frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•1y 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•1y ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•1y ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•1y 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•1y ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•1y ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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?

Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s

1786•section33•13h ago•191 comments

Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

https://xcancel.com/__alpoge__/status/2079028340955197566
110•loubbrad•1h ago•32 comments

Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/19/claude-code-in-bun-in-rust/
430•tosh•18h ago•596 comments

What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

https://chipweinberger.com/articles/20260719-hardware-is-not-so-hard
438•chipweinberger•17h ago•203 comments

The Zen of Parallel Programming

https://smolnero.com/posts/the-zen-of-parallel-programming
131•edgar_ortega•5d ago•15 comments

Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine
27•wertyk•4h ago•12 comments

Orion Browser by Kagi

https://orionbrowser.com/
98•sebjones•9h ago•79 comments

Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-26-3-snapshot-4
286•ObviouslyFlamer•16h ago•189 comments

Biggest Probabilistic Computer Turns Noise into Answers

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biggest-probabilistic-computer
53•rbanffy•6h ago•9 comments

Who Is America's Homer?

https://www.plough.com/articles/who-is-americas-homer
53•samclemens•5d ago•121 comments

A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

https://raymii.org/s/blog/Intel_Itanium_IA-64-Emulator_that_boots_Windows.html
63•jandeboevrie•7h ago•49 comments

Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg8edqq5g5o
138•teleforce•14h ago•100 comments

11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies' Archive of Americana Architecture

https://www.openculture.com/2026/07/free-photos-from-john-margolies-archive-of-americana-architec...
42•gslin•4d ago•2 comments

Qwen 3.8

https://twitter.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2078759124914098291
813•nh43215rgb•19h ago•567 comments

Talk: The Art of Braiding Algorithms

https://pgadey.ca/notes/talk-relatorium-2026/
28•surprisetalk•4d ago•0 comments

HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router

https://justsomebody.dev/blog/mikrotik-home-router
79•rafal_opilowski•9h ago•68 comments

C64 Basic Dungeon Crawler: Goblin Attack (C64 Basic Part 8)

https://retrogamecoders.com/c64-basic-dungeon-part8/
63•ibobev•13h ago•4 comments

HMD Touch 4G

https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-touch-4g
62•thisislife2•11h ago•65 comments

The Chickens and the Bulls (2012)

https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/the-chickens-and-the-bulls-the-rise-and-incredible-fall-...
3•robtherobber•4d ago•0 comments

Cagire: Live Coding in Forth

https://cagire.raphaelforment.fr
82•surprisetalk•1w ago•11 comments

I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned

https://en.andros.dev/blog/0b8e451e/i-joined-the-indieweb-heres-what-i-learned/
170•andros•17h ago•87 comments

Dupes took over the world

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/493930/dupe-culture-fender-ugg-quince-tiktok-amazon-online-shopping
70•gumby•5d ago•65 comments

I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

https://quesma.com/blog/custom-deep-research-pipeline/
104•bkotrys•16h ago•141 comments

AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-advice-suppresses-critical-thinking-wrong-answers-study
303•rbanffy•7h ago•170 comments

World GeoHistoGram

https://textbooks.wmisd.org/worldgeohist.html
8•rzk•6d ago•0 comments

Natural experiments prove phytoplankton carbon removal works

https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/natural-experiments-prove-feeding
53•getnormality•13h ago•24 comments

Ollama: All Aboard Open Models

https://ollama.com/blog/all-aboard-open-models
125•inferhaven•20h ago•50 comments

Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies (2021)

https://www.scopeofwork.net/ise-jingu-and-the-pyramid-of-enabling-technologies/
10•NaOH•4d ago•4 comments

Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)

https://psychedelics.community/cultural-icons/terence-mckennas-mega-bad-trip
78•Dimmiwoah•13h ago•75 comments

UnifiedIR for Julia

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/62334
88•vimarsh6739•1d ago•17 comments