Was tired of drowning in HN comments, so I built an AI Chief of Staff
Details
- External ID
- 46765448
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Was tired of drowning in HN comments, so I built an AI Chief of Staff
- Website domain
- hnsignals.com
- Launched
- Jan. 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.09617918313570488
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about.I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?"So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of Staff who reads the entire thread for you and hands you a one-page executive brief.How it works: 1. Filters: Shows trending stories (50+ comments) where the discussion has heated up. 2. Extracts: An AI (Qwen 3 via Venice.ai) reads the top comments. 3. Structures: Instead of a wall of text, you get 4 specific signals: - The Hook: Why you should care. - The Gist: The core technical facts. - The Debate: The actual friction point (e.g., "Rust vs. C++ safety"). - The Verdict: The community consensus.Why I'm showing this (Beta): Most AI tools just shorten the text. I'm trying to extract the signal. It's a work in progress - the AI sometimes gets too clever, and I'm still tuning the cache strategy. I'd love feedback on whether this structured approach is actually better than a standard "TL;DR."Bonus meta-game: If this Show HN gets 50+ comments and makes it onto HNSignals itself, I'll read the AI's analysis of people analyzing my analyzer. (P.S. Please go easy on the intentional stress testing - my Lambda inference budget is finite!)Try it: https://hnsignals.comExample output The Heartbleed Bug (2014): https://hnsignals.com/signal/7548991 Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer? (2018): https://hnsignals.com/signal/17692005 Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml (2019): https://hnsignals.com/signal/20192645 OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin (2020): https://hnsignals.com/signal/23885684 Apple, What Have You Done? (2026): https://hnsignals.com/signal/46763592
Enrichment
- Theme
- database infrastructure and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- ai summarization for hacker news comments
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Scraping Hacker News comment threads via the Algolia API, sending the text to an LLM with structured outputs, and displaying the summary on a static web interface is a straightforward vibe-coding task.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Only shows original titles, not updated/edited ones, High comment threshold (50+) limits story coverage
Feature requests: Show updated/edited story titles, Lower comment threshold for broader coverage
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 252 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #246 of 253 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 83 days after the earliest competitor.
- I built an interactive HN Simulator · hn · 2025-11-24 · 538 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- A self-hosted AI that turns Hacker News into a daily briefing · hn · 2026-07-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Hackobar · hn · 2026-05-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- WhatHappened · hn · 2025-12-08 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- HN Companion · hn · 2026-02-10 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Selbstbild · hn · 2026-07-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Turning 100-plus comments HN threads into readable discussions · hn · 2026-01-02 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours · hn · 2026-07-02 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.49
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.