Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit

Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

https://www.getspine.ai/
I think this is really neat. You should probably take it as a compliment that the biggest criticisms so far are about the website landing page. ;)

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.)

loading story #47365898
Calling it a 'canvas' makes me think that this tool is about AI agents doing some kind of collaborative drawing. Looking at the vid though, it seems more like an environment for visually organizing and managing agentic work (which seems very cool, and quite a bit more than just a canvas).
Agreed. The term has been overloaded lately. We also refer to it as a visual workspace which perhaps captures it a bit better.
I like the overall idea and presentation. In trying it out, I hit the token cap before my trial task was able to complete and show me the end result. I'm sure your free-tier token costs are non-trivial but it was definitely a bummer that I couldn't even see one initial run's output to decide if I wanted to pay.

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.

I didn’t read the post, I checked out the website just like 99% of the people will do.

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

loading story #47365705
loading story #47365307
loading story #47367621
I have not seen my final report yet for my query around machinist.com. However I would like to say my initial impression is very positive. At least in terms of the digestion of my somewhat nebulous request. I like the way your app was able to burrow down to pain points I have experienced and am trying to work out in terms of product market fit for the domain. I look forward to exploring more and giving you more feedback when I see the final report. I will also add that I am looking forward to using your product to explore other opportunities that I'm sure are out there in this age of AI.
loading story #47366203
Super cool!

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!

loading story #47365699
"I make AI output lots of stuff" is not an intrinsically valuable thing. I can run the same thing on Claude in research mode and get a report with cited sources in a more digestable format on my phone. What's the eval here on if any of this is good? Is it even possible to test (ie, you cant really AB test startup ideas)?
loading story #47366486
loading story #47367537
I had to read this text in order to understand what this tool does, because I could not know from the website (without watching a video). You should use Spine to improve your website. ;-)
Congrats on the launch! Meta comment, but I just ain't reading all of the above. You need to be able to explain this in about 20% the number of words or you'll lose people, especially VC.

My advice is to start with "Spine Swarm solves _____" then how, then why you're different. 3 short paragraphs, preferably 1-2 sentences each.

loading story #47365914
What does it mean to say 30,000 monthly credits and 1500 daily refresh credits? If my project takes 7000 credits (the way your demo does) then does that mean I couldn’t actually do it on the lowest available pricing plan because I couldn’t use 7000 credits in one run? If this is the case, what am abysmal pricing model!
loading story #47365647
In the demo video you shared (yt link) how many credits did that whole project take? What is the prices to fix elements of it (for example of you dislike a minor aspect of the generated spreadsheet do follow up instructions utilize only the narrow subset of agents that has been demoed to that subtask, or does it create new agents who have to create new context in the narrow follow up task?)
loading story #47365192
Interesting idea, I wanted to see an example of the agents working on a canvas when I opened your page. I saw nothing of the sort. Sorry, but immediate fail.

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!

loading story #47366171
loading story #47365671
Just as a tiny first piece of feedback, the main marketing website is very hard to understand or grok without a demo of how the tool works. Even just the quick YouTube video that you added in your post here, if embedded, would make a difference.

There are so many "agentic tools" out there that it's really hard to see what differentiates this just based on the website.

loading story #47364646
{"deleted":true,"id":47366460,"parent":47364116,"time":1773418910,"type":"comment"}
Why do I need a canvas to visualize the work that the agents are doing? I don't want to see their thought process, I just want the end product like how ChatGPT or Claude currently work.
loading story #47364930
whoa congrats on the launch. lol I launched my visual canvas for agents today too. I went in a more of a collaborative canvas IDE, agent orchestration direction. But very cool to see your take on it

https://getmesa.dev is mine

loading story #47365847
loading story #47366132
Is it possible to build self-improving swarm loops? (ie swarm x builds a thing, swarm y critiques and improved x’s work, repeat…)
loading story #47365039
excuse my memory at this point, arent there like a 100 of these posted on HN every month that all have something to do with multi agent collaboration that support 1000 models?
Dark UI pattern: pretends that it is immediately usable only to redirect for sign-up.
loading story #47365065
Is the value prop that I can see what the agent is doing? This is not the way: https://youtu.be/R_2-ggpZz0Q?t=158

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.

loading story #47365258
The persistence layer is probably more valuable here than the visual canvas itself. When running multi-agent workflows on complex tasks, the hard part isn't the agents working in parallel — it's maintaining coherent state when something fails mid-run or needs revision. A canvas that preserves intermediate results and lets you surgically re-run specific branches without starting over would solve a real pain point. Curious how Spine handles partial failures — does the whole workflow restart or can it pick up from the last valid checkpoint?
loading story #47366671
the 'chat is the wrong interface' framing is interesting but i think the real friction is context fragility, not linearity. long chats break because models lose the thread, not because you can't branch. the canvas fixes that by making context explicit and persistent — you can see what the agents are actually holding.

curious how the orchestrator handles conflicts when parallel agents produce contradictory outputs. does the downstream synthesizer just pick, or does it surface the divergence to the user?

loading story #47366164
That is a bold claim for a wrapper lol
loading story #47365122