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Comment by thorum | Hacker News Reader

If you’re a power user of these LLMs and have coding experience, I actually recommend just whipping together your own bespoke chat UI that you can customize however you like. Grab any OpenAI compatible endpoint for inference and a frontend component framework (many of which have added standard Chat components) - the rest is almost trivial. I threw one together in a week with Gemini’s assistance and now I use it every day. Is it production ready? Hell no but it works exactly how I want it to and whenever I find myself saying “I wish it could do XYZ…” I just add it.

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This is the most "just build your own Linux" comment I read this year.

Just download some tool and be productive within seconds, I'd say.

Kinda odd to be so dismissive of this mindset given this websites title. Whipping up your own chatui really is not that hard and is a pretty fun exercise. Knowing how your tools work and being able to tweak them to your specific usecases kinda rules!

There is a big difference between fun exercise and actually creating something that competes with the apps you can download. Building something on par with Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop, etc. would be a lot of work. And I don't think the payoff would be there for most people.

Most people aren't hackers. Thanks to LLMs and vibe coding, even they can now take a can-do attitude to life that feels empowering. There's no longer any excuse to languish in helpless misery and negativity. You can just build things.

But you can build something new instead of reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time.

I've only been lucky enough to find one opportunity in my entire twenty-seven year career to write something novel and new. Most of the time we're reinventing the wheel. What separates the winners from the losers is whether or not it's your wheel.

I don't know, you don't have to invent cosmopolitan libc to qualify as new, but my bar is higher than another LLM chat app.

Then again, maybe OP's app will have some new twist that will revolutionise everything.

I have other things to do with my day than vibe-coding yet another stupid chat app with fewer features than one I can just download and get running in minutes. It’s not helplessness or misery, it’s just the finite number of hours I have in a day and the fact that other things are more interesting than that. I don’t grow my own wheat or maintain my own OS, either.

Yeah, ok, don't do it then. That doesn't mean because you do not want to bother, the suggestion is invalid for everyone here. There are a lot of people who just love to do their own thing, tinker with whatever they have on hand and then use the stuff they have created themselves.

its ok to let other people have fun programming and code dumb tools. you can decide yourself what you want to or not to work on, doesn't mean you should be so negative towards the idea of people who do want to code these things

I only did it once some 15 years back (in a happy memory) using LFS. It took about a week to get to a functional system with basic necessities. A code finetuned model can write a functional chat UI with all common features and a decent UX in under a minute.

I have been exploring AI and LLMs. I built my own AI chat bot using Python [1], and then [2] AI SDK from Vercel and OpenAI compatible API endpoints. And eventually build a product around it.

1. VT.ai https://github.com/vinhnx/VT.ai Python

2. VT Chat https://vtchat.io.vn: my own product

Yes I do that too. The important bit is the model. Rest is almost trivial. I had posted a Show HN here about the script I've been using which is open source now ( https://github.com/n-k/tinycoder ) ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674856 ).

With a bit of help from ChatGPT etc., it was trivial to make, and I use it everyday now. I may add DDG and github search to it soon too.

this is not coder this help typing instructions. Coding is different. For example look at my repository and tell me how refactorizing it, write a new function etc. In my opinion You must change name.

Could you plz link to your repo? would love to look at it.

> this is not coder this help typing instructions.

'Coding' technically is just that. If you mean engineering, yes sure, I agree. Nothing right now automates engineering. Maybe some day.

Or you could use: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui

Either directly or use it as a base for your own bespoke experience.

Yeah, I have one which lets me read a pdf and chat side by side, one which is integrated into my rss feed, one with insanely aggressive memory features (experimental) etc etc :)

[flagged]

> Tell me you're not in charge of young kids without telling me you're not in charge of young kids

Please avoid internet tropes on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I don't know if parenting hits the "developer-tinkerer class" harder than others, but damn.

I sort of suspect so? Devs of parenting age trend towards being neurospicy, and dev work requires sustained attention with huge penalties for interruptions.

I have a 1yo too, and I could do it. I used the other tools to make one which I liked.

> Tell me you're not in charge of young kids

Yeah, my wife would murder me as our kids yelled at me for various things

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