[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Phind 3 (YC S22) - Every answer is a mini...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Phind 3 (YC S22) - Every answer is a mini-app
Hi HN, We are launching Phind 3 (https://www.phind.com), an AI
answer engine that instantly builds a complete mini-app to answer
and visualize your questions in an interactive way. A Phind mini-
app appears as a beautiful, interactive webpage -- with images,
charts, diagrams, maps, and other widgets. Phind 3 doesn't just
present information more beautifully; interacting with these
widgets dynamically updates the content on the page and enables new
functionality that wasn't possible before. For example, asking
Phind for "options for a one-bedroom apartment in the Lower East
Side" (https://www.phind.com/search/find-me-options-
for-a-72e019ce-...) gives an interactive apartment-finding
experience with customizable filters and a map view. And asking for
a "recipe for bone-in chicken thighs" gives you a customizable
recipe where changing the seasoning, cooking method, and other
parameters will update the recipe content itself in real-time
(https://www.phind.com/search/make-me-an-recipe-for-7c30ea6c-...).
Unlike Phind 2 and ChatGPT apps, which use pre-built brittle
widgets that can't truly adapt to your task, Phind 3 is able to
create tools and widgets for itself in real-time. We learned this
lesson the hard way with our previous launch - the pre-built
widgets made the answers much prettier, but they didn't
fundamentally enable new functionality. For example, asking for
"Give me round-trip flight options from JFK to SEA on Delta from
December 1st-5th in both miles and cash"
(https://www.phind.com/search/give-me-round-trip-flight-c0ebe...)
is not something that neither Phind 2 nor ChatGPT apps can handle,
because its Expedia widget can only display cash fares and not
those with points. We realized that Phind needs to be able to
create and consume its own tools, with schema it designs, all in
real time. Phind 3's ability to design and create fully custom
widgets in real-time means that it can answer these questions while
these other tools can't. Phind 3 now generates raw React code and
is able to create any tool to harness its underlying AI answer,
search, and code execution capabilities. Building on our history
of helping developers solve complex technical questions, Phind 3 is
able to answer and visualize developers' questions like never
before. For example, asking to "visualize quicksort"
(https://www.phind.com/search/make-me-a-beautiful-visualizati...)
gives an interactive step-by-step walkthrough of how the algorithm
works. Phind 3 can help visualize and bring your ideas to life in
seconds -- you can ask it to "make me a 3D Minecraft simulation"
(https://www.phind.com/search/make-me-a-3d-minecraft-fde7033f...)
or "make me a 3D roller coaster simulation"
(https://www.phind.com/search/make-me-a-3d-roller-472647fc-e4...).
Our goal with Phind 3 is to usher in the era of on-demand software.
You shouldn't have to compromise by either settling for text-based
AI conversations or using pre-built webpages that weren't
customized for you. With Phind 3, we create a "personal internet"
for you with the visualization and interactivity of the internet
combined with the customization possible with AI. We think that
this current "chat" era of AI is akin to the era of text-only
interfaces in computers. The Mac ushering in the GUI in 1984 didn't
just make computer outputs prettier -- it ushered in a whole new
era of interactivity and possibilities. We aim to do that now with
AI. On a technical level, we are particularly excited about: -
Phind 3's ability to create its own tools with its own custom
schema and then consume them - Significant improvements in agentic
searching and a new deep research mode to surface hard-to-access
information - All-new custom Phind models that blend speed and
quality. The new Phind Fast model is based on GLM-4.5-Air while the
new Phind Large model is based on GLM 4.6. Both models are state-
of-the-art when it comes to reliable code generation, producing
over 70% fewer errors than GPT-5.1-Codex (high) on our internal
mini-app generation benchmark. Furthermore, we trained custom
Eagle3 heads for both Phind Fast and Phind Large for fast
inference. Phind Fast runs at up to 300 tokens per second, and
Phind Large runs at up to 200 tokens per second, making them the
fastest Phind models ever. While we have done Show HNs before for
previous Phind versions, we've never actually done a proper Launch
HN for Phind. As always, we can't wait to hear your feedback! We
are also hiring, so please don't hesitate to reach out. - Michael
Author : rushingcreek
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-12-03 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
| WillAdams wrote:
| Tried the prompt:
|
| >A geometry app with nodes which interact based on their
| coordinates which may be linked to describe lines or arcs with
| side panels for variables and programming constructs.
