Show HN: Runchat, mini agents for creative automation (Productainment?)
runchat.appHey HN,
Firstly, to head things off at the pass: Runchat is another reactflow + llm app and we apologise for that.
Runchat is a node based editor for building things (workflows, mini agents, web apps, branching dialogues, etc) using three simple building blocks: an llm, http requests and a sandboxed js environment.
We started building Runchat to try and solve what we see as one of the biggest issues with llms: people assume they are creative and constantly ask them for ideas, when they aren't and their ideas are bad. Our hunch is that the chat UI for llms is the inhibiting factor here, and that llms might actually be great for a bunch of creative tasks if we could use them more systemically.
In Runchat, interactions with language models are a branching dialogue with explicit history. Returning and changing any part of the conversation propagates changes through the remainder of the dialogue. Each prompt must necessarily describe an action the language model needs to perform, rather than an exchange in a one-off chat. In this way, Runchat can research, write and run tasks.
To make Runchat more useful in more ways, every Runchat can become a node in some other Runchat. You can build a tool once then reuse it again and again, or share it so others don't have to reinvent the wheel. These can also be used as tools by llms. If you want an llm to be able to search hackernews, you can make a Runchat that does this via api, then add this as a tool to your prompt and away you go. This feels pretty easy, so we're excited about the potential.
Runchat is also quite fun. It's fast (super fast with Groq) and we're trying to keep it free for the average punter (by using OpenRouter). This is also so that the barriers to exploring creative uses of llms for making things like recommendation engines, simple games or other "useless" tools is as low as possible. Using Runchat feels like you're making something, rather than just filling in a form and we like that.
We know node-based editors are opinionated, prompting is weird and hard and apps don't usually fall in both the "Productivity" and "Entertainment" categories. We know we're a bit crazy. But we will get round to polishing this and would love a bit of healthy HN feedback.
-Gwyll + James