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I think this is really neat. You should probably take it as a compliment that the biggest criticisms so far are about the website landing page. ;)

I like canvases in general, and I especially like them for mentally organizing and referring to this sort of broad work. (Honestly, I think zoomable canvases would make a better window manager in general, but I digress)

One small piece of friction: My default mouse-based ways of dragging the canvas around (that work in most canvases like Figma) aren't working. I saw that you had a tutorial, and I have learned to hold space now, but I prefer the "hold middle mouse button to drag my canvas view around".

I've got a couple of research tasks running now, and my current open questions as a very new user are: 1) How easy will it be to store the outputs into a Github repository. 2) How easy will it be to refer back to this later? 3) Can I build upon it manually or automatically? 4) Can I (securely) share it with someone else for them to see and build upon it? 5) Can I do something "locally" with it? Not necessarily the model, but my preferred interface for LLMs at this point is Claude Code. Could I have a Claude Code instance running in one of these boxes somehow? 6) What if I want to do private stuff with it and don't like the traffic going through Spine's servers? Could I pay them for the interface, but bring my own keys? (Related: Can I self host somehow?) 7) When this is done, each artifact it found (screenshot, webpage, etc), is going to be helpful. The data-hoarder in me wants to make sure I can search these later. Heck, if I could do that, this would become my preferred "web browser". (But again, I digress.)

We run 13 AI agents in production on a $24/month VPS. Key things we learned: 1) File-based memory beats databases for LLM ops (portability, readability, no ORM). 2) Preflight checks on every edit prevent 90% of incidents. 3) Hash-chained audit logs are cheap insurance. 4) Ollama for chat responses, Claude for complex tasks - saves 95% on API costs. Open sourced the governance layer: https://github.com/levelsofself/mcp-nervous-system

Got some great results for a rather broad domain in the first pass.

HN is going to tend towards negative/constructive feedback, for me the only issue is that the mouse interaction is a bit wonky. Took me a minute to realize that i could select different mouse modes. With that I'd say I'd echo TheTaytay's comment about mouse interaction and for me generating docx (which was the output of my agents, haven't even explored explicitly asking for something else) creates a bit of a barrier to use the content for me. Markdown or even HTML would be helpful.

But these are just minor nits, love the concept and great execution.

It might just be me, but this interface is the first time I felt the desire to interact with long-running agents even though I use chat interfaces all day long. Maybe it was the demo video on the landing page which was compelling with its examples. Maybe it was the feeling that I could see what was going on because I would be on a canvas. Nicely done!

Off to keep iterating on the prototype app I started...

Calling it a 'canvas' makes me think that this tool is about AI agents doing some kind of collaborative drawing. Looking at the vid though, it seems more like an environment for visually organizing and managing agentic work (which seems very cool, and quite a bit more than just a canvas).

I didn’t read the post, I checked out the website just like 99% of the people will do.

Simple advice, if you are selling a product with a selling point of being visual, show it on your website. Not in a YouTube video but actual screenshots, short cut 10 sec video/gif

I like the overall idea and presentation. In trying it out, I hit the token cap before my trial task was able to complete and show me the end result. I'm sure your free-tier token costs are non-trivial but it was definitely a bummer that I couldn't even see one initial run's output to decide if I wanted to pay.

I decided to gamble the one month fee to let it continue, but the payment defaulting to annual was jarring. I can see it lets you advertise a lower price but that only made me more tempted to leave altogether when I saw the price go up on the final screen.

Congrats on the launch! Meta comment, but I just ain't reading all of the above. You need to be able to explain this in about 20% the number of words or you'll lose people, especially VC.

My advice is to start with "Spine Swarm solves _____" then how, then why you're different. 3 short paragraphs, preferably 1-2 sentences each.

I have not seen my final report yet for my query around machinist.com. However I would like to say my initial impression is very positive. At least in terms of the digestion of my somewhat nebulous request. I like the way your app was able to burrow down to pain points I have experienced and am trying to work out in terms of product market fit for the domain. I look forward to exploring more and giving you more feedback when I see the final report. I will also add that I am looking forward to using your product to explore other opportunities that I'm sure are out there in this age of AI.

Super cool!

I'm completely sold on the canvas layer. Embracing non linearity is such a boon when you're on the ideas stage. When you have verified it though, moving it to another medium (a document, presentation or just code) is often the best choice.

Do you see the canvases created with Spine as "one off" that you discard when you have got your deliverable, or as something living that you keep around?

I'm building a side project for running SQL on a canvas (kavla.dev), so I'm thinking about canvas workflows all the time!

I had to read this text in order to understand what this tool does, because I could not know from the website (without watching a video). You should use Spine to improve your website. ;-)

"I make AI output lots of stuff" is not an intrinsically valuable thing. I can run the same thing on Claude in research mode and get a report with cited sources in a more digestable format on my phone. What's the eval here on if any of this is good? Is it even possible to test (ie, you cant really AB test startup ideas)?

Why is the landing page “paged”? Feels odd on mobile. Some titles are cut off because of it.

In the demo video you shared (yt link) how many credits did that whole project take? What is the prices to fix elements of it (for example of you dislike a minor aspect of the generated spreadsheet do follow up instructions utilize only the narrow subset of agents that has been demoed to that subtask, or does it create new agents who have to create new context in the narrow follow up task?)

What does it mean to say 30,000 monthly credits and 1500 daily refresh credits? If my project takes 7000 credits (the way your demo does) then does that mean I couldn’t actually do it on the lowest available pricing plan because I couldn’t use 7000 credits in one run? If this is the case, what am abysmal pricing model!

Interesting idea, I wanted to see an example of the agents working on a canvas when I opened your page. I saw nothing of the sort. Sorry, but immediate fail.

This may be too harsh, but you need to make it immediately clear to someone today why they can't just have Claude Code one shot your app!

Just as a tiny first piece of feedback, the main marketing website is very hard to understand or grok without a demo of how the tool works. Even just the quick YouTube video that you added in your post here, if embedded, would make a difference.

There are so many "agentic tools" out there that it's really hard to see what differentiates this just based on the website.

This is awesome. Good job.

I got dizzy from the star effect when scrolling the website.

Why do I need a canvas to visualize the work that the agents are doing? I don't want to see their thought process, I just want the end product like how ChatGPT or Claude currently work.

whoa congrats on the launch. lol I launched my visual canvas for agents today too. I went in a more of a collaborative canvas IDE, agent orchestration direction. But very cool to see your take on it

https://getmesa.dev is mine

Is it possible to build self-improving swarm loops? (ie swarm x builds a thing, swarm y critiques and improved x’s work, repeat…)

excuse my memory at this point, arent there like a 100 of these posted on HN every month that all have something to do with multi agent collaboration that support 1000 models?

Dark UI pattern: pretends that it is immediately usable only to redirect for sign-up.

Is the value prop that I can see what the agent is doing? This is not the way: https://youtu.be/R_2-ggpZz0Q?t=158

How am I supposed to get anything out of this? Consider that agents are going to get faster and run more and more tasks in parallel. This is not manageable for a human to follow in real time. I can barely keep up with one agent in real-time, let alone a swarm.

What I could see being useful is if you monitored the agents and notified me when one is in the middle of something that deserves my attention.

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