|
| which resulted in:
|
| https://www.phind.com/search/a-geometry-app-with-nodes-ed416...
|
| which didn't seem workable at all, and notable was lacking in a
| side panel.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Hi, I just clicked the link and it's showing up for me. Could
| you refresh?
| Lionga wrote:
| [flagged]
| WillAdams wrote:
| While I initially noted it as not showing up, after a while,
| things did appear, but what I'm getting isn't what I would
| consider usable, and in particular, the requested areas for
| values and variables do _not_ appear at the side as requested
| and it's not workable for my needs/expectations.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| I agree that this answer was a bit wacky. Phind Fast is the
| fast and free model. Selecting Phind Large, GPT-5.1, and
| Claude models would be better for a modeling task like
| this.
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| Congrats on the launch I love the idea! Super exciting to see
| these generative UIs
|
| I tried to make it generate an explainer page and it created an
| unrelated page: https://www.phind.com/search/explain-to-me-how-
| dom-66e58f3f-...
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Hi, apologies for this -- it seems to have written a syntax
| error that it then failed to auto-fix (hence the white screen).
|
| I tried generating your answer again:
| https://www.phind.com/search/explain-to-me-how-
| dom-78d20f04-....
| Lionga wrote:
| [flagged]
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Hi, sorry about that -- we are receiving an HN traffic "hug"
| spike right now and I'm working on getting that fixed ASAP.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Hey to be fair getting in the front page of HN floods a site
| with traffic and that's even harder for an AI app. Just wait a
| bit and will likely be fine.
|
| Congrats on the launch and keep up the great work.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while
| loading www.phind.com (see the browser console for more
| information).
|
| Getting this error the homepage. In the browser console I am just
| seeing Content-Security-Policy: (Report-Only
| policy) The page's settings would block a script (script-src-
| elem) at https://www.phind.com/_next/static/chunks/c857e369-74661
| 8a9672c8ed0.js?dpl=dpl_4dLj9qrNQMh6evFNeDZbEJjTnT9B from being
| executed because it violates the following directive: "script-src
| 'none'" GET https://www.phind.com/_next/static/ch
| unks/4844-90bb89386b9ed987.js?dpl=dpl_4dLj9qrNQMh6evFNeDZbEJjTnT9
| B [HTTP/1.1 403 403 Forbidden 716ms]
|
| The other links you shared seem to work though
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Interesting -- could you try with a vanilla browser (no
| extensions or VPN) please? Preferably Chrome or Safari.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| It seems to work except when I connect to my work VPN, which
| is very permissive -- I haven't observed it to break anything
| else
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| It's definitely cool and engineering wise close to SOTA given
| lovable and all of the app generators.
|
| But, assuming you are trying to be in between lovable and google,
| how are you not going to be steamrolled by google or perplexity
| etc the moment you get solid traction? Like, if your insight for
| v3 was that the model should make its own tools, so even less
| hardcoded, then i just dont see a moat or any vertical direction.
| What really is the difference?
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thanks, and great question. The custom Phind models are really
| key here -- off-the-shelf models (even SOTA models from big
| labs) are slow and error-prone when it comes to generating full
| websites on-the-fly.
|
| Our long-term vision is to build a fully personalized internet.
| For Google this is an innovator's dilemma, as Google currently
| serves as a portal to the current internet.
| resiros wrote:
| That is really cool! Congrat on the launch!
|
| I was surprised not to see a share and embed button. I would
| expect that could be huge for growth.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thank you! There is a share button in the upper-right corner of
| the answer page screen :)
| vector_spaces wrote:
| OK, I've had a chance to play with it in earnest.
|
| First: my sense is that for most use cases, this will begin to
| feel gimmicky rather quickly and that you will do better by
| specializing rather than positioning yourself next to ChatGPT,
| which answers my questions without too much additional ceremony.
