frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•6mo ago
Hey HN! We recently graduated from YC, and have been building customer personas for large e-commerce companies. We recently expanded into the image generation space, and have been working on research about how to automatically improve the quality of generated images.

Comments

average_r_user•6mo ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•6mo ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•6mo ago
This is a wonderful writeup of building a simple agentic system in general. What OP describes is more or less the bare minimum you should be doing at this point to get good (consistent) results from an LLM; single-shot prompting is a thing of the past.
palashshah•6mo ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•6mo ago
I'm surprised you landed on using o3 as the judge - we found it way too expensive. I use llm as a judge for generating color variations of products, definitely hoping for some improvements - it can be brutal to get non hallucinated features along with proper final rendering.
omneity•6mo ago
Have you tried open weights vision models such as Qwen VL, MiniCPM, PaliGemma...?

I'm also curious how usable are simpler vision models such as Florence in case you explored this direction.

palashshah•6mo ago
we're currently in the process of doing this. i think something that could potentially work is to iterate upon the initial image composition / structure using cheaper models, and then upscale at the end. this way you're saving on that iteration cost, but eventually land on a higher-scale image.
shmoogy•6mo ago
I actually haven't but nova from Amazon was surprisingly good at things like bounding boxes compared to some others You kind of have to test and measure so many different aspects to get the best at specific tasks Thanks for the idea
elif•6mo ago
This is great and provides a good starting point for any similar efforts.

However I think the temptation to lean all tasks on AI is perhaps a little naive if not lazy.

For mask generation, there is really not much reason to use AI. In this example, simple stochastic blob detection, a trivial function you could get from openCV or ask a college sophomore to write would generate much better quality masks.

palashshah•6mo ago
totally agreed here. i think my goal primarily with the mask generation was to test out how effective openai's capabilities were.

we're currently working on pipelines that limit the the involvement of AI to various tasks. for example, when generating an ad there's usually logo, some banner text, and background image.

we can use gpt-image-1 to generate the background image, another LLM to identify the coordinates of where we place the logo, and just add the logo onto the image. this is just one example!

jackphilson•6mo ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•6mo ago
"Simple stochastic blob detection" is an abstraction. You write (or import) a function where the the gnarly logic lives and call `detectBlobs()`. "Use an abstraction" doesn't mean you should use the same abstraction for every task, you should use the right tool for the job.
mentalgear•6mo ago
Again another example of "the unreasonable effectiveness of LLMs in a loop". At with time, the tasks for loop become bigger and more complex, until we find ourselves "outlooped" at least job wise.
ramoz•6mo ago
Nice retrospective but I guess this process is no longer needed as model's get better; esp as they start enabling features like consistent subjects. Seems like a lot of overhead to correct text for inspirational images, but I can imagine you need to always present some form of _quality_ to your clients.

Feel like control nets and some minimal photoshop work would've been better.

palashshah•6mo ago
totally. it got to a point where most of the text generated in our images was incorrect, and so it wasn't a great look showing that to our clients.

we're actually working on some form of what you described where we take images generated from LLMs + add consistent logos discretely rather than generatively.

abshkbh•6mo ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•6mo ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•6mo ago
I was kind of hoping this would be in the 'Dreambooth mold' of finetuning open weights models. I have used that with some success some ~2 years ago, does anyone know what improvements there have been in that direction since Dreambooth?
zahlman•6mo ago
It's frankly amazing to me that "ask another LLM to evaluate the image" actually produces useful feedback that results in actual improvement from the first LLM.

But then, I guess it's not much different of an idea from the earlier use of GANs, or of telling LLMs to "stop hallucinating", etc.

palashshah•6mo ago
totally. the way i think about it (purely based on intuition) is that asking an LLM to do understanding + image generation is too complex for it to be effective. if we separate out the tasks into discrete steps, the evaluation becomes better, and the generation simply becomes instruction following.
jacob019•6mo ago
This is all edited with gpt-image-1? The revised images are amazing. Were example logos provided or is it just working off of it's knowledge of a well known brand?

