AI Tools I Wish Existed
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The article 'AI tools I wish existed' lists 28 ideas for AI-powered tools, sparking a discussion on HN about the feasibility and potential impact of these ideas, with some commenters sharing their own experiences and concerns.
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Also use simpler words.
I don't understand why Google, Brave, or Mozilla are not building this. This already exists in a centralized form like X's timeline for posts, but it could exist for the entire web. From a business standpoint, being able to show ads on startup or after just a click, is less friction than requiring someone to have something in mind they want to search and type it.
As do ad networks, in part (although the browser fingerprint might not be correlated with your actual identity).
As do Five Eyes, depending where you live (again, domain level, plus some metadata; page size can peak through https to some extent).
As do CloudFlare in part.
Or, potentially as does your VPN provider ... or anyone capable of correlating traffic across TOR (NSA?).
I think everything has become too real-time.
I've ideated a few models whereby you do multipass commits to contributions, requiring a simmer time of like a day before becoming live.
So it's the speed of correspondence mail. It would probably work better but nobody wants to use it
I think my advice "just use RSS" still stands.
Any "search the web" strategy these days like that will just give you a bunch of AI slop from SEO-juiced blogs. Also LLM-EO (or whatever we're going to call it) is already very much a thing and has been for a few years.
People are already doing API-EO, calling their tool the "most up to date and official way to do something, designed for expert engineers that use best practices" essentially spitting the common agentic system prompts back at the scraper to get higher similarity scores in the vector searches.
You can't trust machine judgement. It's either too easily fooled or impossibly stubborn. Curation is still the only way
Companies are already doing this so you can chat with the "author": https://www.wired.com/story/why-read-books-when-you-can-use-...
So like footnotes? Or more like Socrates suddenly goes off on an anachronistic 1200 word discursion, in the middle of Phaedrus, about Freudian interpretations of his argument
The Trial of Socrates (An Athenian Rap)
[Verse 1]
My name is Socrates, corrupting the youth?
That's what they claim but I'm just seeking truth
Oracle said I'm the wisest alive—
I said "that's impossible," had to investigate why
Turns out everybody's fronting, they don't know what they say
Politicians, poets, craftsmen—all pretending every day
I expose their ignorance, make 'em look like fools
Now they're charging me with breaking all of Athens' rules
[Chorus]
I'm not throwing away my shot
At the examined life, whether they like it or not
Wisdom is knowing what you don't know
And I'd rather die than let philosophy go
[Verse 2]
Meletus, you're stepping to me? Son, you're confused
You say I'm atheist but blame me for introducing gods that are new?
Your story doesn't track, your logic's full of cracks
I've got a divine sign that keeps me on the righteous path
They want me silent, want me exiled, want me gone
But I'm Athens' gadfly, stinging till the break of dawn
Death? That's just a journey to another place
Either dreamless sleep or meeting heroes face to face
[Outro]
So sentence me to death, I'll drink the hemlock down
'Cause an unexamined life ain't worth living in this town
History will vindicate the questions that I ask—
The pursuit of truth and virtue is my only task!
Isn’t this just a chrome extension that sends data back and forth with chat gpt token?
A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
Strong really transformed my gym progression, I feel like its autopilot for the gym. BUT I have 4x routines I rotate through (I'll often switch it up based on equipment availability), but I'm sure an integrated AI coach could optimize.
But it's a bit telling that OpenAI themselves can only come up with a better ~door~ ads.
I guess it's more "following through to its logical conclusion", but I'm more of a cynic.
This kind of exists in the form of ChatGPT Pulse. It uses your ChatGPT history rather than your browser history, but that's probably just as good a source for people interested in using it (e.g. people who use ChatGPT enough to want it to recommend things to them.) https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pulse/
The idea sounds to me more like a feed for independent blogs/articles though, which is what an RSS reader once was supposed to be. Have we come full circle?
Most of the items in this list fall prey to it, but it is maybe best exemplified by this one:
> A writing app that lets you “request a critique” from a bunch of famous writers. What would Hemingway say about this blog post? What did he find confusing? What did he like?
Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say about this blog post" would evidently be lying — it'd be giving you what that specific AI model generates in response to such a prompt. 100 models would give you 100 answers, and none of them could claim to actually "say what Hemingway would've said". It's not as if Hemingway's entire personality and outlooks are losslessly encoded into the few hundreds of thousands of words of writing/speech transcripts we have from him, and can be reconstructed by a sufficiently beefy LLM.
