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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 3
coffeecoders 12/3/2025|
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 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025|
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!
syndacks 12/4/2025||
This is pretty cool!

Since we’re sharing related work, I’ve been building something at a very different layer of the stack. Shameless plug warning!

Where Phind gives you an interactive answer right now, I built SageNet for the opposite problem: when you want to go from zero → actually good at something over weeks/months, not just get a one-shot result.

SageNet:

- builds a personalized learning plan

- adapts as you progress

- generates short audio lessons

- gives real projects

- has a daily voice check-in agent

- lets you share a public progress dashboard

If anyone wants to try it: https://www.sagenet.club

deepdarkforest 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025|
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.

lerp-io 12/4/2025||
i had idea like this when gpt first came out but decided not to go down this route because idk at what point to automate and at what point to refine and just seemed too complex and now tools like claude cli seem to make more sense for devs. but as internal b2b tool for non technical with predefined schemas and apis and very strong ui rules (eg u must use this library/component/pattern at all times for X or Y) u COULD generalize but then it would also be impotent to fork and extend those that already been made and without bugs or be able to fix bugs..and the second u need something slightly non trivial would need to be able to “drill down” to fix this or fix that or tweak or whatever so just becomes to vibe code and deploy so maybe like to vibe code harder and faster and deploy faster but maybe with enough rhfl it would be viable… i can imagine like some sort of fluid experience especially for learning or research where u just need to process and visualize some data and don’t care about stuff breaking because its internal tool
johndevor 12/3/2025||
We're using a similar approach at https://hallway.com ... launching soon!
rushingcreek 12/3/2025||
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 :(
l___l 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025||
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 :)
l___l 12/5/2025||
I want a simple CRUD mobile app that talks to a website. Like a website where you GET and POST to read and write data. Something that copies the submission forms of a website and gives me the website as a mobile app. Something that identifies all endpoints in a website and gives me access to these endpoints as a mobile app.
johndevor 12/4/2025||
Would a PWA suffice? We are building that @ https://hallway.com
l___l 12/5/2025||
Without looking further into hallway, I'm inclined to say no because it doesn't instantly prompt me to describe the app I want to build.

I want to build an app. Not to enter an email in a textbox.

resiros 12/3/2025||
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 12/3/2025|
Thank you! There is a share button in the upper-right corner of the answer page screen :)
hbarka 12/4/2025|
Very nice. This opens up new possibilities for enterprise use. Imagine opening a sales order or inventory management or item fulfillment page, based on your prompt. Bring on the AI UI for enterprise use cases. Salesforce is getting too expensive.
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