Launch HN: Phind 3 (YC S22) – Every answer is a mini-app

Summary

Hi HN,We are launching Phind 3 (https://www.phind.com), an AI answer engine that instantly builds a complete mini-app to answer and visualize your questions in an interactive way. A Phind mini-app appears as a beautiful, interactive webpage — with images, charts, diagrams, maps, and other widgets. Phind 3 doesn’t just present information more beautifully; interacting with these widgets dynamically updates the content on the page and enables new functionality that wasn’t possible before.For example, asking Phind for “options for a one-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side” (https://www.phind.com/search/find-me-options-for-a-72e019ce-...) gives an interactive apartment-finding experience with customizable filters and a map view. And asking for a “recipe for bone-in chicken thighs” gives you a customizable recipe where changing the seasoning, cooking method, and other parameters will update the recipe content itself in real-time (https://www.phind.com/search/make-me-an-recipe-for-7c30ea6c-...).Unlike Phind 2 and ChatGPT apps, which use pre-built brittle widgets that can’t truly adapt to your task, Phind 3 is able to create tools and widgets for itself in real-time. We learned this lesson the hard way with our previous launch – the pre-built widgets made the answers much prettier, but they didn’t fundamentally enable new functionality. For example, asking for “Give me round-trip flight options from JFK to SEA on Delta from December 1st-5th in both miles and cash” (https://www.phind.com/search/give-me-round-trip-flight-c0ebe...) is not something that neither Phind 2 nor ChatGPT apps can handle, because its Expedia widget can only display cash fares and not those with points. We realized that Phind needs to be able to create and consume its own tools, with schema it designs, all in real time. Phind 3’s ability to design and create fully custom widgets in real-time means that it can answer these questions while these other tools can’t. Phind 3 now generates raw React co...