Learning Music with Strudel

https://terryds.notion.site/Learning-Music-with-Strudel-2ac98431b24180deb890cc7de667ea92
227•terryds•6d ago•51 comments

I Designed and Printed a Custom Nose Guard to Help My Dog with DLE

https://snoutcover.com/billie-story
108•ragswag•2d ago•12 comments

Mistral 3 family of models released

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-3
406•pember•3h ago•131 comments

Nixtml: Static website and blog generator written in Nix

https://github.com/arnarg/nixtml
61•todsacerdoti•3h ago•14 comments

Addressing the adding situation

https://xania.org/202512/02-adding-integers
224•messe•6h ago•66 comments

YesNotice

https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/yesnotice/
82•surprisetalk•1w ago•34 comments

Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025

https://xania.org/202511/advent-of-compiler-optimisation
270•vismit2000•8h ago•41 comments

Poka Labs (YC S24) Is Hiring a Founding Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/poka-labs/jobs/RCQgmqB-founding-engineer
1•arbass•1h ago

Python Data Science Handbook

https://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook/
123•cl3misch•5h ago•27 comments

Lowtype: Elegant Types in Ruby

https://codeberg.org/Iow/type
24•birdculture•4d ago•6 comments

Show HN: Marmot – Single-binary data catalog (no Kafka, no Elasticsearch)

https://github.com/marmotdata/marmot
61•charlie-haley•3h ago•12 comments

A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
102•absqueued•5h ago•66 comments

Apple Releases Open Weights Video Model

https://starflow-v.github.io
375•vessenes•12h ago•122 comments

What will enter the public domain in 2026?

https://publicdomainreview.org/features/entering-the-public-domain/2026/
422•herbertl•14h ago•282 comments

YouTube increases FreeBASIC performance (2019)

https://freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27927
133•giancarlostoro•2d ago•30 comments

Comparing AWS Lambda ARM64 vs. x86_64 Performance Across Runtimes in Late 2025

https://chrisebert.net/comparing-aws-lambda-arm64-vs-x86_64-performance-across-multiple-runtimes-...
105•hasanhaja•8h ago•47 comments

Lazier Binary Decision Diagrams for set-theoretic types

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/12/02/lazier-bdds-for-set-theoretic-types/
35•tvda•5h ago•5 comments

Apple to beat Samsung in smartphone shipments for first time in 14 years

https://sherwood.news/tech/apple-to-beat-samsung-in-smartphone-shipments-for-first-time-in-14-years/
19•avonmach•43m ago•10 comments

Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science

https://beej.us/guide/bglcs/
290•amruthreddi•2d ago•110 comments

How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-music-for-airports/
160•dijksterhuis•10h ago•84 comments

Show HN: RunMat – runtime with auto CPU/GPU routing for dense math

https://github.com/runmat-org/runmat
16•nallana•3h ago•3 comments

Fallout 2's Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/fallout-2-designer-chris-avellone-recalls-his-first-forays...
42•LaSombra•2h ago•13 comments

An LED panel that shows the aviation around you

https://github.com/AxisNimble/TheFlightWall_OSS
64•yzydserd•5d ago•16 comments

Rootless Pings in Rust

https://bou.ke/blog/rust-ping/
108•bouk•11h ago•73 comments

Progress on TypeScript 7 – December 2025

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typescript-7-december-2025/
9•DanRosenwasser•31m ago•2 comments

4.3M Browsers Infected: Inside ShadyPanda's 7-Year Malware Campaign

https://www.koi.ai/blog/4-million-browsers-infected-inside-shadypanda-7-year-malware-campaign
7•janpio•1h ago•0 comments

Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023)

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/power-proximity-coworkers-training-tomorrow-or-...
134•delichon•4h ago•102 comments

Tom Stoppard has died

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74xe49q7vlo
159•mstep•2d ago•57 comments

After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/august-29-2025-kb5064081-os-build-26100-5074-preview-3f...
168•zdw•15h ago•198 comments

Reverse math shows why hard problems are hard

https://www.quantamagazine.org/reverse-mathematics-illuminates-why-hard-problems-are-hard-20251201/
152•gsf_emergency_6•15h ago•35 comments