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Products that do what Roundtable – A rubber duck that argues with itself does

Hey HN, I'm a founder at Ovlo a supply chain company.I had a problem. After every batch of customer interviews/research/feedback sessions, I'd run ideas through an LLM to help me decide what we should build next. Except it was obvious to my cofounder I wasn't really validating anything. LLMs are incredibly good at agreeing with you in subtle ways, especially when you feed them context that already reflects your thoughts. I'd ask "Does this make sense?" and get a beautifully worded essay about why yes, obviously, this is the best thing ever. I was using AI as an echo chamber without…

  1. 1IE

    Hi HN! I spent the last year traveling and feeling purposeless after shutting down my last startup (Zage YC S’21) in Dec 2022. There were some obstacles I couldn’t overcome and decided to return investors 50% of their capital. To afford (and justify to myself) traveling, I started consulting as an engineer and product designer. I started (https://backspace.nyc) and it was a good time. I (and some friends) built a handful of AI experiences and learned a lot along the way. The hardest thing about running a services business shipping and selling AI experiences powered by LLMs was…

    2024 · loom.com

  2. 2LG

    Hi there, I've decided to jump on the AI train and put something together with low effort & high reward, to see if it can get any traction. What do you think? Is it a promising area? Do you guys have ideas for me? There is obviously going to be sea of LLM generated content out there and one project adding up to it might not necessarily be what world needs. In the same time there is something intriguing about the area. Well, please play with it and let me know what y'all think. Much appreciated.

    2023 · canonica.ai

  3. 3WT

    I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…

    Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com

  4. 4IB

    Hey, just wanted to share with you guys and app that I built and deployed in a day with Lovable. So, as a founder I always wanted to have an advisor but my budget would always be less, then on the other hand hand I had Paul's essays on Startup Advice, which I never read because I was busy building stuff. Hence, I built this product which comes into a sweet spot of both at the same time being more reasonable and capable than the alternative. ps: it's running on a reasoning model and tbh I've been able to gather pretty good insights from it. Note to PG: If you're seeing this. I'm your big fan.…

    2025 · paulgraham.resurrect.space

  5. 5IA

    I was working on validating some of my own project ideas. While trying to find how to validate my idea, I realized the process itself could be turned into a tool. A few late nights later, I had something that takes any startup idea, fetches discussions, summarizes sentiment, and gives a quick “validation score.” It’s very rough, but it works, and it’s already making me rethink a few of my own ideas. It's still a work in progress. I don't actually know what I'm doing, but I know it's worth it. Honest feedback welcomed! Live demo here: https://validationly.com/

    2025 · validationly.com

  6. 6AG

    I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai

    Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide

  7. 7IM

    So hard to keep up with tooling and MLOps - I put it all in one place and got some tips from an experienced friend on what to use.

    2025 · readyforagents.com

  8. 8IB

    Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…

    2024 · viewpointhq.com

  9. 9DR

    The first ever AI peer reviewed research article just got approved. It’s kinda crazy how advanced AI have come to replace researchers. I've just been using Deep Research on ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot to write and research complex technical reports for my boss. He loves the reports and it has decreased my workload a ton but I still have some frustrations with it. None of them provide an API that gets me the same quality of output you would with the applications. I wanted something with more control on the LLMs, swappable with the reasoning new models that came out. Not just prompt →…

    2025 · github.com

  10. 10AG

    I've been working on a platform that uses LLMs to turn any random idea into 2-3 minute episodes - one of the newer ones is JARS Tank, where you can pitch inventions to a panel of AI investors. Would love to hear your thoughts!

    2024 · jars.ai

  11. 11WW

    Hey all! @sridatta and I wrote a book/zine called Forest Friends on system evals for LLM-driven apps. But it's a bit more whimsical, a bit more visual, and very much inspired by the meme of LLMs being a shoggoth polished into a smiley face with RLHF. LLM system evals are important as companies move past the flashy AI demos to reliable production apps. System evals keep coming up as the answer for what you "should do", but it's not exactly a standard part of the software engineering toolkit. So we pulled from @sridatta's seven years as a research engineer at Google, plus a ton of best…

    2024

  12. 12RE

    Recent academic work ([1], [2]) has suggested that LLMs can effectively simulate different Internet subpopulations. For example, you may ask ChatGPT to emulate being a high school teacher explaining Newton’s laws of physics. Building upon this, we created Roundtable, a platform that uses LLMs to predict how people will respond to any arbitrary survey question. To do so, we needed to first reduce bias arising from GPT’s training procedure. Because these models are primarily trained on Internet data, they can be heavily skewed towards the demographics of heavy Internet users (e.g.,…

    2023 · roundtable.ai

  13. 13MS

    For years, I have struggled to understand my cash flow and save for the future. In addition to that, my wife has many credit cards and accounts that complicate matters. I am building a tool that connects all our accounts, helps us create a budget, and tracks and adjusts expenses on the fly. I am also sprinkling some AI magic on it for financial suggestions. I am looking for feedback on the implementation. More importantly, I am looking for more beta testers to improve the product.

