[HN Gopher] Show HN: A big tech dev experience for an open sourc...
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Show HN: A big tech dev experience for an open source CMS
Hey HN! We're building an open-source CMS designed to help creators
with every part of the content production pipeline. We're showing
our tiny first step: A tool designed to take in a Twitter username
and produce an "identity card" based on it. We expect to use an
approach similar to [Constitutional AI] with an explicit focus on
repeatability, testability, and verification of an "identity card."
We think this approach could be used to create finetuning examples
for training changes, or serve as inference time insight for LLMs,
or most likely a combination of the two. The tooling we're showing
today is extremely simplistic (and the AI is frankly bad) but this
is intentional. We're more focused on showing the dev experience
and community aspects. We'd like to make it easier to contribute to
this project than edit Wikipedia. Communities are frustrated with
things like Wordpress, Apache, and other open source foundations
focusing on things other than software. We have a lot of community
ideas (governance via vote by jury is perhaps the most
interesting). We're a team of 5, and we've bounced around a few
companies with each other. We're all professional creators (video +
music) and we're creating tooling for ourselves first. Previously,
we did a startup called Vidpresso (YC W14) that was acquired by
Facebook in 2018. We all worked at Facebook for 5 years on creator
tooling, and have since left to start this thing. After leaving
FB, it was painful for us to leave the warm embrace of the Facebook
infra team where we had amazing tooling. Since then, we've pivoted
a bunch of times trying to figure out our "real" product. While we
think we've finally nailed it, the developer experience we built is
one we think others could benefit from. Our tooling is designed so
any developer can easily jump in and start contributing. It's an
AI-first dev environment designed with a few key principles in
mind: 1. You should be able to discover any command you need to
run without looking at docs. 2. To make a change, as much context
as possible should be provided as close to the code as possible. 3.
AIs are "people too", in the sense that they benefit from focused
context, and not being distracted by having to search deeply
through multiple files or documentation to make changes. We have a
few non-traditional elements to our stack which we think are worth
exploring. [Isograph] helps us simplify our component usage with
GraphQL. [Replit] lets people use AI coding without needing to set
up any additional tooling. We've learned how to treat it like a
junior developer, and think it will be the best platform for AI-
first open source projects going forward. [Sapling] (and Git
together) for version control. It might sound counter intuitive,
but we use Git to manage agent interactionsand we use Sapling to
manage "purposeful" commits. My last [Show HN post in 2013] ended
up helping me find my Vidpresso cofounder so I have high hopes for
this one. I'm excited to meet anyone, developers, creators, or nice
people in general, and start to work with them to make this project
work. I have good references of being a nice guy, and aim to keep
that going with this project. The best way to work with us is
[remix our Replit app] and [join our Discord]. Thanks for reading
and checking us out! It's super early, but we're excited to work
with you! [Constitutional AI]:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/constitutional-ai-harmles...
[Isograph]: https://isograph.dev [Replit]: https://replit.com
[Sapling]: https://sapling-scm.com [Show HN post in 2013]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993981 [remix our Replit
app]: https://replit.com/t/bolt-foundry/repls/Content-
Foundry/view... [join our Discord]: https://discord.gg/TjQZfWjSQ7
Author : randall
Score : 38 points
Date : 2025-03-07 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (contentfoundry.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (contentfoundry.com)
| Etheryte wrote:
| For your consideration, the main page you've linked to is nearly
| unusable on mobile, might want to look into that.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/n1zVO1n
|
| I can't read that and pinch to zoom has been disabled.
| randall wrote:
| We will fix right now.
| graypegg wrote:
| The tweaked typography is looking better!
|
| You'll need to toss on <meta
| name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-
| scale=1.0" />
|
| and add a small amount of padding around the body to make the
| text scaling pixel density agnostic though.
|
| I would also remove the overflow:hidden on body, and remove
| the fixed height on #root. Nothing needs to be a scrollable
| container here, the viewport can just scroll over the body.
| That's causing the bottom ~2 paragraphs to be "stuck" under
| the bottom edge of my iPhone 13 mini in safari. Ideally use
| `min-height:100dvh`.
| randall wrote:
| Just shipped it. Will get the padding going too.
| jpc0 wrote:
| I'm not sure how, but the text is miniscule on Safari on iOS and
| causes reader mode to need to scroll horizontally by nearly
| double the page width.
|
| I am going to slog through it but I would recommend checking on
| mobile Safari in the future.
| randall wrote:
| Reader mode is fixed, working on the meta tags now. Thanks for
| the patience.
| rekabis wrote:
| Haven't dug deeply into it, but it appears to be CSS that
| doesn't play nicely with the Safari rendering engine on mobile.
| With only five devs, maybe none of them have Apple devices?
| jpc0 wrote:
| > ...maybe none of them have Apple devices?
|
| I mean it is possible. But another comment mentioned it's
| broken on Android mobile too.
|
| They do seem to be working on it though which is great.
|
| The text on the site and the text in the post is the same
| though.
| markerz wrote:
| Super weird behavior for me too. When I double tap to zoom into
| the text, I get some weird nested scroll bar state and can only
| read the first few paragraphs.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Maybe its just me but I can't figure out what exactly this is. I
| tried your demo, gave it a Twitter user. And its now generating
| blog posts in the "voice" of that Twitter user? And this is a
| tiny first step to... what? I know this sounds antagonistic but
| I'm just genuinely confused.
| randall wrote:
| Totally fine, thanks for trying it out.
|
| The idea is this "identity card", which is super early in our
| dev process. The goal is to make it so you can have your voice
| as a thoroughly vetted example, and then be able to use that to
| finetune LLMs, or use it at inference time to enhance LLM
| outputs to sound more like you.
