- you lament the chat interface, but the first 1m30s of the video I only see the chat interface
- your research task is LLM/AI related. There were moments where I found this slightly confusing and I wasn't sure if I was reading about Swarm itself or just its own research. Would recommend something non-LLM related and more generally applicable for the demo video.
Very cool!
I decided to gamble the one month fee to let it continue, but the payment defaulting to annual was jarring. I can see it lets you advertise a lower price but that only made me more tempted to leave altogether when I saw the price go up on the final screen.
HN is going to tend towards negative/constructive feedback, for me the only issue is that the mouse interaction is a bit wonky. Took me a minute to realize that i could select different mouse modes. With that I'd say I'd echo TheTaytay's comment about mouse interaction and for me generating docx (which was the output of my agents, haven't even explored explicitly asking for something else) creates a bit of a barrier to use the content for me. Markdown or even HTML would be helpful.
But these are just minor nits, love the concept and great execution.
Off to keep iterating on the prototype app I started...
https://getmesa.dev is mine
I like canvases in general, and I especially like them for mentally organizing and referring to this sort of broad work. (Honestly, I think zoomable canvases would make a better window manager in general, but I digress)
One small piece of friction: My default mouse-based ways of dragging the canvas around (that work in most canvases like Figma) aren't working. I saw that you had a tutorial, and I have learned to hold space now, but I prefer the "hold middle mouse button to drag my canvas view around".
I've got a couple of research tasks running now, and my current open questions as a very new user are: 1) How easy will it be to store the outputs into a Github repository. 2) How easy will it be to refer back to this later? 3) Can I build upon it manually or automatically? 4) Can I (securely) share it with someone else for them to see and build upon it? 5) Can I do something "locally" with it? Not necessarily the model, but my preferred interface for LLMs at this point is Claude Code. Could I have a Claude Code instance running in one of these boxes somehow? 6) What if I want to do private stuff with it and don't like the traffic going through Spine's servers? Could I pay them for the interface, but bring my own keys? (Related: Can I self host somehow?) 7) When this is done, each artifact it found (screenshot, webpage, etc), is going to be helpful. The data-hoarder in me wants to make sure I can search these later. Heck, if I could do that, this would become my preferred "web browser". (But again, I digress.)
My advice is to start with "Spine Swarm solves _____" then how, then why you're different. 3 short paragraphs, preferably 1-2 sentences each.
Simple advice, if you are selling a product with a selling point of being visual, show it on your website. Not in a YouTube video but actual screenshots, short cut 10 sec video/gif
This may be too harsh, but you need to make it immediately clear to someone today why they can't just have Claude Code one shot your app!
I'm completely sold on the canvas layer. Embracing non linearity is such a boon when you're on the ideas stage. When you have verified it though, moving it to another medium (a document, presentation or just code) is often the best choice.
Do you see the canvases created with Spine as "one off" that you discard when you have got your deliverable, or as something living that you keep around?
I'm building a side project for running SQL on a canvas (kavla.dev), so I'm thinking about canvas workflows all the time!
How am I supposed to get anything out of this? Consider that agents are going to get faster and run more and more tasks in parallel. This is not manageable for a human to follow in real time. I can barely keep up with one agent in real-time, let alone a swarm.
What I could see being useful is if you monitored the agents and notified me when one is in the middle of something that deserves my attention.
There are so many "agentic tools" out there that it's really hard to see what differentiates this just based on the website.
Nothing wrong with sharing your own stuff, but at least contribute something back to the submission you're commenting on.
You can use your full 30k balance in a single run if needed. The daily refresh just tops you back up over time so you're not waiting for a monthly reset.
The canvas helps when you want to trace back why an output wasn't what you expected, or if you're curious to dig deeper.
Even beyond auditability, the canvas also helps agents do better work: they can generate in parallel, explore branches, and pass context to each other in a structured way (especially useful for longer-running tasks).
On conflict resolution, the synthesizer block can see all upstream outputs, so it has full visibility into any divergence. It does surface contradictions to the user, though this is something we're constantly improving.
On the eval side, we ran Spine Swarm against GAIA Level 3 and Google DeepMind's DeepSearchQA and hit #1 on both.Full writeup: https://blog.getspine.ai/spine-swarm-hits-1-on-gaia-level-3-...
But the deliverables (docs, slides, code) are first-class outputs you can export and use independently. So it works both ways depending on the workflow.
Kavla looks cool, canvas-based SQL is a great use case for this kind of thinking!
Good callout on the canvas navigation, we'll look into middle mouse button support.
To answer your questions: 1) GitHub integration is on our roadmap. Right now you can export outputs manually but we want to make this seamless. 2) All your canvases are saved and you can search them by name in your dashboard. We're also working on a dedicated section for deliverables across canvases. 3) Yes to both! You can manually add or edit blocks, or kick off new agent runs that build on existing work. 4) You can currently only share public links of your canvas to others (but you can make it private at any point). We are testing out a teams feature which allows you to share canvases with members on your team securely. Beyond that, we are working on adding roles and email-based sharing controls which is in our roadmap. 5) Claude Code in a block is a really interesting idea. We don't support that today but we're thinking about computer use and coding workflows. 6)BYOK (bring your own keys) is something we've heard interest in and are considering. Self-hosting isn't available right now, though we do support private deployments for enterprise customers if that's ever relevant. 7) Love the 'preferred web browser' framing. Right now you can search canvases but searchable artifacts across canvases is definitely where we want to head.
Thanks for giving it a real spin, this kind of feedback is incredibly valuable.
Beyond human auditability, the canvas helps the agents do a better job by generating in parallel, exploring branches and passing context to each other in a structured way.
For failures, we handle it at multiple levels: first, standard retries and fallbacks to alternate models/providers. If that fails, the agents look for alternate approaches to accomplish the same task (e.g. falling back to web search instead of browser use).
For completeness, you can also manually re-run or edit individual blocks if they fail (though the agents may or may not consider this depending on where they are in their flow).
The canvas architecture naturally supports this kind of loop since agents can already read and build on each other's outputs — so the plumbing is there, it's more about building the right orchestration on top. Definitely something we're exploring.
In the demo video I shared, the task cost about ~7,000 credits since it ran around 10 BrowserUse blocks and produced multiple deliverables.
If you want to fix a specific block (or set of blocks), you can select them and the chat will scope itself to primarily work on those. In that case fewer blocks run, so it's cheaper.
ugh. guys. come on. stop celebrating at the 1 yard line. people are telling you they didnt even look at the product becacuse your landing page was so bad. you wasted your launch HN linking directly to it, ofc thats the first thing people are going to give feedback on. fix it right now you still have time.
e: 'be' to 'we'; oops.