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
This is pretty cool. Congrats on the launch! With anything, there will be multiple corner cases to handle, but I'm initially impressed!
Low hanging fruit feedback that would really improve the experience of many: I haven't been able to pinpoint it, but there seems to be double scroll bar enabled in both the container of the whole page (top navbar, and "non-content") and the actual wanted scrollbar inside the rendered content. Because of this, especially on mobile, when I try to scroll, the outside scrollbar "captured" my scroll input and I could never get past the Headline.
Might be a missing height: 100vh; or overflow-y: hidden in your min-h-screen class. Cheers!
Thank you, will take a look!
Pro tip: Use 100dvh rather than 100vh. dvh is dynamic so it reacts to changes in the available device height. Useful as on mobile browsers the height of the window often changes when you use certain browser features
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?
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.
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.
Yea, I wonder if this was an ai interaction.
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?"
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.
One benefit is that they could use just phind, making it more sticky.
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?
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...
> 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
I think the killer app for this genre of on demand app creation is BI.
that's pretty hard to make that work past a certain point. Context is limited, and operations on numbers isn't genAI's strength.
If your reports include a small error, it could be catastrophic.
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
Thanks for the feedback, this is helpful!
This is cool! AI is the UI!
I could see something like this being especially killer in ecommerce, where comparisons, faceted search, and heavy use of video/photos/3D models is important. Also ecommerce brands love to have control over the aesthetic of their experiences. Their UI is constantly evolving due to sales, up/cross sells, recommendations, personalization, A/B testing, etc
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/
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.
I also used the original phind back then. For a brief period of time, it was probably the best place around for programming questions.
Then they pivoted to flowcharts and now to "one off apps". It is a bit weird because the concepts are not bad necessarily, but instead of adding features to their product incrementally they decided to make that one feature their product. The problem imo is that there is no one size fitting all. Flowcharts or interactive content can be great, but it is not always the best fit for a search query. Like, I do believe that the chat based UI is not optimal and flowcharts and more complex interactive/dynamic functionalities are great improvements for some use cases, but I am not sure of what to make of this product. If it was a feature in a more general product that I could still get the same functionality as before, it may have been more appealing. Now it feels like they are building a new hammer every time and looking for nails that fit that one hammer.
try old.phind.com
yeah, broadly agree with this. Phind had quite a strong niche a 18 or so months ago (eg, the best LLM powered replacement for Stack Overflow), but I'm guessing improvements in the core models ate their lunch.
sorry to hear that -- could you please elaborate?
Before it was a fast AI chat that would explain tech stuff and help me with issues.
I used it quite often, even instead of GH Copilot.
Now, it's much slower and has some kind of solution view that gets updated with every new message.
Found myself to resorting to GH Copilot chat quite often today, because Phind felt like a different/worse service.
One example: I asked it to explain continue.dev, the kind of thing I’d asked it previously.
Before I got a proper summary and an arch diagram. It felt like its own work. Now it spun in circles for a good while and then it regurgitated the continue.dev website in weird topic boxes and that wasn’t helpful at all.
It does seem that it’s SOTA for LLMs to take forever to respond. In that sense it’s in good company. More and more, lately, I send a prompt to an LLM and switch tabs because it’s likely to be 20-60 seconds at best.
A curious regression, even if I understand why.
Thanks for the specific example -- I'll take a look at this. In the meantime, you can use old.phind.com if you still want the old experience.
As someone who never used Phind, how was it better than copilot? Did it integrate data from broader sources or just do a better job of presenting it? Was it faster?
It did so extensive online search.
You need to make it so the map doesn't refresh when I click another pin, that's so annoying. I wanted to see how hectic my plan for London day trip would be, but I lose the locality between clicking different options in the map.
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.
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.
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?
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
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...
Interesting -- could you try with a vanilla browser (no extensions or VPN) please? Preferably Chrome or Safari.
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
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
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.
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.
Oh wow, yeah this one is pretty funny. My attempt gave more reasonable results: https://www.phind.com/search/twinnings-extra-spicy-tea-b1742....
Holy shit those sliders are so funny what was it even trying to do?
I have no idea.
Yikes, lol.
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).
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.
Hi, I just clicked the link and it's showing up for me. Could you refresh?
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.
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.
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Neat idea!
I tried it out with a relatively basic Medicinal Chem/Pharmacology question, asking for an interactive Structure-Activity-Relationship viewer:
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-...
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....
Gemini 3's new "Dynamic View" responses does a pretty good job:
https://gemini.google.com/share/e0cdb00b1854
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.
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-...
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-....
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!
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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 :)
Would a PWA suffice? We are building that @ https://hallway.com
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?
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.
We're using a similar approach at https://hallway.com ... launching soon!
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 :(
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.
Thank you! There is a share button in the upper-right corner of the answer page screen :)
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.
thanks for reporting!
i love this. had my doubts when i read the premise, but this might replace chatGPT for me for learning stuff.
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.
If this actually gets traction this looks like it'll just become a feature of ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
I love the direction. It feels really fresh.
Thank you, great to hear :)
Very interesting... with the marginal cost of basic software dev decreasing but distribution costs remaining high, I have been wondering how that changes software consumption (1).
I suppose this is one interesting pattern for that.
_1: (explored a bit here at https://world.hey.com/akumar/software-s-blog-era-2812c56c)_
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.
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.
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.
Yep, we heard that feedback loud and clear; the diagrams are a lot less annoying in this new version.
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
Is this a pivot? I used Phind successfully about 2 years ago to make my way around an old codebase
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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.
Hi, sorry about that -- we are receiving an HN traffic "hug" spike right now and I'm working on getting that fixed ASAP.
Very cool!
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