|
| We'll be building out a full CMS, and shipping parts of it over
| time.
|
| Thanks again, it's super early but we're working on it. :)
| jmuguy wrote:
| Ah, I'm not much of an AI person so I'm probably just lacking
| context. Regardless I do think it would be helpful to point
| out - your second paragraph refers to "the tooling" and that
| you're focused on "showing the dev experience and community
| aspects". I don't really see how your site or the demo you're
| showing actually highlights either of those things.
| randall wrote:
| Yeah, honestly this might have been too early of a launch,
| but kind of just want to put something out and then
| iterate.
| fallinditch wrote:
| > you can have your voice as a thoroughly vetted example, and
| then be able to use that to finetune LLMs
|
| You have piqued my interest.
|
| Can you explain in more detail how a user will fine tune a
| model. Will the LLM just replicate a user's conversational
| style? Or will the user be able to set deeper parameters, for
| example to define goal-oriented outputs for agentic actions?
| randall wrote:
| So the goal initially is going to be to create a
| "constitution." Basically a document that outlines your
| voice, or whatever.
|
| From there, you can create examples for every sentence and
| classify them... ie "this is a good example" or "this is
| almost a good example."
|
| Then, after you have a good enough enough number of human
| versions (idk this number yet), you can use those to create
| dozens more examples, refine, etc... then at some point
| you've thoroughly described a document enough that there's
| no more delta. Then you can use the document to train /
| finetune / infer.
|
| The effects are that the "instincts" of the model (if on
| the training / weights) or the "thoughts" of the model (at
| inference time) are closer to a well vetted baseline.
| graypegg wrote:
| Interesting! I think the idea of a "tone" in your content being
| enforced by a sort of... prose linter makes a lot of sense.
|
| You can assume 1 person with at least some practice in writing
| will have a clear tone and presence in the things they write, but
| this would be rather useful for corporate communications,
| especially when simpleton engineers (such as myself) try to write
| blog posts for a company engineering blog. If there was something
| nudging me towards the style of the blog, without steam rolling
| me constantly by rewriting everything, I would like that.
|
| For the CMS, (I think you're building a CMS?) I think building
| around THAT use case would be an awesome selling point. Let
| content folk spawn special ephemeral links that let someone write
| up a draft without having to set up an account. Have some sort of
| approval process in there too, that could be configured on that
| "magic link", so I don't impulsively publish to everyone.
|
| Make it super easy to just stumble into writing something the
| company can actually communicate with, right away. There's a lot
| of passionate people at companies, with 0 writing experience that
| would lend a lot of authenticity to blogs/engineering
| comms/recruiting ads, if they they had the bumpers in their
| bowling lane.
| randall wrote:
| precisely.
|
| that's exactly where we're headed.
|
| thanks!!
| 65 wrote:
| What's so difficult about just writing a blog post yourself, in
| your own writing style? What's so wrong about pure human
| expression?
| randall wrote:
| nothing at all. it's not just about blog posts though, it's
| figuring out what to write about, finding the best comments of
| fans who are smart and interesting without spending your entire
| day doing that (or hiring a team).
|
| it's not about having it write for you, it's about scaling who
| you are to do lower value tasks.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| With the constant deluge of AI slop everywhere, your voice is
| basically all you have.
|
| This is basically a tool to train a computer to "steal" your
| voice. I find that sad.
|
| Why can't we figure out how to use this technology in something
| other than creative tasks? I don't care what anyone says, a blog
| post showing off some technology or accomplishment should be a
| creative task, otherwise what's the point?
| randall wrote:
| for me, i've only been able to tell my stories at scale with
| the help of a lot of infrastructure. as a solo creator, i've
| never had the impact i did in local news or at cnet or
| engadget.
|
| it's not about having it write for you, it's about having it
| help you write better.
|
| writing is thinking, but 90% of writing is editing.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think this is interesting in sort of a scifi way because if you
| can establish a reliable enough characterization of "tone" then
| maybe you can then create a steganographic side channel out of
| deviations from that tone: so your adversaries see inane blather
| about something unimportant, but your comrades can decode the
| blather into more meaningful messages. Meanwhile, others are
| hosting your communications for free because what is actually
| cyphertext appears to them as engagement.
| randall wrote:
| Cool idea.
| rbalicki wrote:
| I'm incredibly excited for this launch! Bolt Foundry is the first
| company to use [Isograph], which is a framework for building
| data-driven apps that are performant and stable out of the box.
| It does so by making heavy use of a compiler and of generated
| files, and essentially being an incremental computation engine
| for your UI. Your UI becomes performant by doing the least amount
| of unnecessary work.
|
| And Bolt Foundry is truly the perfect first adopter! As "A big
| tech dev experience" implies, they're very focused on providing
| great DevEx. And a bunch of them previously worked at Meta, where
| they used Relay, and understood the powers that it provides.
|
| Isograph aims to provide an even better developer experience (see
| the YouTube link), and give you the things that previously were
| only feasible at FAANG-co scale: e.g. even in a very dynamic app,
| fetching just the JavaScript and data you end up using.
|
| So far, they've had a great experience using Isograph!! You
| should also [give it a try] or [contribute].
|
| [Isograph]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf8ac2NtwPY
|
| [give it a try]: https://isograph.dev/docs/quickstart
|
| [contribute]: https://github.com/isographlabs/isograph
| mediumsmart wrote:
| This is great! Assuming the LLM versions of me will build their
| fake consumer clones believably. Once this goes FAANG-co scale it
| will only be a couple of months until we can all go public and
| Advertisers will stop buying ads putting an end to the
| enshittification of the interwebs. _Genius_. Who came up with
| this? ... and is Apple likely to sue considering their patent
| from 2012?
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(page generated 2025-03-07 23:00 UTC)