It matters to the person above, which would be why they asked the question.

That's generally how question asking goes...

Isn’t this the forum for the technically curious? So yes, it matters.

and I'm curious on the technical details for why it matters for you.

if it's, say, a chrome extension someone whipped up that makes it a button click to generate, or a script someone handcrafted, or somone had an LLM generate, or a fully automated bot doing it off a Cron job, or a billionaire is paying a human in the Philippines to do it by hand, some SV startup millionaire is bored with life and spends too much time here, a college student that has some free time between classes... the end result is a relatively simple post linking back to previous threads.

in what manner does having a human in the loop for that specific post affect your broader feelings about this site?

I’m merely curious.

so, how does it matter?

I can't possibly explain it any better than "I'm curious, and at hackernews we are here to discuss & understand how things work"

and I'm here to understand how, among other things, how other people (who aren't things) work/think. It was clearly important enough of a question for you to bother to login and post the comment asking if it was a bot, and you wanted some sort of reaction from you posting that message, so I ask, in all earnestly and not confrontationally - there are no wrong answers, what were you thinking?

It's a good idea and I was curious if it was a bot or manual. reply