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Posted by rushingcreek 8 hours ago

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

75 points | 66 commentspage 2
mainecoder 5 hours ago|
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.
WillAdams 8 hours ago||
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 8 hours ago|
Hi, I just clicked the link and it's showing up for me. Could you refresh?
WillAdams 6 hours ago|||
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 6 hours ago||
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.
Lionga 8 hours ago|||
[flagged]
dingnuts 7 hours ago||
[dead]
l___l 4 hours ago||
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 4 hours ago|
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 :)
bossyTeacher 1 hour ago||
Is this a pivot? I used Phind successfully about 2 years ago to make my way around an old codebase
0xferruccio 8 hours ago||
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 8 hours ago|
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-....

thatcat 3 hours ago||
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 3 hours ago|
thanks for reporting!
coffeecoders 7 hours ago||
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.

vector_spaces 7 hours ago||
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 6 hours ago|
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!
mbesto 3 hours ago||
If this actually gets traction this looks like it'll just become a feature of ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
johndevor 6 hours ago|
We're using a similar approach at https://hallway.com ... launching soon!
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