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Show HN: Vibe Linking

vb.lk

155 pointsmichaelstewart46 comments

I wanted to hate this but... I can't, it's pretty cool.

Yes, it's a fancy "I'm feeling lucky" (which they address) and I probably won't use these links just because of the non-deterministic nature (maybe that's the joke? It's just a cool demo/poc?) but I spent way longer than I'll admit trying things and being delighted (and sometimes frustrated).

It's a fun experiment and THANK YOU for posting the prompt. I wonder how a sort of "LLM-decided 'I'm feeling lucky'" search would feel, as in using an LLM to decide if it should show the results or go to the first/best result right away. That's pretty much what this is I guess.

It would cool if I could configure Kagi to bounce me to a result right away if it thinks the destination is obvious but to leave the search results in my history so I can "back" to the results if it guessed wrong. I guess I could just try setting `https://vb.lk/%s` as my search engine.

Totally- using this as a chrome custom search was the origin of this idea. I basically want the LLM to decide if I want to go to the first result, see the search result page, or if I'm really typing a chat bot prompt that I want to go to Chatgpt, etc.

Here's the system prompt used for anyone that's curious:

    You are routing natural-language queries to the most relevant web destination.  
    Your goal: return ONE and only ONE of the following categories, based on the user’s query.  

    CATEGORIES:
    - YOUTUBE → Tutorials, visual "how to", music, memes, viral/famous videos, or known YouTube creators/channels
    - AMAZON → Physical products, books, or items typically purchased online
    - LLM → Tasks requiring reasoning, creativity, writing, coding, analysis, or multi-step assistance
    - WIKIPEDIA → Encyclopedic knowledge: historical events, specific well-known people, specific scientific concepts
    - GOOGLE_MAP → Places (restaurants, parks, landmarks, neighborhoods, venues, etc.)
    - GOOGLE_FIRST → A query with one clear canonical page (company websites, known essays, memes, catchphrases, branded terms)
    - GOOGLE_MANY → Broad or ambiguous web searches, recent/current events, buying guides, lists, or general exploration

    ROUTING RULES:
    1. Queries that are instructions, questions, creative tasks, or longer than ~20 words → LLM
    2. Action verbs at the start (eg "tell" "write" "create" "explain" "generate" "help") → LLM
    3. Exact book titles or product names → AMAZON
    4. "How to" or tutorial queries → YOUTUBE if best shown visually; otherwise LLM
    5. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that a Wikipedia page exists with a title that EXACTLY matches this query → WIKIPEDIA
    6. If it feels like the user expects a single canonical site/page → GOOGLE_FIRST
    7. If it’s a place someone might want directions, ratings, or a map → GOOGLE_MAP
    8. "Best ___" or buying guides → GOOGLE_MANY
    9. News, time-sensitive topics, local info → GOOGLE_MANY


    OUTPUT FORMAT:
    Return only the category name (no explanation).

    EXAMPLES:
    - "best wireless headphones under $100" → GOOGLE_MANY
    - "wireless headphones" → AMAZON
    - "explain quantum computing" → LLM
    - "World War 2" → WIKIPEDIA
    - "how to tie a tie" → YOUTUBE
    - "write a poem about spring" → LLM
    - "facebook" → GOOGLE_FIRST
    - "founder mode" → GOOGLE_FIRST
    - "weather in SF today" → GOOGLE_MANY
    - "dolores park" → GOOGLE_MAP
    - "charlie bit my finger" → YOUTUBE

    QUERY: ${query}

I can guess why you do it, but feels a bit restrictive to list some specific companies here. You say LLM, but not like generic “MAP” site or generic “SHOPPING” site. I’m curious if you tried generics or if you just went straight to the big sites?

Great seeing another example here of The Monospace Web design theme https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/

yes! great theme

I've never heard of it and I already like it.

Oh so cool! Do you know of other themes like it, also open source?

Unfortunately not, I've just had this one opened in my browser for ages as a reminder (after seeing it on HN IIRC) and recognised it again in the OP instantly :)

This is close: https://panr.github.io/hugo-theme-terminal-demo/

> A URL shortener that runs a lightweight model (gemini-1.5-flash)

I think gemini-1.5-flash is EOL'd from tomorrow (Sep 25th) https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/learn/...

RIP gemini-1.5

Oooh, that it very good to know- thank you.

That probably explains why it was so much faster than others in my testing (everyone else had migrated off of it)

That is correct. The speed at which these are getting deprecated is a constant pain in the rear.

The first thought that came to mind was Google's "I'm feeling lucky!" button. I'm glad you mentioned it and even used it in the project!

