Exactly. The audience used to be tinkerers, people who liked getting their hands dirty. Now it's mostly bros of one stripe or another (AI bros, finance bros, and so on).
The link 'past' in the top bar allows you to see the front page in the past.
From 2010 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-04 that still looks similar (though I find it amusing that Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754134 is on the front page "... My prediction (heh pun intended) is that you see enormous changes in the field when processing by GPU's becomes much more available. There are some algorithms that are simply difficult to research because labs don't have access to fast enough machines. ...")
There's certainly been some broification and the various reddit exoduses have been shifting the average user a bit.
I do believe you've got your top color set to ff007f rather than ff6600 if you're forgetting what the site looked like then.
It depends I guess, on how competent and creative you are. I am not against AI per se, but when I see boring, zero investment, generic AI slop, there is no value in it, hence I won't invest time reading it.
