14%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
prev avg · 17%
Aug 01Aug 08Aug 15Aug 22Aug 31
Below 17% 17–20% 20% and above Highest day: 25% on Aug 04

— Steady

Domains holding the line

vs. previous month
earendil.com
↓ 100pp
huggingface.co
↓ 100pp
medium.com
↓ 40pp
AI of the month

Native Bedrock Codex GPT-5.6 Sol lacks explicit cache controls, producing high cache-write spend

github.com · Aug 21 · 335 words
100% AI likelihood
Most-human longread

How to Do Great Work

paulgraham.com · Aug 1 · 5,000 words
0% AI likelihood
Mixed signal

Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel over baseline with Codex in GPU Mode's qr_v2 problem

sankalp.bearblog.dev · Aug 15 · 4,999 words
44% AI likelihood