Top
Best
New

Posted by rushingcreek 12/3/2025

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

138 points | 94 commentspage 2
dwa3592 12/3/2025|
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.

rushingcreek 12/3/2025||
Oh wow, yeah this one is pretty funny. My attempt gave more reasonable results: https://www.phind.com/search/twinnings-extra-spicy-tea-b1742....
ryanmcbride 12/3/2025|||
Holy shit those sliders are so funny what was it even trying to do?
dwa3592 12/3/2025||
I have no idea.
SeanAnderson 12/3/2025||
Yikes, lol.
fainpul 12/4/2025||
Didn't really work for me. I asked it for something I hacked together myself in the past, so I have an idea of what I want, and I also know that resources like this exist on the internet. So it seemed like a fair test.

Prompt:

"I want to build a V-plotter (carriage hanging from two points, connected by light chain or belts). How can I figure out the dimensions of the printable area that will have good print quality? Good quality requires that there is enough, but not too much pull on both chains."

Result:

https://www.phind.com/search/i-want-to-build-a-e402fb56-8e69...

Yes, it has some form elements to adjust values. But it's not really interactive and the "map" it talks about is not showing. Also "Keep both chains between 0.5 m g and 1.5 m g" sounds like nonsense.

You also get the usual LLM crap like "Loose belts cause skipped steps and misaligned layers" where "layers" clearly refers to 3D printers and has no meaning here.

What I expected:

https://jsfiddle.net/Lgmnv5t7/2/

WillAdams 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025|
Hi, I just clicked the link and it's showing up for me. Could you refresh?
WillAdams 12/3/2025|||
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 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025|||
[flagged]
dingnuts 12/3/2025||
[dead]
0xferruccio 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025|
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-....

mainecoder 12/3/2025||
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.
slake 12/4/2025||
This is so cool. These are shareable I guess? I built this to give me recommendations of good non-fiction books to read...

https://www.phind.com/search/i-want-to-find-out-d79b4dca-bac...

gavinray 12/3/2025||
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-...

rushingcreek 12/3/2025||
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....
gavinray 12/3/2025||
Gemini 3's new "Dynamic View" responses does a pretty good job:

https://gemini.google.com/share/e0cdb00b1854

sulicat 12/3/2025||
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!

hirako2000 12/4/2025||
I asked. What is life.

It gave me a decent introduction to biology, it defined what life is, then quizzed me. The problem is, it says to select the appropriate answer, but selection does not work.

It reminds me of the game developer behind "Another World". He made some good games, and was able to raise money from early game investors. He thought he could make a game maker. He would develop it once, and it would make all sort of games. So he pitched it, and investors were more interested than ever. Obviously he realized that such concept would never work. Today we have over ambiguous ideas, but they ship them anyway.

dr_kiszonka 12/4/2025|
You have a good product, but I would remove beautiful* from your copy. Based on what I tried, every result page has the same AI aesthetic, with low contrast text which is at times _very_ hard to read (e.g., small red text).
More comments...