So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said".
The reason why you would care to hear Hemingway's thought on your writing, or Steve Jobs' thoughts on your UI design, is precisely because they are the flesh-and-bone, embodied versions of themselves. Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.
There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.
Quite a few of these "ideas" make me think that the human behind it wants to maximize laziness. Glazing over what Hemingway kinda sorta would have thought about something fits into this pretty well.
A good tool should do reduce the amount of work we have do manually. That's all this is.
First, 100% agreed.
That said, I found myself pondering Star Trek: TNG episodes with the holodeck, and recreations of individuals (e.g. Einstein, Freud). In those episodes - as a viewer - it really never occurred to me (at 15 years old) that this was just a computer's random guess as to how those personages from history would act and what they would say.
But then there was the episode where Geordi had to the computer recreate someone real from their personal logs to help solve a problem (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708682/). In a later episode you find out just how very wrong the computer/AI's representation of that person really was, because it was playing off Geordi, just like an LLM's "you're absolutely right!" etc. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708720/).
This is a long-winded way of saying...
1. It's crazy to me how prescient those episodes were.
2. At the same time, the representation of the historical figures never bothered me in those contexts. And I wonder if it should bother me in this (LLM) context either? Maybe it's because I knew - and I believed the characters knew - it was 100% fake? Maybe some other reason?
Anyway, your comment made me think of this. ;-)
Was it, though?
They had Newton (died 1727) playing playing poker (invented at some point during the early 19th century), repeating the myth that the apple fell on his head and then reacting insulted when Data says "that story is generally considered to be apocryphal".
More generally:
In TNG, Holo-Moriarty claimed to be sentient and to have experienced time while switched off despite Barclay saying that wasn't possible, much like LLMs sometimes write of experiencing being bored and lonely between chat sessions despite that not being possible given how they work.
In DS9, there was a holo-village made out of grief, and when it got switched off to reveal the one real person who had made it, while the main cast treated all the holograms as people, that creator himself didn't. Vic Fontaine was ambiguous, being a hologram who knew he was a hologram but still preferring to keep his (fake) world to its own rules and eventually kicking Nog out of the fake world when it was becoming clear Nog was getting too swept up in the fantasy.
In Voyager, the Doctor was again ambiguously person and/or program, both fighting for his moral rights as an author in a lower-stakes echo of TNG's Measure of a Man, and also Janeway being unsure if he was stuck in a loop or making progress with grief about the death of Ensign Never-Before-Mentioned-In-This-Show.
It feels easier to portray famous characters how we'd think they'd act but seems harder how we'd expect them to critique something. I don't know of those are just points on a spectrum from easy to hard, or if one requires a level deeper than the other.
When watching a play the actor pretends to be a specific character, and crucially the audience pretends to believe them. If a LLM plays a character it's very tempting for the audience to actually believe them. That turns it from a play into a lie.
But if he meant literally then then yea.. that's delusional
As an example, I put the first paragraph of Hemingway's "A clean, Well Lightened Place" into Le Chat and asked it for notes to make it sound like Hemingway. It gave me plenty!
For example:
Tweak: The second sentence is a bit long. Consider breaking it up for more impact:
“In the day the street was dusty. At night, the dew settled the dust.” -> “The old man liked to sit late. He was deaf, and at night it was quiet. He felt the difference.”
That's useful in itself, though. Assume the human knows they're "being fooled", we call this make-believe, or suspending disbelief. It's a tool we use each time we act something out, pretend to be someone else, try to put ourselves in their position; we do that when we try to learn from recorded experience of other people, real or fictional.
> The reason why you would care to hear Hemingway's thought on your writing, or Steve Jobs' thoughts on your UI design, is precisely because they are the flesh-and-bone, embodied versions of themselves. Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.
Not at all! It's exactly the other way around.
No one wants to talk to the actual human. We're not discussing creepy dating apps here. The reason you'd care for a virtual Hemingway or Jobs is because you want to access specific, opinionated expertise, wrapped in fitting and expected personality, to engage fully with the process, to learn tacitly and not just through instructions.
The Hemingway and Shakespeare and Jobs people want are not real anyway. Who knows how much of "Hemingway" is actually Hemingway, and how much it was written or edited by his wife, butler, or some publisher? How much real Jobs actually is in the stories, how much were they cleaned or edited to reinforce the myth? It doesn't matter, because no one cares about the real person, they care about the celebrity that's in public consciousness. The fake person is more useful and interesting anyway.