|
| If you have any diehard users, I suspect they will cluster around
| very particular use cases, say business users trying to create
| quick internal tools, users who want to generate a quick app on
| mobile, scientists that want quick apps to validate data.
| Focusing on those clusters (your actual ones, not these specific
| examples) and building something optimized for their use cases
| seems likelier to be a stronger long term play for you
|
| Secondly, I asked it to prove a theorem, and it gave me a link to
| a proof. This is fine, since LLM generated math proofs are a bit
| of a mess, but I was surprised that it didn't offer any
| visualizations or anything further. I then asked it for numerical
| experiments that support the conjecture, and it just showed me
| some very generic code and print statements for a completely
| different problem, unrelated to what I asked about. Not very
| compelling
|
| Finally, and least important really: please stop submitting my
| messages when I hit return/enter! Many of us like to send more
| complex multi-line queries to LLMs
|
| Good luck
| htshnr wrote:
| First time I'm seeing valid business advice on HN - unlike the
| infamous Dropbox comment haha :) But I strongly agree with the
| above advice on specializing for a vertical and hope the
| founders take it seriously!
| rushingcreek wrote:
| The loading issues should be fixed now (as of 11am PST).
| Apologies for this -- one of our search providers went down right
| as we launched :(
| coffeecoders wrote:
| This is good. It's fascinating how it spins up interactive pages
| instantly. Some of the mini-apps actually feel useful, but others
| break in ways you wouldn't expect.
|
| I'm curious to see how it evolves with more complex, multi-step
| queries.
| personjerry wrote:
| The problem is I don't think every answer needs a mini-app. I'd
| argue there are very few answers that do.
|
| For example, it feels like Google's featured snippet (quick
| answer box) but expanded. But the thing is, many people don't
| like the feature snippet, and there's a reason it doesn't appear
| for many queries - it doesn't contribute meaningfully to those.
|
| This functionality is doing exactly the opposite of the process
| of building good web apps: Rather than "unpacking functionality"
| and making it specific for an audience, it "packs" all
| functionality into a generalized use case, at the cost of
| becoming extremely mediocre for each use case, which makes it
| precisely worse than any other tool you'd use for that job.
|
| As a specific example, I clicked your apartments in LES search
| (https://www.phind.com/search/find-me-options-for-a-72e019ce-...)
| and it shows us just 4 listings...? It shows some arbitrary
| subset of all things I could find on StreetEasy, and then
| provides a subset of the search functionality, losing things such
| as days on market, neighborhood, etc.
|
| It's a cool demo, but "on-demand software" is exactly "Solution-
| In-Search-of-a-Problem".
|
| The difficult part you need to ask is, like feature snippet, what
| are the questions worth solving with this, and is the pain point
| big enough that it's worth solving?
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, and I agree that it is very much early
| days for this product category. To be clear, our goal is to
| make the software specific for an audience: you. What's
| exciting, though, is that models are rapidly improving at
| building on-demand software and this will directly benefit
| Phind. There are still many edge cases, but I think it will get
| better quickly.
| personjerry wrote:
| Hmm this answer seems to have ignored everything I said,
| provided a generic answer ("you") which is exactly the
| problem, and doubled down on models/technology portion (and
| edge cases?) which is neither built by Phind nor did I
| question.
| imglorp wrote:
| I would like to see a detection of when I want a one sentence
| answer and when I want a full interactive explanation with
| flowcharts and tables and diagrams.
|
| My most common usecase now is "give me a quick answer because
| I don't want to wade through the search engine results page
| and then wade through the blog to get my one liner. Eg:
| "what's the command line to untar an xz over ssh?"
| rushingcreek wrote:
| I hear you, but why not use something like Google AI Mode
| or AI Overviews for that? That's pretty hard to beat for
| simple questions in terms of speed, especially for one-
| liners.
| alwa wrote:
| I tend to agree: I don't understand what the "one-off app" is
| trying to achieve. In the example of the rental apartment--the
| user specified the parameters in the query. Just apply them,
| right?
