1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video
2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.
It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!
1. I loathe video with the white-hot glow of a thousand angry suns, and loathe LLM slop-digests of things more still.
2. I spend tremendous amounts of time in situations where I can listen but not read, whether driving or on my bike, and this is a legitimately useful way to catch up on HN in those situations.
I made an OSS framework for these for when you want to go beyond one-shoting it: https://github.com/scosman/videowright
- Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover
- can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio.
- interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds
- MP4 export/encoder
- Generates a video from a prompt (obvs)
We're not using Opus 5.5 btw, as it would be too expensive. Our goals is to eventually get the cost down to 1 cent for a 1 minute video, and with 1 second delay from submit to playback. For that, we need dirt cheap and lightning fast models.
Like Marquise Brownlee just has opinions I care about and I watch his videos for this reason.
If a video just explains something I could just read all I’m getting is a layer of obfuscation.
I think this is exactly the opposite of what AI should be used for. It is going to make people dumb.
Watching a video instead of engaging your own brain makes you feel like you learned something without actually trying and I would bet it works much less well.
If someone is there adding something beyond what is already there - ie someone like Maruqise. Then it makes sense for them to be there.
If not it is just brain rot.
People already have issues with concentration. Allowing them to further allow that muscle to atrophy will not be good.
But given how good a job this seemed to do at giving me more than just headlines, I'd love to have maybe even just an audio podcast feed of the top 10 stories like this compiled a few times a day. I would listen while I'm doing things when reading isn't practical.
tl;dr agree that we don't need this to replace reading, but I see that it can be a useful tool.
I’m still basically against this though. I consider it slop.
What Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS is doing with generative voice design in this area super interesting.
This is pretty crazy. It's not hard to imagine something like Reddit deploying this as a first party feature.
Seems like over engineering - why not just make JavaScript/HTML?
The article: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-spanning-tree-video
The tool built by Claude to make the video: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/tree/2808...
You can use MCP to generate an Explainer video next time if you want. It's currently free, as the tokens for directing and scripting it is offloaded to your agent. And then we cover the TTS for the time being.
How would you do that?
This will work for young readers too, illiterates, sensory-impaired and foreigners. All four!!
I wonder what the challenge would be of making these videos more interactive would be? Also I do wonder if there is any research happening in making AI explainers more trustable.
"We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link."
Though I realise it could have been said more explicitly. But the second time someone clicks the link we re-use the same explainer.
It's definitely a form of TLDR, but for watching?!
This feels like some kind of parallel to Jev in that. If it is super fast, what other use cases may be unlocked it, as you suggest.
Also, I love the simple, easy to remember domain name, HN.watch!
Thanks!
I have to say, if HN were to add an AI generated paragraph summary about each link at the top of each comments page, it would probably go a long way to improving the discussions about a lot of topics. The number of people who comment based on the title of a link alone is pretty high, and I'd bet the vast majority of commenters only skim the linked pages anyways. Might as well get everyone on the same page with a quick overview.
But I'm skeptical that people would embrace it. It's more about the optics, and it also relates to the old principle of "Read the article -- don't start opining based only on the headline." Many would probably say that you shouldn't offer an opinion if you've only read an AI distillation.
It could be wrong - or more likely, the article acknowledges likely objections and refutes them well, but that part didn't make it into the summary, so everyone starts raising very un-insightful points as though the author was oblivious to them.
"a compressor uses three main organs" @ 2:97
I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.
Kidding, I already sent it to a friend with ADHD who has been struggling to remain anchored to the tech world in any way besides Shorts.
But, culturally, I definitely hate the trend it implies!
Neat. Thank you for sharing.
We've always gotten a ton of positive comments from people with ADHD who've used our HTML videos to learn to code. Despite it not being in our target group at all when we started out.
Hope your friend finds it helpful!
The select comment/conversation slide is a nice touch, though it's sure making some choices there.
Main problem seems to be that the sameness of the format (it's clearly following a strict template) and voice do make it feel very repetitive, real fast. I'm not sure how you get consistent results AND solve for that, though.
I watched the videos and confirmed they are worse than brainrot.
Think there's a ton of potential here too. So we're staying on course.