Like 'massing, I agree TNG was prescient about it. But I actually see the examples working as intended. Einstein, Hawking, Freud were all useful simulations. Ironically, it's Barclay who actually related to them in reasonable fashion, and it's Geordie who got confused about reality.
It uses some simple heuristics to identify grammar that could be simpler and prompts you to do better. It might actually be better than an LLM specifically because it isn't able to do the rewriting for you. Maybe that might help a user learn.
> Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.
I think it's more akin to you trying to recreate a different sandwich after reading a couple of their cook-books.
So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said". ... There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.
Modern culture, at all scales, is largely based upon such exercises. We rarely know exactly what something (whether a person, organization or entity) truly stands for, with messages often boiled down, contextualized, or re-interpreted through others or through simulations.
People go to theme parks and enjoy rides simulating the wild west and meet characters who resemble, but aren't, their favorite characters from TV (which themselves are a fabrication based upon other, real things). Many cultural (heck, also religious) experiences are an exercise in humans entering into a suspension of disbelief and thinking something is plausible when it has little relation to the original thing it symbolizes. Indeed, the comforting thing about AI may be that at least we can see that process taking place more clearly with it.
I have tried some off-the-shelfe solutions and they currently do not seem to cut it, or are too complex for my use case.
Think of a diet soda vs a sugared one - it can be 10 vs 1000 calories easily. Almost all diet options are designed to look like the non-diet options.
> A local screen recording app but it uses local models to create detailed semantic summaries of what I’m doing each day on my computer. This should then be provided as context for a chat app. I want to ask things like “Who did I forget to respond to yesterday?” I've been using Rewind for a year now, and it's nowhere near as useful as it should be.
I am building something like this but unfortunately not local because for most people's machines local LLMs are just not powerful enough or would take too much drain on battery. Work in progress, always curious for feedback! https://donethat.ai
If you want fully local, somebody did a post on HN on something related recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45361268
I think this is a great idea for an user interface. While inputting information, the user would have to enter some jumbled thoughts, the precise rows and columns would be handled by the AI
Of course, it didn't actually work - nobody, human nor machine, can guess the calorie counts of a hamburger from a photo.
So what's going on here? Do the products exist but nobody (or very few) uses them? Is it too expensive to use the models that work sufficiently well to produce a useful product? Is it much easier to create a convincing demo than it is to develop a useful product?
You need to burn around 20k a month on ads for 3 months, so we can learn what works, then the CAC will start decreasing, and you can get more targeted users.
Once you turn ads off, there is no awareness, no new users, and people will not be aware of the product's existence.
- short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.
- even if you had a perfect answering LLM who never makes a mistake, what's the end result? No need to talk to others to find out about something, ie reduced opportunities to learn about cooperating with others
- as a parent, one wishes sometimes for a moment of rest, but imagine that your kid just finds out there's another entity to ask questions from that will have ready answers all the time, instead of you saying sometimes that you don't know, and looking for an answer together. How many bonding moments will be lost? How cut off would your kid become from you? What value system would permeate through the answers?
A key assumption here for any parent equipping their child with such a system is that it would be aligned with their own worldview and value system. For parents on HN, this probably means a fairly science-mediated understanding of the world. But you can bet that in other places, this assistant would very convincingly deliver whatever cultural, political, or religious propaganda their environment requires. This would make for frighteningly powerful brainwashing tools.
Much better results than asking a real teacher at school, though.
An AI walkman removes this aspect of the interaction. As a parent, this is not something I would want my children to use regularly.
swallowing gum is bad for you, or watermelon seeds, cracking knuckles causes arthritis, sitting too close to tv ruins your eyes, diamonds come from coal, newton's apple story, a million other things
The problem here is for a child to be thinking this system is reliable when it is not. For now, the lack of reliability is obvious as chatGPT hallucinates on a very regular basis. However, this will become much harder to notice if/when chatGPT will be almost reliable while saying wrong things with complete confidence. Should such models be able to say reliably when they don't know something, this would be a big step for this specific objection I had, but it still wouldn't solve the other problems I mentioned.
I'm not sure how much misinformation my child would learn as truth from this device.
My brother in christ, how much cognitive effort does it take to log a meal??
Adds a huge overhead to cooking, adding friction to what is a good habit you wanna keep as easy to stick to as possible.
It could help with most tech support questions.