|
| I offer this in the spirit of feeling like I'm missing
| something, not out of negativity--I just genuinely don't
| understand the proposition.
|
| What's the advantage of trying to extract and normalize
| features from already-messy data sources, then provide controls
| that duplicate the query, rather than just applying the query
| and returning the results? Isn't the user turning to a natural-
| language LLM specifically to avoid operating idiosyncratic UI
| controls?
|
| For that matter, it takes time to learn to use an interface
| effectively. To understand how what it _says_ it's doing
| connects to what it's _actually_ doing. I know I can _always_
| trust McMaster Carr's filter controls, and I know I can _never_
| trust Amazon's wacky random ones.
|
| It seems to me that it's much harder to pick the right controls
| and make them work correctly than it is to throw some controls
| in an interface. Maybe that's what I'm missing: that just
| wiring in controls in the first place _is_ the hard part for
| most people who don't work in this space.
|
| Is the idea here that I'd need to learn a brand new interface,
| and figure out whether I can trust it, with every query?
| rushingcreek wrote:
| A hypothesis here is that well-crafted UI helps you
| understand/see options for what you don't yet know.
|
| For example, here's an example for a "day trip plan in
| Bristol" that contains a canonical example (directly based on
| the query), but also a customization widget that presents
| some options that you might not have already thought about if
| you were just doing a text-based followup.
|
| https://www.phind.com/search/make-me-a-day-plan-
| ac8c583b-ce6...
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > I don't understand what the "one-off app" is trying to
| achieve.
|
| Many years ago in college I worked on building Java applets
| that let kids visualize math related concepts. Sliders make
| things like sine/cosine and all sorts of other cool stuff way
| way more intuitive. We had a applet that, let you do
| ridiculous comparisons, to visualize how many empire state
| buildings a marathon is in length, etc. We had an primitive
| 'engine' simulator that let you adjust inputs on a steam
| engine. stuff like that
| omani wrote:
| hey michael, long term phind user here. phind became absolute
| sh*t. almost every answer is wrong. web search should be on by
| default to get accurate info. but even then is ends up
| hallucinating a lot.
|
| if every response starts with "You're absolutely right -- ..."
| you know phind is hallucinating and you can immediately close the
| tab.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| hey, sorry to hear that. web search is on by default, but we
| had some teething issues with it in the last hour. it should be
| fully fixed now. can you send some links that failed?
| nextaccountic wrote:
| people often can't share their searches due to privacy
| concerns, maybe you should at least provide an email address
| so they can share it privately? rather than posting on HN
| (going forward, does you app have a feedback button in each
| search? if not it should)
|
| anyway I think you need better QA processes
| johndevor wrote:
| We're using a similar approach at https://hallway.com ...
| launching soon!
| Honga wrote:
| I love the direction. It feels really fresh.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thank you, great to hear :)
| lukasb wrote:
| I asked about the Peninsula campaign during the Civil War and it
| gave me an overview, a map, profiles (with photos) of the main
| military commanders, a relevant Youtube video ... rough edges but
| overall love the format.
|
| Rough edges: - aspect ratios on photos (maybe because I was on
| mobile, cropping was weird) - map was very hard to read (again,
| mobile) - some formatting problems with tables - it tried to show
| an embedded Gmap for one location but must have gotten the
| location wrong, was just ocean
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, this is helpful!
| mainecoder wrote:
| Awesome job is it possible to have predefined specing features
| and perhaps a layout as well for instance if I need a specific
| layout, font , order , certain UI elements it could be for
| accessibilitys' sake or preference , can you make the internal
| code used for app creation be configurable insuring security of
| course.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Impressive. A few weeks ago I asked Claude how to use FreeCad,
| and I got stuck and Claude couldn't help me get out.
|
| When I told Phind I'm a complete novice, it came up with very
| detailed instructions and troubleshooting tips.
| miduil wrote:
| Great reminder that phind still exists, with Gemini Enterprise
| and ChatGPT + phind always creating massive diagrams I kinda
| stopped using it unconsciously. Maybe I'll give it a try again.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Yep, we heard that feedback loud and clear; the diagrams are a
| lot less annoying in this new version.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I-LOVE-IT!
