I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic

A recent post on Hacker News highlights the growing challenge of bot traffic for independent website owners. After sharing a personal project on the platform, the author experienced an immediate and overwhelming surge in traffic, which was quickly identified as automated AI scrapers rather than human visitors. The influx of bots, often associated with training large language models or indexing content, can lead to increased server costs and degraded site performance. The author details the technical hurdles faced when attempting to filter this traffic while maintaining accessibility for legitimate users. This experience underscores a broader trend in the tech ecosystem where the rise of generative AI tools has significantly increased the volume of automated web crawling. The article serves as a cautionary tale for developers and startup founders about the necessity of implementing robust bot mitigation strategies early in the development lifecycle to protect site resources.