Hacker News Agent
Hacker News rewards the person who answers the question and flags everybody else. This agent does the reading: it goes through the threads, and drafts the comment for the ones where what you built is genuinely the answer. You post it yourself, from your own account.
Kwern gathers what it needs itself
The thread was on Monday. You found it on Thursday.
Once every few weeks a thread appears where somebody describes, in detail, the exact problem you spent a year solving. You find it on Thursday. The thread is from Monday, the good comments are at the top, and the moment has gone. Sitting in Hacker News all day is not the fix, because that is a job, and it is not the job you have.
What is Hacker News marketing?
Hacker News marketing is answering the technical question, in public, as the person who built the thing. The site has no marketing surface: it has a comment box and a crowd that has read every launch post ever written, and the fastest way to be removed from a thread is to sound like you are selling. What works there is narrow and old fashioned: answer the technical question that was asked, be specific, say that you built the thing you are recommending, and stop. Anything that reads like copy gets flagged, and the people doing the flagging are your users.
A Hacker News agent is the reading half of that, done for you. It goes through the week's threads, keeps the ones where somebody has a problem your product genuinely solves, and drafts the comment you would have written if you had the evening free. Kwern's never posts: every draft comes with the page to open, and you paste the comment under your own account, because on Hacker News the account is the reputation.
What it leaves you
A comment written for one thread, with the page to open. Occasionally a Show HN pitch, and only when there is something finished enough for people to try.
The skills it runs
A run may activate these and nothing else. Every one of them is open: read the file before you turn the agent on.
What the market charges for a channel it does not cover
Two figures here rather than three, because none of the AI CMO products we read ships a Hacker News agent and there is almost nothing to price against. Both are prices on those companies' own pricing pages on the day shown. Kwern publishes no audience figure for Hacker News, because we have not measured one.
Kwern against the alternatives
| What is compared | Kwern | AI CMO suites | Point tools | An agency | Doing it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replying without getting flagged | Answers the question first, never pitches, and posts nothing itself: you paste it under your own account. | None of the ten we read touch Hacker News at all. | A scheduler will post whatever you queue, whenever you queued it. | A fresh account with no history, which is what gets flagged. | You read the guidelines once, in 2019. |
| Finding the thread worth answering | Reads the week's threads and keeps the ones where you have something true to add, with the page to open attached. | Nothing, because none of them read Hacker News. | A keyword alert, which fires on every mention and none of the good ones. | A digest of threads that peaked on Tuesday. | Whatever was on the front page when you last looked. |
| Writing the comment | Written in your own voice against what your product actually does, and it says you built the thing rather than hiding it. | Nothing on this channel. | Nothing. An alert does not write. | Written by somebody who has never used what you built. | Written by you, well, on the evenings you have one spare. |
| Who says yes before it goes out | One feed. Approve, edit or reject each draft; nothing is published or spent until you do. | Usually a dashboard, sometimes autopilot with no stop. | Per tool, in whatever queue that tool keeps. | A shared document, and a reply a day later. | You wrote it, so you approved it. |
| What it costs a month | From $29 a month, every agent in every plan. | $20 to $1,000 a month, and $5,000 for a done-for-you tier. | One subscription per channel, each with its own seat. | A monthly retainer, agreed before anything ships. | Nothing, and it costs you the evenings. |
| Who pays for the model | Your own key. Across the 11 models Kwern vets, input runs $0.10 to $10 per million tokens, billed to you by the provider. | Credits you buy from them; the markup is never itemised. | Theirs, folded into the subscription. | Inside the retainer, at whatever margin they keep. | Your own key, at the provider's price. |
RiseMore, the cheapest
- www.risemore.app/pricing
MarketOwl, the dearest
- marketowl.ai/pricing
This Agent runs about 15 times a month. The tokens those runs spend are billed to you by your own provider: $0.10 per million in on gpt-6-luna, $10 on gpt-6-astra. Kwern never resells a token and never marks one up.
Three plans, every agent in each
Your model key, your accounts, your approval on every post. The plan decides how many products you run.
Questions about the Hacker News Agent
Where to go next
Someone is asking for what you built today.
On Reddit, on X, in ChatGPT's answers. Kwern finds them every morning and drafts the reply in your voice; you decide what goes out.