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Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

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11–20 of 85 posts

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#11

Is it possible to build self-improving swarm loops? (ie swarm x builds a thing, swarm y critiques and improved x’s work, repeat…)

We've only partially explored this so far, but it's a great suggestion.

The canvas architecture naturally supports this kind of loop since agents can already read and build on each other's outputs — so the plumbing is there, it's more about building the right orchestration on top. Definitely something we're exploring.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#12

Dark UI pattern: pretends that it is immediately usable only to redirect for sign-up.

Fair point, we should be more upfront about the sign-up step. Given that tasks are long-running and token-intensive, we do need an auth barrier to protect against abuse, but we can definitely do a better job signaling that before you hit the canvas.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#13
In the demo video you shared (yt link) how many credits did that whole project take? What is the prices to fix elements of it (for example of you dislike a minor aspect of the generated spreadsheet do follow up instructions utilize only the narrow subset of agents that has been demoed to that subtask, or does it create new agents who have to create new context in the narrow follow up task?)

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#15
Is the value prop that I can see what the agent is doing? This is not the way: https://youtu.be/R_2-ggpZz0Q?t=158

How am I supposed to get anything out of this? Consider that agents are going to get faster and run more and more tasks in parallel. This is not manageable for a human to follow in real time. I can barely keep up with one agent in real-time, let alone a swarm.

What I could see being useful is if you monitored the agents and notified me when one is in the middle of something that deserves my attention.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#16

In the demo video you shared (yt link) how many credits did that whole project take? What is the prices to fix elements of it (for example of you dislike a minor aspect of the generated spreadsheet do follow up instructions utilize only the narrow subset of agents that has been demoed to that subtask, or does it create new agents who have to create new context in the narrow follow up task?)

Credits are consumed by the blocks that get generated, not by the agents themselves. Some blocks are cheaper than others. A simple prompt or image block is a single model call, while browser use or deliverable blocks like documents and spreadsheets run models in a loop and cost more. Blocks also cost more when they have more blocks connected to them (more input tokens).

In the demo video I shared, the task cost about ~7,000 credits since it ran around 10 BrowserUse blocks and produced multiple deliverables.

If you want to fix a specific block (or set of blocks), you can select them and the chat will scope itself to primarily work on those. In that case fewer blocks run, so it's cheaper.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#17

Dark UI pattern: pretends that it is immediately usable only to redirect for sign-up.

Fair point, we should be more upfront about the sign-up step. Given that tasks are long-running and token-intensive, we do need an auth barrier to protect against abuse, but we can definitely do a better job signaling that before you hit the canvas.

Or, just show us in an animated GIF how the product works in practice. Then, should we somehow find benefit in a visual representation of a swarm's workflow, we could sign up rather than having to, unintuitively, scroll down to watch a YouTube video.

e: 'be' to 'we'; oops.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#18
post #15

Is the value prop that I can see what the agent is doing? This is not the way: https://youtu.be/R_2-ggpZz0Q?t=158 How am I supposed to get anything out of this? Consider that agents are going to get faster and run more and more tasks in parallel. This is not manageable for a human to follow in real time. I can barely keep up with one agent in real-time, let alone a swarm. What I could see being useful is if you monit…

This is a fair point, we are exploring progressive disclosure on the canvas to better utilize the space and make the key artifacts more readily visible. We do have other panels (the chat, task and deliverable) that have alternate views of what the agent did and the key deliverables.

Beyond human auditability, the canvas helps the agents do a better job by generating in parallel, exploring branches and passing context to each other in a structured way.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#19
I didn’t read the post, I checked out the website just like 99% of the people will do.

Simple advice, if you are selling a product with a selling point of being visual, show it on your website. Not in a YouTube video but actual screenshots, short cut 10 sec video/gif

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, we should be more upfront about the sign-up step. Given that tasks are long-running and token-intensive, we do need an auth barrier to protect against abuse, but we can definitely do a better job signaling that before you hit the canvas.

Or, just show us in an animated GIF how the product works in practice. Then, should we somehow find benefit in a visual representation of a swarm's workflow, we could sign up rather than having to, unintuitively, scroll down to watch a YouTube video. e: 'be' to 'we'; oops.

Good call and noted. We're working on making the product experience more visible upfront.
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