I tried searching for similar incidents in the past[1], and I think the problem is that the title munging actually doesn't happen often enough for Hacker News to want to do anything about it. It's unusual that two front page articles were affected on the same day, but that's a small fraction compared to titles that passed through[2].

I don't know if Hacker News will pop up any extra confirmation to the submitter to warn that their submitted title were automatically edited, but I think that would be a better interface than relying on submitters and readers to fix the mistake after the article is already visible and ranked.

Whether any automated editing of titles actually helps with reducing clickbait is a different question.

[1]

How wolves became dogs (2026-01-09) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553433

How Samba Was Written (2026-01-04) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551531

Why I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky (2025-12-19) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327832

How they clean the balls in a ball pit (2025-10-15) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45592984

Why we didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust (2025-10-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517240

How Spain put up wealth taxes (2025-08-16) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44927460

[2]

Majority of the submitted titles never had "how" or "why" to begin with, and sometimes the submitter catches the change in time, for example:

How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code (2026-01-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620

I didn't see any mentions of the title being edited here.