Cool project, but I'd really suggest looking at the UI.
The text is too small and it's way too dense with information in general. Considering how simple this product is to use, it's kinda crazy that I have to scroll through over a page length of (mostly useless, AI-generated) information before getting to the actual interface.
Also what is going on with the footer (why does it link back to the site itself, why is it telling me to "serve over HTTP").
We didn't have this kind of sloppy UI. Putting in an extra text field is work, so we mostly had blocks of text and misaligned fields and text in the wrong place.
AI has no trouble churning out code, so AI-generated sloppy UIs have text fields everywhere.
It's clear that this was vibecoded. I'm antivibecoding, but here's a tip.
Don't focus on the actual code or the actual UI. You need to give your model a way to see its output. If it just pumps code, it looks at the code. If you let it look at the rendered UI, whether by manually taking screenshots, or making it so that the agent looks at the browser output automagically (with a webdriver or selenium or puppeteer or a skill or whatever), it will fix whatever issues it sees on itself, and it will never be content with delivering something that looks as bad as this.
>Since this submission has been on the front page of HN for hours now, clearly people like it as it is. I don't think I need to change anything about it.
That's not really how it works. People like it in spite of the bad vibe coded UI. That doesn't mean that the UI is good. The criticism was clearly correct. I don't feel bad about publicly criticizing the UI to your face, either, because it's not like you were the one who designed/created it anyway--by the same reasoning, I don't see any reason to get defensive about it, since you have not invested very much of yourself into it either.
This has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine in general. Over the last six months or so I've been inundated with all kinds of lazy, bad vibe-coded UIs via my normal internet usage. It feels paradoxical in a way, because AI tooling should make it easier than ever to fix obvious problems, and yet UIs have gotten worse.
I have two theories for why this is: (1) usage of AI tooling conditions people into engaging with their creations in a certain hands-off, uninvolved, low-attention surface level way; or perhaps (2) those who care about their UIs were the people who were already creating UIs pre-AI, and so the marginal effect of AI tooling has been to increase UI creation amongst precisely the population who cares the least about what they are putting out.
I've also been developing a very strong personal revulsion towards the Claude default design language, including and especially the gold-on-black color scheme, although I admit that this is entirely by association and not because of its inherent qualities per se.
In this particular case it used to not have any text at the top. Just click a model, chat.
I decided that that wasn't very user friendly. It doesn't tell people what it is. Or how to use it. It doesn't explain any of the concepts or vocabulary.
So I asked it to add those things, above the main interface, including the steps people need to take to use it. I think it did great, and I think the small text sizes with a clear title let people who need it, read it, and people who don't can just scroll down. Even with the text it's 600 words.
I like the effect of what it's done. It's better than I would have done if I had written those intro words myself.
Clearly it resonates with people, this thing has been on the front page of HN for 4 hours and with 110 points is by far the most popular thing I've ever posted here.
They probably flagged it because they thought an LLM wrote my comment, perhaps because of the disconnect between my initial reply and the edit. Together with the whole comment, the first part of my reply sounds like it could have been written by an LLM.
You're arguing with the same OP that an LLM piloted into claiming SHA-256 was on the cusp of being broken <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557755">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557755, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546028">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546028
All right, I've made some of the requested changes, summarized here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897068">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897068
It isn’t about how small the text is or how easy it is to skip. Humans are not transformers with multiheaded anttention. Human brains do not process one million tokens in parallel. Humans have caloric constraints and will be annoyed if you ask them to process irrelevant information.
Therefore, when showing something to humans, the first thing they see should be the first thing you want them to see. And since this is a demo, the first thing they see should be the demo, with sane defaults, above the fold.
Also, it is likely that no one (including the author) has read this “fine print” because it includes incorrect information. GPT-4 isn’t a frontier model anymore.
I've made it more clear what parts are optional reading. summary of my changes here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897068">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897068
I've thought some more about your feedback, since other replies gave the same feedback. At the same time, I didn't want to remove the "mostly useless" information since clearly it was useful for a lot of people! The submission was on the front page of HN (often in the #3 or #4 spot) for 12 hours and last I checked generated more than 300,000 requests from 36,000 unique IP's (on an ordinary 2-day period there are around 1,600 unique IP's) and people downloaded 600 GB of models, including 8.5k downloads initiated for the first model (3,000 of which were completed and 5.5k of which did not wait for it to complete, since download was a little slow due to the high number of concurrent users.)
So, clearly, the presentation format resonated with a lot of people. Therefore, I kept the presentation but put a tl;dr in enormous can't-miss-it shimmering font at the top. I marked all the "dense information" you mentioned as "Optional reading" (it's a lab after all, there should be a reading for it) and increased the font size.
I removed the parts of the footer that you said didn't make sense. The page isn't on the front page anymore so I don't know if people would like the changes or not, but I've changed the page layout in response to your feedback.
I should preface this by saying it is a cool demo. I love SLMs and I think they will become even more popular in the future as capability per byte improves and hardware improves to support my bytes.
