I think Show HN has been closed off to new users in an attempt to gatekeep it against slop entries and that's why the quality has increased.

And I think "how it is arrived at," in other words, the art of code, is what HN is supposed to be about. It isn't merely a place to advertise startups or projects, the goal is to satisfy intellectual curiosity and have discussions. That goal is undermined when projects are built with AI because the person presenting them will not be capable of discussing anything but their prompts and AI processes, which is not at all interesting.