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Comment by mrozbarry | Hacker News Reader

What part of this needs ai? This looks like it could be done with a database and a price list. I think this suggestion is already said, but the main push of "ai" is mostly in terms of natural language processing, so why not allow a prompt? Give a default prompt like "I'd like to build a gaming pc with a budget of $1000." You could even make it a fill in the blank like "I'd like to build a _______ pc with ___special features____ for a budget of $____." The thing about it's current iteration is regardless of there being "ai" in it, it's not clear what it's doing that's more special than me asking a pc building community for a parts list with a budget.

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To continue this idea (feel free to steal this), what if this tool looked more like this: https://play.tailwindcss.com/KqFF5wqk5I

Have a conversation with the AI about the PC you want, and challenge it on things like "can I see the equivalent PC but with AMD instead of Intel" and things like that. I think that would have extremely good value. And for prices, you might be better off scraping amazon (or whatever site makes the most sense), instead of whatever stale data you have. Prices for PC parts fluctuate so much that I don't know that it make sense to try and store/cache it locally.

this makes a lot of sense, thanks for the feedback! We'll think more about your idea and get back to you here

Non PC experts need this sort of thing.

Pcpartpicker does this perfectly

i used the logical increments guide back in the day

I don't disagree, but from what I see, it could be executed faster with just a good database query. It's not clear what is AI about this, or what benefit AI actually gives it as a tool.

I don't understand your favor for a database query. What database, who's querying it, and why would that be better than a UI? Ain't nobody opting for database queries as their go-to interface for anything, and it would be silly to recommend anyone use sql to build their pc. The benefit the tool provides is not having to interact with a database.

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear on my point. What I was trying to convey is that whatever the ai model is doing behind the scenes doesn't appear to be any more powerful than having a set of pre-built machine specs in a database and querying them for price and type. I'm sure there is more at work here in reality, but since it takes a few minutes for the ai to build a machine from 2 parameters, it seems silly that you need ai for this at all.

Now, there are ways to make the ai more useful, and that would be to have a conversation with it about what you want to do on the computer. Then that makes the ai use apparent and reasonable.

Ah I see, so like Rock Auto vs ChatGPT

No. They need something which deterministically tells them which parts are appropriate for their budget and usecase. Putting AI in there is ridicolous.

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