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Comment by njtransit | Hacker News Reader

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njtransit

Can you share some examples?

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ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor)

MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it)

GoUnfaked.com

PlaybookFM.com

TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)

Good job, I suppose, but the existence of all of these, and the fact you're able to pump them out so quickly, is genuinely depressing.

There was a time when mathematicians wrote LISP programs and other humans translated them into machine instructions. Then one day someone wrote a LISP program to do this, and had one of the translators translate it.

A compiler was born.

Think of Claude as a compiler which compiles NLP text instructions into functional code.

I don't mind tools that empower programmers or even less technical people to build products. I use these tools myself in minor ways, even though I find them to be more of a nuisance than actually helpful.

What I find depressing is how quickly someone with minimal experience can flood the web with low quality services, in search for a quick buck. It's like all the SEO spam we've been seeing for decades, but exponentially worse. The web will become even more of a nightmare to navigate than it already is.

Could you please explain why? I'm trying to think how is it depressing and can't come up with anything.

Because we don’t believe it’s equal quality to our job, so we see cheap competition arriving with swathes of bad products, but no way for customers to distinguish what makes quality. Plus we all create bugs anyway.

It's not really that. The quality of these tools will probably increase, and I'm fine with more competition, and with less experienced developers being empowered to build their own products.

What is depressing to me is that the products showcased here are essentially cookie-cutter derivatives built on and around the AI hype cycle. They're barely UI wrappers around LLMs marketed as something groundbreaking. So the thought of the web being flooded with these kinds of sites, in addition to the increase in spam and other AI generated content, is just depressing.

I find that part depressing as well, like who would even listen to gen AI podcasts? Not even vetted by a person but just pumped out as filler like it’s some kind of soil fertilizer. There is already so much good human made content on the web for nearly free if you only look. No doubt this AI slop will get in out way even if we don’t want it, but think of the effect this slop is going to have on younger generation.

Why is it depressing? I find it exhilarating

I’m able to bring ideas to life that I could only think about before

Honestly? These were ideas that you put a lot of thought into?

All your sites are essentially wrappers around LLMs. You don't disclose which models or APIs you use in the backend, so did you train your own models, or are you proxying to an existing service? Your T&C and Privacy Policy is generic nonsense. What happens to the data your users upload?

ThumbnailGenius.com has an example thumbnail of a person with 4 fingers. I honestly can't tell the difference in the comparison between Midjourney, Dall-E and your fine-tuned models. MetHacker.io is not loading. GoUnfaked.com claims to have royalty and copyright-free images, which is highly misleading and possibly illegal. PlaybookFM.com is another effortless wrapper around NotebookLM or a similar LLM. TokenAI.dev is non-functional and seems like a crypto+AI scam.

I'm sorry to be so negative, but if you're going to leverage AI tools, at least put some thought and effort into creating something original that brings value to the world. I think you'll find this more rewarding than what you're doing now. Quality over quantity, and all that.

These are not the things I wanted to create, but its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping. I did that with MetaHacker which, under the hood, is very capable. But because I spent so much time building it, I never got around to marketing it or monetizing it, so much of it is abandoned and only 1/10th of it is live for end users.

So for my future projects, I told myself I will only spend at most a month working on them. Learn to launch and get users before spending months just building

There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

I spent almost ten years as a b2b marketer. All the clients I worked with were established businesses that needed some scale and direction.

I quickly learned that growing a 10M ARR business with established pipelines is a whole lot different than building something from scratch. This is my attempt to go from 0 to 1 as fast as possible and learn as much as I can before diving into bigger things

> its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping.

I agree with you there.

> There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

Fair enough. And good on you for doing a career shift and learning new skills. I don't want to tear down your efforts.

I just think we disagree on the approach. You don't need to ship a half-dozen cookie-cutter web sites with minimal effort. Sometimes it pays off to really think about a product-market fit—something you should be familiar with as a marketer—and then spending more than a month working on that idea. You'll learn new skills along the way, and ultimately shipping something will be a much more valuable achievement. Besides, shipping for the first time should just be the start of a project. If you're really passionate about the project and building a customer base, then the hard work only starts there. Currently the impression these sites give off are quick cash grabs or downright scams. But good luck to you.

Well, I've had dozens of signups every day for ThumbnailGenius depsite 0 marketing. Whatever I'm doing, people seem to like it. I had way more data on it about thumbnails (including an index of 100k thumbnails) but had to remove that because YouTube didn't like it.

I can't see why any of these would seem like "scams" because I'm not asking for money for any of them except for ThumbnailGenius. Not sure how a free product can be a scam or a cashgrab?

And I don't know how familiar you are with YouTube, but most serious creators typically take multiple pictures of themselves, then get multiple thumbnail variants created by an editor. A good creator will typically spend hundreds of dollars just testing out variations to see how they "look". AI just makes it easy to create the variations and visualize different ideas.

Most of the users end up visualizing 20-30 ideas, then picking 1-2 and actually creating them in real life. It's a massive time and money saver

Thank you for sharing these. So many people talk in superlative terms about the stuff they did with AI and give no details. It's very hard to gauge what they actually achieved.

Are you sharing your process anywhere (like on YouTube)? I’d be really curious to see behind the scenes of how you’re building these types of products. For example, are you just using Claude or Claude with Cursor (or something else)?

I think I should create a video showing it

Usually its v0.dev for the basic UI and then just prompting cursor

With the lower barrier to entry comes dozens of nearly "apps" that are nearly indistinguishable from each other.

ThumbnailGenius

There's already several sites that generate YT thumbnails with AI:

https://vidiq.com/ai-thumbnails-generator/

https://www.testmythumbnails.com/create-thumbnails-with-ai

PlaybookFM

AI Podcasts have been a thing for a while - though I can't imagine who finds listening to TTS voices with LLM content particularly engaging over a genuine person who puts time and effort into crafting an engaging personality.

GoUnfaked

I don't really understand the point of this one - it generates photorealistic AI pictures? Isn't that exactly what Getty Images AI, Freepik, etc. are all doing already?

Good luck - but this feels like a very "spray and pray" approach to development. It feels like it has the same probability to generate genuine income as people who try to start Patreon pages for their AI "artwork".

I have at least 10 people signing up for thumbnailgenius every day when I haven’t even started marketing it

So hey, maybe its not revolutionary, but some people find it useful enough

Which is fine by me. Maybe you can tackle changing the world. I’ll just focus on being useful enough to some people

Thanks. That is interesting. Did you use AI for just the front end components, or were you also able to reliably use the output for the ML portions, or were those simply offloaded to other services via API call?

The most impressive part of this is your ideas, btw. I don't think for most people LLM's are nearly as effective, because they can't think of use cases.

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