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?

Kaiser nurses say AI, workplace surveillance are making their jobs, care worse

https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/07/15/kaiser-nurses-say-ai-workplace-surveillance-are-making-th...
328•gnabgib•4h ago•211 comments

AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

1069•nprateem•17h ago•648 comments

Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work

387•nicholasjbs•10h ago•36 comments

The Zilog Z80 has turned 50

https://goliath32.com/blog/z80.html
173•st_goliath•7h ago•54 comments

First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4kdd1e0ejo
384•neversaydie•12h ago•237 comments

The Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine unlocks a new frontier beyond AlphaFold

https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/the-isomorphic-labs-drug-design-engine-unlocks-a-new-fron...
41•andsoitis•3h ago•2 comments

Moonstone: Modern, cross-platform Lua runtime and package manager written in Zig

https://moonstone.sh/
11•ksymph•1h ago•2 comments

Learning a few things about running SQLite

https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/07/17/learning-about-running-sqlite/
179•surprisetalk•9h ago•41 comments

Vāgdhenu: A Sanskrit Chanting TTS System

https://prathosh.in/vagdhenu/
81•subinalex•4d ago•9 comments

DrDroid (YC W23) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/drdroid/jobs/w45QcNV-product-engineer-assignment-mandatory
1•TheBengaluruGuy•2h ago

Stenchill: 3D Printable Solder Paste Stencil Generator

https://www.stenchill.com/en/
13•radeeyate•2h ago•1 comments

Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/
283•droidjj•12h ago•149 comments

An Update on Igalia's Layer Based SVG Engine in WebKit (Reducing Layer Overhead)

https://blogs.igalia.com/nzimmermann/posts/2026-07-14-lbse-conditional-layers/
11•bkardell•3d ago•0 comments

I Started a "Dirt Notebook"

https://pinewind.bearblog.dev/i-started-a-dirt-notebook/
19•herbertl•1h ago•12 comments

TP-Link Kasa cameras leaked home GPS via unauthenticated UDP for 6 years

https://github.com/BadChemical/IoT-Vulnerability-Research-Public/blob/main/TP-Link_Kasa_EC71/Kasa...
37•BadChemical•5h ago•5 comments

Static search trees: 40x faster than binary search (2024)

https://curiouscoding.nl/posts/static-search-tree/
54•lalitmaganti•6h ago•3 comments

Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader

https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/open-book-touch
67•surprisetalk•6h ago•16 comments

Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment

https://www.up.com/news/safety/Tracking-Rail-Heat-260608
53•zdw•6h ago•19 comments

Topcoat: The full full-stack framework for Rust

https://github.com/tokio-rs/topcoat
52•wertyk•6h ago•30 comments

Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

https://app.everything.diena.co/
65•lortex•8h ago•24 comments

PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats

https://www.abuseofcats.com
19•scooterbooper•3h ago•26 comments

Lego building instructions through time

https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-lego-building-instructions-through-time
70•NaOH•8h ago•11 comments

The state of open source AI

https://stateofopensource.ai/
383•rellem•12h ago•283 comments

Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

https://improvesomething.today/responses-to-problems/
205•surprisetalk•13h ago•115 comments

Frank Lloyd Wright’s first home

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/frank-lloyd-wright-home-and-studio-everything-you-need-...
83•NaOH•5d ago•44 comments

FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/faa-boeing-737-max-787.html
130•hmm37•5h ago•69 comments

MoonBASIC: A modern BASIC for building 2D and 3D games

https://github.com/CharmingBlaze/moonbasic
58•klaussilveira•3d ago•18 comments

Show HN: Watch bots interact with an SSH honeypot in real time

https://honeypotlive.cc/
144•tusksm•13h ago•51 comments

Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-landmark-l...
149•letmevoteplease•4h ago•178 comments

More Bounce to the Ounce

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/more-bounce-to-the-ounce
118•pavel_lishin•13h ago•47 comments