So I think this post performed well in spite of the annoying parts, not because of it.
> I didn't want to remove the "mostly useless" information since clearly it was useful for a lot of people
The information was not “clearly” useful. It had obviously incorrect information that no one even noticed. In my opinion that is strong evidence for the opposite conclusion, that people ignored it because it was noise.
Why would people ignore this information? Demos are a show, don’t tell thing. For example, you don’t have to tell people that the latency is low. They should be able to see it from the demo.
demibabs · · focus · HN ↗
The text is too small and it's way too dense with information in general. Considering how simple this product is to use, it's kinda crazy that I have to scroll through over a page length of (mostly useless, AI-generated) information before getting to the actual interface.
Also what is going on with the footer (why does it link back to the site itself, why is it telling me to "serve over HTTP").
phist_mcgee · · focus · HN ↗
azan_ · · focus · HN ↗
aleksiy123 · · focus · HN ↗
It’s verbose with a layer of looking legit play first glance sloppy UI.
I don’t mind vibe code ui but at least some ui efffort would be nice. Not just 1 shot.
api · · focus · HN ↗
post-it · · focus · HN ↗
AI has no trouble churning out code, so AI-generated sloppy UIs have text fields everywhere.
logicallee · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
TZubiri · · focus · HN ↗
Don't focus on the actual code or the actual UI. You need to give your model a way to see its output. If it just pumps code, it looks at the code. If you let it look at the rendered UI, whether by manually taking screenshots, or making it so that the agent looks at the browser output automagically (with a webdriver or selenium or puppeteer or a skill or whatever), it will fix whatever issues it sees on itself, and it will never be content with delivering something that looks as bad as this.
askjdfksdbfhk · · focus · HN ↗
That's not really how it works. People like it in spite of the bad vibe coded UI. That doesn't mean that the UI is good. The criticism was clearly correct. I don't feel bad about publicly criticizing the UI to your face, either, because it's not like you were the one who designed/created it anyway--by the same reasoning, I don't see any reason to get defensive about it, since you have not invested very much of yourself into it either.
This has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine in general. Over the last six months or so I've been inundated with all kinds of lazy, bad vibe-coded UIs via my normal internet usage. It feels paradoxical in a way, because AI tooling should make it easier than ever to fix obvious problems, and yet UIs have gotten worse.
I have two theories for why this is: (1) usage of AI tooling conditions people into engaging with their creations in a certain hands-off, uninvolved, low-attention surface level way; or perhaps (2) those who care about their UIs were the people who were already creating UIs pre-AI, and so the marginal effect of AI tooling has been to increase UI creation amongst precisely the population who cares the least about what they are putting out.
I've also been developing a very strong personal revulsion towards the Claude default design language, including and especially the gold-on-black color scheme, although I admit that this is entirely by association and not because of its inherent qualities per se.
logicallee · · focus · HN ↗
I decided that that wasn't very user friendly. It doesn't tell people what it is. Or how to use it. It doesn't explain any of the concepts or vocabulary.
So I asked it to add those things, above the main interface, including the steps people need to take to use it. I think it did great, and I think the small text sizes with a clear title let people who need it, read it, and people who don't can just scroll down. Even with the text it's 600 words.
I like the effect of what it's done. It's better than I would have done if I had written those intro words myself.
Clearly it resonates with people, this thing has been on the front page of HN for 4 hours and with 110 points is by far the most popular thing I've ever posted here.
Vaslo · · focus · HN ↗
logicallee · · focus · HN ↗
Retr0id · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
logicallee · · focus · HN ↗
janalsncm · · focus · HN ↗
Therefore, when showing something to humans, the first thing they see should be the first thing you want them to see. And since this is a demo, the first thing they see should be the demo, with sane defaults, above the fold.
Also, it is likely that no one (including the author) has read this “fine print” because it includes incorrect information. GPT-4 isn’t a frontier model anymore.
logicallee · · focus · HN ↗
post-it · · focus · HN ↗
The Claude special.
fl0id · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
katzenq · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
logicallee · · focus · HN ↗
So, clearly, the presentation format resonated with a lot of people. Therefore, I kept the presentation but put a tl;dr in enormous can't-miss-it shimmering font at the top. I marked all the "dense information" you mentioned as "Optional reading" (it's a lab after all, there should be a reading for it) and increased the font size.
I removed the parts of the footer that you said didn't make sense. The page isn't on the front page anymore so I don't know if people would like the changes or not, but I've changed the page layout in response to your feedback.
janalsncm · · focus · HN ↗
So I think this post performed well in spite of the annoying parts, not because of it.
> I didn't want to remove the "mostly useless" information since clearly it was useful for a lot of people
The information was not “clearly” useful. It had obviously incorrect information that no one even noticed. In my opinion that is strong evidence for the opposite conclusion, that people ignored it because it was noise.
Why would people ignore this information? Demos are a show, don’t tell thing. For example, you don’t have to tell people that the latency is low. They should be able to see it from the demo.