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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•9mo ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•9mo 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•9mo ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•9mo ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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?

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
1093•qwertox•4h ago•612 comments

Layoffs at Block

https://twitter.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343
528•mlex•6h ago•544 comments

What Claude Code Chooses

https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks
268•tin7in•9h ago•111 comments

AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf]

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2026-f1282-paper.pdf
330•DamnInteresting•11h ago•159 comments

Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

https://read.technically.dev/p/vibe-coding-and-the-maker-movement
333•itunpredictable•11h ago•323 comments

Two insider cases we've recently closed

https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-trading-violation-enforcement-cases
14•fortran77•1h ago•25 comments

Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

https://www.usecardboard.com/
97•sxmawl•8h ago•49 comments

What does " 2>&1 " mean?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/818255/what-does-21-mean
157•alexmolas•7h ago•101 comments

Hydroph0bia – fixed SecureBoot bypass for UEFI firmware from Insyde H2O (2025)

https://coderush.me/hydroph0bia-part3/
40•transpute•5h ago•2 comments

LiteLLM (YC W23): Founding Reliability Engineer – $200K-$270K and 0.5-1.0% equity

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/litellm/jobs/unlCynJ-founding-reliability-performance-engineer
1•ij23•2h ago

Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

https://www.idc.com/resource-center/press-releases/wwsmartphoneforecast4q25/
183•littlexsparkee•5h ago•187 comments

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published

https://www.openculture.com/2026/02/an-introduction-to-the-codex-seraphinianus.html
31•vinhnx•3d ago•9 comments

Google Workers Seek 'Red Lines' on Military A.I., Echoing Anthropic

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/technology/google-deepmind-letter-pentagon.html
11•mikece•21m ago•5 comments

I baked a pie every day for a year and it changed my life

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/22/a-new-start-after-60-i-baked-a-pie-every-day...
234•NaOH•3d ago•159 comments

Museum of Plugs and Sockets

https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/index.html
84•ohjeez•3d ago•31 comments

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdocs/uiguidelines.pdf
167•spiffytech•10h ago•78 comments

OsmAnd's Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

https://osmand.net/blog/fast-routing/
121•todsacerdoti•8h ago•35 comments

Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator

https://internals-for-interns.com/posts/go-memory-allocator/
37•valyala•3d ago•7 comments

Hacking Tauri for Designer

https://yujonglee.com/blog/hacking-tauri-for-designer/
15•yujonglee•4d ago•0 comments

BuildKit: Docker's Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything

https://tuananh.net/2026/02/25/buildkit-docker-hidden-gem/
152•jasonpeacock•13h ago•52 comments

Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance

https://hackersmacker.org
95•conesus•2d ago•97 comments

Lidar waveforms are worth 40x128x33 words

https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2025/html/Scheuble_Lidar_Waveforms_are_Worth_40x128x33_...
38•teleforce•3d ago•14 comments

Show HN: Deff – Side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal

https://github.com/flamestro/deff
82•flamestro•9h ago•51 comments

Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back

https://www.playlinex.com/
54•Humanista75•2d ago•19 comments

Cartographic Symbologies: The Art and Design of Expression in Historic Maps

https://exhibits.stanford.edu/cartosym/browse
8•starkparker•3d ago•0 comments

Interval Research Corporation: a 1990s PARC without a Xerox (2022)

https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/interval-research-corporation-a-1990s-parc-without-a-xerox/
4•surprisetalk•3d ago•0 comments

The Wolfram S Combinator Challenge

https://www.combinatorprize.org/
79•paraschopra•3d ago•22 comments

Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/nano-banana-2/
501•davidbarker•11h ago•479 comments

This time is different

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/this-time-is-different/
135•speckx•14h ago•216 comments

Steering interpretable language models with concept algebra

https://www.guidelabs.ai/post/steerling-steering-8b/
62•luulinh90s•1d ago•3 comments