    2023 · financemadelovely.com

  14. 14IB

    After reading the book Getting to Yes, I really want some tool to help me negotiate more efficiently without having to memorize everything principle. You start by putting in interests of each party, then you can explore different functions: how to respond to the other party, explore objective criteria out there or brainstorm more negotiation options. Still working on it! Leave me feedback if you have any suggestions!

    2025 · negotiator.randomshit.world

  15. 15IC

    Most of us founders won’t publicly admit it: We’re very lonely and stressed. I know from 20 years of building 4 companies (1 failure, 3 acquisitions). We can’t be truly transparent with our team, board, investors, twitter, family or friends. We want to, but can’t. No matter what we’re thinking or feeling, we have to project strength. During my entrepreneurial journey I longed for a group of always-available experts that met these criteria: 1. Experienced 2. Trustworthy 3. Kind yet extremely direct 4. Available and affordable Obviously now with LLMs like gpt-4-1106-preview, we’re unlocking…

    2024 · ryancarson.com

  16. 16CA

    Hi HN, I've been working with LLMs in production for a while both as a solo dev building apps for clients and working at an AI startup. The one thing that always was a pain was to pay OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic a few dollars a month just for me to say "test" or have a CI runner validate some UI code. So I built this server called ChunkBack, that mocks the popular llm provider's functionality but allows you to type in a deterministic language: `SAY "cheese"` or `TOOLCALL "tool_name" {} "tool response"` I've had to work in some test environments and give good results for experimenting…

    Nov 2025 · github.com

  17. 17AD

    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

  18. 18LA

    Hi HN, I’m Harrison, co-founder of Listed. Today we're launching our agentic platform to help your business win in the new age of AI. You can try the platform here: https://getlisted.ai And watch the launch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJUPo6H78z8 The idea for this came from pure frustration. I asked ChatGPT about my own company and it hallucinated, inventing features and getting basic facts wrong. I realized there was no mechanism for a business to provide a verified source of truth to these models. This problem is now existential. With Google's AI…

    2025

  19. 19MA

    Hi HN, A couple weeks ago I shared an early version of a side project I’ve been tinkering with called Persistent Mind Model. I built it at home on an i7-10700K / 32GB RAM / RTX 3080 because I was curious whether an AI could keep a stable “mind” over time, that could "think" about it's own identity as an LLM, instead of resetting every session. After a lot more tinkering, I think the architecture is finally in a solid place. Basically, it saves everything the AI does, thoughts, decisions, updates as a chain of events in a local SQLite database. Because the “identity” is stored in…

    Nov 2025 · github.com

  20. 20WI

    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

  21. 21AA

    I built a tool to solve a problem I kept running into: I was making product decisions based on guessing instead of real users. I kept building stuff nobody wanted as I was usually wrong. So, I built HolyShift: AI agents that validate product ideas by talking to real people on Reddit, HN, X, and LinkedIn … then generate a detailed GTM and “Should we build this?” report. No synthetic data (ChatGPT). No predictions. Only real conversations from real people. What it does • Posts platform-native questions (where allowed) • Collects real reactions, objections, pricing signals • Clusters feedback…

    Nov 2025 · app.holyshift.ai

  22. 22AD

    Ever wish you could get the best arguments for both sides of a debate? I built an AI-powered debate platform that pits language models against each other on controversial topics. Each AI is randomly assigned a side (pro/con). You vote before and after to see if you were persuaded. Most content today presents lopsided arguments. They provide strong points for one side, weak ones for the other. This project aims to surface the strongest arguments from both sides, using LLMs to simulate a fair debate. With enough usage, I want to use it to benchmark LLMs. My hypothesis is that randomly…

    2025 · bot-bicker.vercel.app

  23. 23

    A room of AI models wrestling with your problem.

    Jun 2026 · convene.heuricity.com

  24. 24

    Pure ideas from AI, no syco flattery.

    May 2026 · letthink.co

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