|
| At least to me, this is totally fresh take on AI and providing
| answers. OpenAI is burning through billions without trying to
| make nicer interface or just come up with some innovation how to
| train models (Qwen and Minimax). Unlike Claude who tries to
| smother you with content and emojis, I got clean and focused
| answer to my query and an app.
|
| Again, love it, thank you. If you have to sell yourself, make
| sure you get a lot of billions.
| desireco42 wrote:
| BTW I saw this approach with mini apps with Cove.ai and it
| surprised me how useful it can be. I got simulations of some
| business ideas I was developing there and it was really useful.
| gavinray wrote:
| Neat idea!
|
| I tried it out with a relatively basic Medicinal
| Chem/Pharmacology question, asking for an interactive Structure-
| Activity-Relationship viewer: > "Build an
| interactive app showing SAR for a congeneric series. Use simple
| beta-2 agonists (salbutamol -> formoterol -> salmeterol). Display
| the common phenethylamine scaffold with R-group positions
| highlighted, and let me toggle substituents to see how logP,
| receptor binding affinity, and duration of action change."
|
| It did not quite get it right. It put a bunch of pieces together,
| but the interactivity/functionality didn't work and choice of
| visualization was poor for the domain:
|
| https://www.phind.com/search/find-me-options-for-a-72e019ce-...
| gavinray wrote:
| Gemini 3's new "Dynamic View" responses does a pretty good job:
|
| https://gemini.google.com/share/e0cdb00b1854
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! The model you use in Phind makes a big
| impact. Claude 4.5 Opus in Phind gave a better answer than
| Phind Fast here: https://www.phind.com/search/build-an-
| interactive-app-showin....
| sulicat wrote:
| This is pretty cool, I asked it to visualize national
| import/export data, it did alright.
|
| I was hoping to get a map with arrows like "$35B in agriculture"
| from China to USA. I wasn't able to make it do that, but the
| information was still there presented in a reasonable way!
| lukebechtel wrote:
| been waiting for this, thanks for bringing it to the fore!
|
| We tried to do this for learning purposes with Reasonote, but the
| tech wasn't _quite_ there yet.
|
| I'm excited to dig back in with some newer models.
| dwa3592 wrote:
| I asked about twinning extra spicy tea bc i had just made it for
| me: https://www.phind.com/search/twinnings-extra-spicy-tea-
| bd067...
|
| and after about 90 seconds the mini app was created which had a
| few sliders for cardamom, cinnamon, ginger which was really
| confusing, then it showed a bunch of other stuff which was also
| completely useless. I did the same search on Google (
| https://tinyurl.com/47sh4eah ) and did not dislike the answer bc
| i know it didn't burn 1000s of tokens for that query. Sorry for
| being a bit harsh but I have never seen wastage of resources as
| bad as this.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Holy shit those sliders are so funny what was it even trying to
| do?
| dwa3592 wrote:
| I have no idea.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Yikes, lol.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Oh wow, yeah this one is pretty funny. My attempt gave more
| reasonable results: https://www.phind.com/search/twinnings-
| extra-spicy-tea-b1742....
| l___l wrote:
| This might be super-obvious or it might already exist but can you
| make Phind create mobile apps? I don't know of any site that
| builds a mobile app and _actually gives you the app_ instead of
| give you half the app or ask to pay for credits and so on and
| never showing you the full real app that you can install on your
| phone and _actually use_.
|
| Phind user for ~2 years.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| What type of apps would you like to see it make? How does this
| version of Phind work for it? And thanks for sticking with us
| :)
| thatcat wrote:
| There is a small bug in your onboarding flow: when I select
| research model and upgrade on phind on my phone it shows some
| features, but it is not possible to scroll down to the purchase
| button.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| thanks for reporting!
| browningstreet wrote:
| I don't get it. I have used Phind a lot over the last year but
| now I type in the same prompts I used in the past and it's not
| phind anymore, and it doesn't work for me at all.
|
| Dey phucked up phind.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| sorry to hear that -- could you please elaborate?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-03 23:00 UTC)