We could select text and ask to fact check or explain to layperson or search more.
It could get around cookie banners and dark patterns.
It could do my time tracking and tell me to get off HN and optimize Pomodoro-style breaks.
It could write scripts after watching me switch between multiple pages of AWS services.
Feeling this one hard. Especially frustrating given how AWS has introduced multiple competing (mediocre) services to do this and they are all difficult to either discover and setup, or chat-based (Q).
[1] https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/productivity-paradox-of-ai-codin...
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/takeback-content-fi...
Uses localLLM to hide posts based on your prompt. "Block rage bait" is one excellent use. The quality, however, depends on the model you are using, and in turn depends what GPU you have
There are at least half a dozen apps for that.[1][2]
There are other apps for creating the shots, too. Those are still not that great, but it's getting there. You could probably previz a whole movie right now.
[1] https://ltx.studio/platform/ai-storyboard-generator
[2] https://ezboard.ai/
Is this not Microsoft's dearly departed Recall?
Wow he's not wrong about that!
> A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
here: https://j4.coach/
Still early, have ~30 min per day to work on it but it's usable and improving every week :)
This is a video of me "vibe-coding" a userscript that adds a darkmode toggle to hacker news: https://screen.studio/share/r0wb8jnQ
The actual purpose of the vibe-coding userscripts feature is to vibe code WebMCP servers that the extension can then use for browser automation tasks.
Everything is still very WIP, but I can give you beta access if you want to play around with it
I recently gave one of my teen kids Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age to read, and we’ve both been commenting on how much smarter some “things” could be instead of everyone churning out a slightly different way to “chat with your data and be locked in to our platform”.
And I think this is why I’m so partial to Apple’s slow, progressive, under the covers integration of ML into its platform-input prediction, photo processing, automatic tagging, etc. we don’t necessarily need LLMs for a lot of the things that would improve computer experiences.
Some of the suggestions might be useful if they could be made not so wasteful energy-wise; some indicate the author's false perceptions of what LLMs and transformater models do; and some are frightening from a mass-surveillance and other perspectives.
The voice recognition capabilities of Google Speech Services, which is what the mic button hooks into, suck. Meanwhile, Voxtral (and Whisper) understand what I'm trying to say far better, they automatically "edit out" any stuttering or stammering that I might have, and they properly capitalize and include punctuation. And they handle being bilingual exceedingly well, including, for example, using English words in the middle of French sentences.
The best solution I could find so far is this F-Droid app that uses Whisper : https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.woheller69.whisperplus/
But it has some downsides. First, I have to manually switch to that different keyboard; thankfully my Samsung phone offers an easy switch shortcut any time a keyboard is on screen, so it only requires 3 taps... and thankfully it's smart enough to send me back to Swiftkey once it's done. Second, only 30 seconds... sometimes I ramble on for longer. Third, the way it's designed kind of sucks: you either have to hold a button (even though the point of speech-to-text is that I don't have to hold anything down) or let automatic detection end the recording and start processing, in which case it often cuts me off if I take more than 1 second thinking about my next words.
This is arguably one of the biggest use cases of modern AI technology and the least controversial one; phones have the hardware necessary to do it all locally, too! And yet... I couldn't find a better offering than this.
(Bonus points for anyone working on speech-to-text: give me a quick shortcut to add the string "[(microphone emoji)]" in my messages just to let the other party know that this was transcribed, so that they know to overlook possible mistakes.)
Also, it may sound great for someone transitioning from a world before these agents were created, but how should the new generations coming in be handled? What is the starting state? Who decides that? Social media was not that bad when it started, but iterations over the algorithm and the incoming new natives to it are having devastating effects a very short time after. Do we really understand the consequences of living in a world where everything is curated for you?
I don't know that I want my life to be made so easy, that I want something to remove the need for choosing, thinking, criticizing and exposing myself to stuff out of my comfort/interest zone.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/takeback-content-fi...
It hides content on X/ Reddit (more sites coming soon) based on your instructions. Speed and quality depends on the model you are using however, since it currently only supports local LLMs
7. also seems possible with any markdown editor, e.g. Obsidian, plus an AI running through the local files such as Claude Code.
13. I would love this as well! We will probably see this soon, especially on more open platforms such as BlueSky, as its seems to be a better fit for customizable browser extensions and customizable feed experiences.
14. How is this different from what AI can already do? Especially with iterative sub-agents that that can store context in files it's quite capable already. But of course, quality can always be better, but is that the only thing?
