Alternatives
Products that do what Bard – An Experiment in Robot Poetry does
Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun. I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis API instead of a fancy AI one. Everything runs on the client, but you can share a song via URL, which includes the random number generator seed. It's open source[1], though the code is a bit chaotic…
- 1IB
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 2AP
Hi HN! Me and my buddy made this in a weekend as an experiment in 1. building something quickly and putting it out there and 2. using AI in an interesting way; in this case a poetry judge. Our “judge” isn’t perfect, but the hope is that at least it’s a relatively fair system that everyone can be sure evaluates their work. Anyway, we wanted to see what the lovely people of HN think of it. Some background on the idea; I like poetry and thought it would be cool if there was a big competition with a large financial incentive that scales with the number of participants. Using AI as a judge allows…
2023 · acontestofwords.com
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2016 · swarbrickjones.wordpress.com
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- 6WI
I've been wondering how I could use LLMs to help me write, without taking my own voice away. I arrived at a workflow where the AI has strict instructions not to give me any text, just to give me tips, but it was clunky to see which parts of the text the critique referred to. To solve it, I made Lucid. I made it mostly for myself, but I added a "bring your own key" system for others to use it. I hope you like it!
May 2026 · writelucid.cc
- 7TF
Today I come to you on this beautiful Friday with a freshly hardthink-ed solution to a proliferous problem plaguing our world: the loss of original voice. The blanket of blandness slowly suffocating centuries of writing. Or to put it bluntly: AI writing is trash. It is disrespectful to expect ME to read something YOU could not even be bothered to write (or likely even read). The lingering human connection that remained resilient on the internet - through years of SEO optimisation, propaganda bots, ads, regional firewalls, politics, censorship - is now being diluted even further. Many of the…
Feb 2026 · tropes.fyi
- 8CW
Just finished some work involving ChatGPT when I felt strong Tolkien nostalgia, so asked it to write a song in the style of Hobbit, the result was amusing, so what the heck, here it is: > Write a short song in the style of Tolkien's Hobbit that tells of a skilled programmer creating artificial intelligence Verse 1: In the land of code and screens, Where the bits and bytes do gleam, There lived a programmer so wise, With knowledge and skills that did surprise. Chorus: Creating AI, a masterpiece, A mind so bright, a true release, Bringing forth a new dawn, Of intelligence beyond what's gone.…
2023
- 9AR
Song url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVQEbD3NyDw Quick background on the project: I'm a full time programmer and I love making rap music. I see a lot of humor in the profession/industry, and thought it would be fun to combine the two. I'm always open to feedback on audio quality/topic ideas/ways to get more exposure/etc! I am also open to collaboration with beat makers/videographers/producers!
2019
- 10BA
Writing is hard, and it's tempting to just let AI do the whole thing So I built an Obsidian plugin that keeps AI in its place Highlight a sentence, get some options, pick the one you like Sharpens your writing instead of automating it
Jun 2026 · rephrasethis.co
- 11IM
2016 · youtube.com
- 12AD
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
- 13TN
Hi guys, I’m excited to share an update on ReproModel, an open-source toolbox designed to streamline the testing and reproduction of machine learning models. I, like many of you, have really struggled with benchmarking and comparing models, from missing code, to opaque experiment parameters slowing the process. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and created a mini-toolbox in my free time to streamline the process. The goal is to reduce the time and effort spent on replicating experiments, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than setup. Knowing this task is not an…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN! I've been tinkering on a programmatically controlled typewriter. I've got a working prototype and it's been a lot of fun to play with. Of course I connected it to ChatGPT so I can chat with it, and I also have it acting as a clock, but it doesn't just type out the time. It writes a poem about the time. I'm posting this to gauge interest in purchasing one. It's all handmade, so I can't scale it up, but if enough people are into it, I might make a small batch. Or maybe sell it as a kit for the DIY crowd. Anyway, just wanted to put it out there and see what you all think. Thanks for…
2024 · notes.bayesup.date
- 15WR
2011 · whatrapperareyou.com
- 16WO
Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…
2024 · omniplex.vercel.app
- 17IM
I really struggle to keep my notes organised, and often can't make any sense of hand written notes after meetings. I did some experiments with Claude and ChatGPT where I blast random thoughts at them during a meeting or brainstorming session and then have them output a nice document that pulls it all together at the end. It worked incredibly well but it was a bit cumbersome to keep sending messages to the chat and telling the ai each time what to do. So I took the idea and built a tool, it makes it easy to throw random notes and voice recordings (images and document support on the way) and…
2025 · scatternote.com
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Hey Hacker News, I'm Nir, cofounder of Oboe (https://oboe.fyi), which we just launched publicly. Oboe lets anyone create a course out of a single prompt to learn about any topic. We're on a mission to democratize learning. We envision a future in which AI feeds us, making us smarter, and reignites the love of learning we all seem to have lost. Each course enables a variety of learning formats, letting you learn how you want, when you want. From deep dive articles to podcasts to games to quizzes. We want courses to feel lightweight and accessible, and to encourage following rabbit…
Sep 2025
- 20SC
2015 · sleepstosanta.com
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title basically covers it. project #2 from my paternity leave. My partner & I got frustrated with hearing Brahm's Lullaby and Wheels On The Bus repeatedly. I also stand by that babies can enjoy adult music just as easily as they can enjoy "kids music". But most adult music is too dense/complex for babies to understand, so I created this to generate baby-friendly, slowed down versions of songs that we like to play for our baby & sing along with. Uses BS-roformer for stemming out the input audio + spotify Basic Pitch for transposing to midi. Still needs some work, kinda sounds like a…
20d ago · lullabyconverter.com
- 22SN
Hi guys, I've been thinking a lot about how advancements in NLP can be standardized; when building a sentiment analysis, you know for sure that other attributes than the actual sentiment can be highly interesting, such as the urgency. Together with my team, I started a new open-source project, aiming to do exactly that. It's called bricks, and it is a composition of more than 50 open-source and modular code snippets, such as computing sentence complexities, emotionality detection and many more. For context, the idea came up after watching the incredible talk "Inventing on Principle" by Bret…
2022 · bricks.kern.ai
- 23SB
Hi HN! I and a couple of friends finally launched a project that's been kicking around since late last year: Stories by AI The spark of the idea was actually inspired by another Show HN ("I had some time yesterday so I made a GPT3 podcast to help you sleep" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428910). With the emergence of nice tools for co-writing fiction with GPT-3, I really liked the idea of publishing a bunch of short fiction where the AI largely did the writing. I still find the surreal fever-dream esque weirdness of language models really entertaining, and hope we can…
2022 · storiesby.ai
- 24CY
I built this quiz after realizing how good AI has gotten at mimicking literature, speeches, and images. It's one strike and you're out. It includes AI-generated Shakespeare, fake MLK speeches, photorealistic images, and movie dialogue. I got several of my own questions wrong while building it. This isn't about testing your English degree, it's more about showing how well AI can now forge canonical cultural references. We've hit a point where the fakes are genuinely convincing. Where AI still slips up: Over-explanation (real Shakespeare is more economical) Generic metaphors vs. specific…
Dec 2025 · valid-human.vercel.app
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