frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
51•palashshah•9h 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•9h ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•7h ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•9h 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•8h ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•9h 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•8h 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•7h 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.
elif•9h 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•8h 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•5h ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
mentalgear•7h 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•7h 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•5h 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•6h ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•6h ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•6h 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•6h 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•5h 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.

For algorithms, a little memory outweighs a lot of time

https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorithms-a-little-memory-outweighs-a-lot-of-time-20250521/
105•makira•3h ago•18 comments

Show HN: Confidential computing for high-assurance RISC-V embedded systems

https://github.com/IBM/ACE-RISCV
49•mrnoone•2h ago•3 comments

By default, Signal doesn't recall

https://signal.org/blog/signal-doesnt-recall/
343•feross•6h ago•256 comments

The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015)

https://thevinylfactory.com/features/the-curious-tale-of-bhutans-playable-record-postage-stamps/
61•ohjeez•4h ago•1 comments

OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/openai-to-buy-apple-veteran-jony-ive-s-ai-device-startup-in-6-5-billion-deal
558•minimaxir•5h ago•754 comments

Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

https://rockylinux.org/news/rockylinux-support-for-riscv
27•fork-bomber•2h ago•3 comments

Show HN: I've built online video editor

https://clipjs.vercel.app/
63•mohyware•3h ago•30 comments

Collaborative Text Editing Without CRDTs or OT

https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html
160•samwillis•5h ago•39 comments

Devstral

https://mistral.ai/news/devstral
310•mfiguiere•8h ago•62 comments

Sorcerer (YC S24) Is Hiring a Lead Hardware Design Engineer

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sorcerer/6beb70de-9956-49b7-8e28-f48ea39efac6
1•maxmclau•1h ago

Animated Factorization (2012)

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/
215•miniBill•8h ago•43 comments

Storefront Web Components

https://shopify.dev/docs/api/storefront-web-components
105•maltenuhn•5h ago•28 comments

How we made iText's table rendering faster

https://kb.itextpdf.com/itext/how-i-made-pdf-table-rendering-faster
10•whizzx•2d ago•0 comments

Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system

https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K25/K25K47.html
84•ddahlen•4h ago•49 comments

The Machine Stops (1909)

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/text/the-machine-stops
9•xeonmc•1h ago•0 comments

LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective

https://jngiam.bearblog.dev/mcp-large-data/
130•jngiam1•5h ago•46 comments

An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-ai-studio-native-code-generation-agentic-tools-upgrade/
70•meetpateltech•5h ago•32 comments

Introducing the Llama Startup Program

https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-startup-program/?_fb_noscript=1
137•mayalilpony10•6h ago•44 comments

Understanding the Go Scheduler

https://nghiant3223.github.io/2025/04/15/go-scheduler.html
87•gnabgib•3d ago•13 comments

Launch HN: SIM Studio (YC X25) – Figma-Like Canvas for Agent Workflows

43•waleedlatif1•7h ago•29 comments

ITXPlus: A ITX Sized Macintosh Plus Logicboard Reproduction

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/itxplus-a-itx-sized-macintosh-plus-logicboard-reproduction.49715/
5•zdw•1h ago•0 comments

The US has a new most powerful laser hitting 2 petawatts

https://news.engin.umich.edu/2025/05/the-us-has-a-new-most-powerful-laser/
77•voxadam•7h ago•83 comments

'Turbocharged' Mitochondria Power Birds' Epic Migratory Journeys

https://www.quantamagazine.org/turbocharged-mitochondria-power-birds-epic-migratory-journeys-20250519/
82•rbanffy•8h ago•59 comments

Ratatoi is a C libary that wraps stdlib's strtol (as atoi does), but it's evil.

https://github.com/rept0id/ratatoi
22•rept0id-2•3h ago•15 comments

Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12540
63•jxmorris12•4h ago•28 comments

All That Glitters

https://magazine.atavist.com/all-that-glitters-jona-rechnitz-lawsuit-jadelle-jewelry-coba-ethereummax-mayweather/
24•gmays•4h ago•0 comments

µPC: Scaling Predictive Coding to 100 Layer Networks

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13124
7•frozenseven•3h ago•0 comments

What Is the Difference Between a Block, a Proc, and a Lambda in Ruby? (2013)

https://blog.awaxman.com/what-is-the-difference-between-a-block-a-proc-and-a-lambda-in-ruby
61•Tomte•3d ago•14 comments

Lune: Standalone Luau Runtime

https://github.com/lune-org/lune
63•erlend_sh•8h ago•38 comments

Visualizing entire Chromium include graph

https://blog.bkryza.com/posts/visualizing-chromium-include-graph/
45•bkryza•7h ago•5 comments