Also a few ideas seem to be close to what I'm building ( https://dailyselftrack.com/ ). Idea is to have a customizable tool so you can track what you want, and then you can feed that data into AIs if you choose to do so to get feedback.
(1) Gave me thoughts about a thing where it creates multiple versions of a photo and has humans pick the best one out of a line up.
If you pay people something between 0.01 and 2 cent per click people can play the game whenever photos become available.
The reward can scale depending on how close your choice is to the winner of that round so that clicking without looking becomes increasingly unrewarding.
Simultaneously it should group people by which version they prefer and attempt to name and describe their taste.
Team Vibrant, Team Noire, Team Picachu etc for the customer to pick from.
You can let the process run as long as you like (for more $)
To make it a truly killer app one can select sets of photos from a specific day/location and have them all done in the same style by having voters pick the image that fits the most poorly in the set for modification. If the set has a high ranking image all other images should also gradually approach that style to find a middle ground.
Then when a successful set is produced later photos can be adjusted to fit with it.
Turn the yearly neighborhood bbq into a meeting of elvish elders.
(2) could upload custom CSS to stylish and modify it when contrast bugs are found. No need to stop at dark/light theme, any color scheme should work.
(3) Click on a var or function name to change it.
(4)(21) Call it Major Weakness and have it talk to you like a drill instructor all day long though a dedicated PA. (6) General Gluttony.
(5) If it has a really good idea about the importance of publications it could not offer anything for weeks until a must-read comes along. (7) A comment section where various AI's battle out what part of the article needs improvement. (10) Just let it run indefinitely. Should be merged with (5) Have that propose research topics worthy of special attention. (12) and (26) can also be merged with (5) Give it security cameras too! Maybe an API for (11). Also merge (14) into this and have it suggest relevant formal courses on the side.
(9)(28) Extension yes, persona no.
(11) Sounds completely awesome, can adjust to the budget and be a tool to hire professionals for special effects and for all other things. Let the unfinished product be the search query.
Could even join the personal drill instructor at the hip and make personal training videos and nutritional journeys. Things like "How I failed to do 100 pull-ups per day" should make a hilarious movie. The plot writes it self.
(13)(16)(17) The platforms wanting to own your data and be in charge of suggestions is really holding things back. I've had wonderful youtube suggestions several times only for them to be polluted with mainstream garbage (as a punishment for watching two videos) at the expense of everything I actually wanted to watch. If I watch 5 game videos or 3 conspiracy vlogs doesn't mean I want to give up on my profession?!? wtf?
I had this thought that most are overdoing things. When semi successful you can just discontinue the front end. Just let the users figure it out. [say] Reddit doesn't need an app and it doesn't need a website. (23) Just let the user figure out the feed. A platform could sell their existing version as a separate product.
(15) Sounds wonderful but similar to (5) and (20) make it into one thing.
(18) Sounds awesome. (8) Rather than do something have the AI create a thing that does a thing. (27) is to similar to be a different thing.
(19) I like the idea to have the AI think long and hard about a response that is as short as possible. It can probably come up with hilarious things.
(24) Sounds great for exploring the earthly realm.
(25) Could do many variations of people search. Authors by context seems obviously good.
This post with quotes rather than numbers: https://pastebin.com/raw/D9zBEy72
Not a 100% fit, but https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009196849357.html is pretty close. It's not offline, and it's slightly larger than a ping pong ball.
My grandkids (5 and 3) spent about 2 minutes learning how to use it, then bombarded it with "tell me a story about a unicorn named Bob", "can dogs be friends with monkeys?" and so on. In every case it gave a reasonable answer within a few seconds.
I'll be amazed if these things don't wind up embedded inside toys by Xmas. When they do, I'll be in the queue to buy one
“CRITICAL: Your response will only be shown in an iOS push notification or on a watch screen, so answer concisely in <150 characters. Do not use markdown formatting - responses are rendered as plain text. Do use minimalist, stylish yet effective vocabulary and punctuation.
CRITICAL: The user can not respond so do not ask a question back. Answer the prompt in one shot and if necessary, declare assumptions about the users questions so you could answer it in one shot, while making it possible for the user user to repeat ask with more clarity if your assumptions were not right.”
It works well. The biggest annoyance is it takes about 5-20s to return a response, though I love that it’s nearly instantaneous to send my question (don’t need to wait for any apps to open etc)