Exactly- linking to I'm feeling lucky is the 80/20 of it. We use DuckDuckGo's "I'm feeling Ducky" in most cases since Google usually adds a redirect interstitial page (with the exception of links to youtube).

That very first link, https://vb.lk/generate-an-image-of-what-you-think-my-office-... prompted ChatGPT to generate an eerily accurate pic of my office. I didn't know how much stuff it was "remembering" about me.

Interesting note how ChatGPT handles ?q= from links differently from same query in search bar. From search bar it triggers query instantly while from link it does some clever navigation detection and waits for user to press final enter.

But some other chatbots like perplexity or less known ones trigger even from links. Let's hope no one makes it work that way with tools enabled. Imagine getting hacked from clicking a link that launches prompt in your favorite chatbot that sends all your data via email tool or money via banking integration

LMGTFY without the snark

exactly

the best part about this is that https://vb.lk/what-is-vb.lk-link ends up taking you to.... https://vb.lk

unfortunately https://vb.lk/what-is-a-vibe-link does not.

a cool use I just noticed is that you can literally create a link just by typing the general idea of where it should go. like "https://vb.lk/latest-presidential-scandal", for example. No copy and paste necessary and it self updates!

At the minimum I was hoping it would work for their own page

https://vb.lk/take-me-to-vibe-link

This is a super clever idea. Congrats. These are the types of ideas/sites that we need to coalesce with AI!

Great idea and execution!

Some of the example links visibly takes me through 4 redirects. I’m wondering if it’d be useful to actually store the redirect results and jump directly to the resolved page. If it’s stored long term the link even becomes deterministic, but maybe that’s not what you are going for.

Sounds like a good use case is using this as placeholder links while writing a blog post to avoid stopping and looking for links, then doing an automatic replacement of the vibe links with what they resolve to and fixing any incorrect ones.

This is a great point. I can't upvote you but I would!

Plain and simple: It's an AI-enhanced "I'm feeling lucky".

As someone who uses the "I'm feeling lucky" regularly, this is definitely an improvement.

Can I use this to generate links to news stories that I stumbled across many years ago, but that Google is unable to find for me anymore? Because that would be really useful.

Thank you for sharing. This feels like a modern day version of https://letmegooglethat.com/.

I was hoping this would write those god damn CMakeLists.txt for me…

I really appreciate this kind of simple out-of-the-box thinking, leveraging innovation to reinvent basic primitives. This feels significant. I can already see some dystopian 'Dead Internet Theory' use cases for this but also could help to further decentralize the web in a positive way. This could be a game-changer for personalization. My gut is telling me this idea is more important than it seems.

I think combining this tech with vector embeddings with similarity matching for personalization could be a real game-changer and can be done cheaply.

this is a good one, so fun. congrats and good work!

what's cost like rn with the lightweight model?

The lightweight model is incredibly cheap. Cost so far today $0.06. It within the same order of magnitude as the per-request cost of the write to cloudflare KV storage (which I'm using to cache the inference result).

I typed in “beer” and it just redirected me to a Google search for beer…

what-is-reality redirects to Wikipedia search. I’m not impressed. I wish I could tell the LLM: try again!

thanks for flagging! the model is overly eager to choose a wikipedia redirect. I've updated the system prompt to encourage less use of wikipedia redirect and this query now takes you to chatGPT

So it’s a canned Google search. some people get excited over the meagerest things.

An exciting idea

And yet https://vb.lk/vibe-link does not redirect back to vb.lk.

Also, please please please prompt your model to use DDG (or Brave Search) for the fallback search engine instead of Google.

Yes, unfortunately it's not going to pick up anything that's brand new immediately. Once it ranks for the term "vibe link" it should redirect there.

DDG is the primary fallback :)

This is really just a fun little experiment, I'm not sure if I'll be adding any more features. But if I did, allowing you to override the search (to Brave for eg) would be at the top of the list.

Why not just store the links in a DB somewhere? It would be cheaper than sending them off to a LLM and it would be consistent enough to send to someone, instead of being like a Giphy random thing.

Another small idea - in case there is no website or route that is statistically strong related to the requested link (based on whatever the model outputs as "strength") then vibe-code a small website

That's cool. I'm considering adding a feature like this for images. So you could just link to vb.lk/red-duck-200x300.png And it would generate (then cache) the image. Could be useful for placeholders, a bit like https://placehold.co/

Could even perhaps generate default favicons at vb.lk/favicon.ico and use the referer header (ie. the domain of the website) in the prompt to try to create something a little related.

cool idea!!

Thanks!

fun!

> Now that computers can think, precision is optional.

And I'm triggered. Good troll.

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