IdeaSmith

Short one this week. I built a small app to generate new ideas from existing ones, using an LLM. The app's called IdeaSmith and the idea was based off Minecraft crafting. It's a simple interface, but it was quick to build and the result is pretty fun to play with.

The main idea was that you could take several existing ideas and toss them into an LLM to generate a new one. The new idea could then be saved to the list of existing ideas, and the process could be repeated. I've seen a few products recently (like Pip Decks and SideQuest Decks from The Hero's Journal) which both use a deck of cards as a set of idea prompts, so I decided to use a similar concept. Ideas would go on cards and then several cards could be combined to create a new idea.

I decided to use the Minecraft crafting interface as inspiration for the app. In Minecraft, you can craft small items without a crafting table, using a 2x2 grid, so I made a section for 4 cards to be placed in a 2x2 grid and allowed toggling cards in and out of the grid. Under the grid, there's a button to generate a new idea and a form that takes an idea title and details. When submitting, the ideas are sent to the LLM and the result is parsed and the title/details are placed into the form. The user can also write in their own ideas and save them, which allows them to build up a set of base ideas to work with. I did try having the LLM generate base ideas, but the results were pretty low-quality, so I decided that it was better to manually seed the ideas list.

The results were ok, but fairly underwhelming. As expected of an LLM, it's not great at combining ideas into novel concepts. The ideas it generated were mostly just a very literal mix of the input ideas. That said, I think it could still be useful as a tool for brainstorming when stuck on a problem. I think a mix of prompt engineering and more specific instructions for the session could help a bit, but because of the nature of LLMs, I don't think it'll ever be as good as a couple of people brainstorming together. Still, it was a fun project and I had fun on the interface design for this one.

See you next week!