It's rather nice looking, but it would have been so much nicer if you'd done it yourself.
Show HN: Phage Explorer
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#12AI really loves that purple-blue style with rounded corners. I asked chatGPT to make a few sites to see how it worked and any time I said "make the site look nicer", it did that. I wonder why.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#13What used to be a life time project that would inspire awe and respect and make OP an instant hire for most managers is now a fun 1-week stunt that makes you go “cool, how many tokens?” Of course, the result is cool and maybe even useful (I wouldn’t dare say _correct_, being ignorant of the topic), but I cannot help but think that this would have been tremendously better if done the old (proper?) way. Also, I suspect…
I'm pretty much on the no-AI side (learning, art, decision making, etc.), but this is the kind of thing I can appreciate. I suppose OP didn't want to learn more about coding this kind of visualization, but rather learn from the visualization. Any tool that can help with that is acceptable, whether it produces code or not. That the tool produced code has the advantage that OP can share this with us. I only hope it doe…
Sure, I don’t discard the contribution altogether, but I am dubious that it is possible to properly draw the line between what to vibe code and what to do it “by hand” to make sure you get the benefits of building.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#14It's rather nice looking, but it would have been so much nicer if you'd done it yourself.
He did do it himself.
If you meant "without AI", then it would have never been done in the first place, so you can choose your preference there.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#15What used to be a life time project that would inspire awe and respect and make OP an instant hire for most managers is now a fun 1-week stunt that makes you go “cool, how many tokens?” Of course, the result is cool and maybe even useful (I wouldn’t dare say _correct_, being ignorant of the topic), but I cannot help but think that this would have been tremendously better if done the old (proper?) way. Also, I suspect…
Yeah but the choice isn't "do I spend two weeks on this, or do I spend a lifetime?". It's "I have two weeks, do I spend them making the whole thing with AI, or 5% of it without?".
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#16What used to be a life time project that would inspire awe and respect and make OP an instant hire for most managers is now a fun 1-week stunt that makes you go “cool, how many tokens?” Of course, the result is cool and maybe even useful (I wouldn’t dare say _correct_, being ignorant of the topic), but I cannot help but think that this would have been tremendously better if done the old (proper?) way. Also, I suspect…
Look at the commit history. I’ve been working on this essentially every single day for over a month.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#17It's rather nice looking, but it would have been so much nicer if you'd done it yourself.
I find this to be a bizarre sentiment. It’s an artifact that exists. The chances of me making this by hand are 0. This would be a full time job for 3 years to research and build this. For 10 people. And it would have to charge a ton of money to access in that case.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#18This is so riddled with inaccuracies that I can spot them immediately despite not being a phage biologist. For example, the PhiX image has a DNA with about 20 base pairs - wildly not to scale. M13 is also wildly scaled, and it clearly has a double stranded DNA which is labeled as single stranded.
What the hell is this amino acid view? This is not how genes work at all. This is biology 101 and it's completely wrong. Why did you buy a domain name to share disinformation that you don't even understand?
None of this is displayed in a way that would be useful to working biologists, and I don't see how this could be used as a teaching tool even if all the errors were corrected. This simply doesn't provide any insight into how phages work. Looking at a raw sequence is pointless (also that color scheme is incredibly garish) - you need annotations! The 3D structures don't have their domains labeled and you can't connect sequence features to structural elements.
Why wouldn't you just use all of the existing tools that already do all of this correctly? Look, I don't mean to gate keep, and it's great that you learned something (assuming you didn't vibe code this), but this is a lot of effort that could have been avoided if you had had a single conversation with a biologist of any background, or asked an LLM to critique your idea, or made a single reddit post asking if this would be useful.
Edit: This may come across as super harsh - but really, I love the enthusiasm and I hope you keep pursuing this. But the right place for this passion at this point in your life is a classroom or some kind of structured course.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#19The premise behind this vibe-coded website is excellent. It would have been great if a bit more effort had been invested in the visualization side and, if instead of using "AI-rendered" images, you'd have fetched scientifically accurate representations from papers and open repositories.
Re: Show HN: Phage Explorer
#20It's rather nice looking, but it would have been so much nicer if you'd done it yourself.
I find this to be a bizarre sentiment. It’s an artifact that exists. The chances of me making this by hand are 0. This would be a full time job for 3 years to research and build this. For 10 people. And it would have to charge a ton of money to access in that case.
> This would be a full time job for 3 years to research and build this. For 10 people.
No it wouldn't.