I also used the original phind back then. For a brief period of time, it was probably the best place around for programming questions.

Then they pivoted to flowcharts and now to "one off apps". It is a bit weird because the concepts are not bad necessarily, but instead of adding features to their product incrementally they decided to make that one feature their product. The problem imo is that there is no one size fitting all. Flowcharts or interactive content can be great, but it is not always the best fit for a search query. Like, I do believe that the chat based UI is not optimal and flowcharts and more complex interactive/dynamic functionalities are great improvements for some use cases, but I am not sure of what to make of this product. If it was a feature in a more general product that I could still get the same functionality as before, it may have been more appealing. Now it feels like they are building a new hammer every time and looking for nails that fit that one hammer.

yeah, broadly agree with this. Phind had quite a strong niche a 18 or so months ago (eg, the best LLM powered replacement for Stack Overflow), but I'm guessing improvements in the core models ate their lunch.

sorry to hear that -- could you please elaborate?

Before it was a fast AI chat that would explain tech stuff and help me with issues.

I used it quite often, even instead of GH Copilot.

Now, it's much slower and has some kind of solution view that gets updated with every new message.

Found myself to resorting to GH Copilot chat quite often today, because Phind felt like a different/worse service.

One example: I asked it to explain continue.dev, the kind of thing I’d asked it previously.

Before I got a proper summary and an arch diagram. It felt like its own work. Now it spun in circles for a good while and then it regurgitated the continue.dev website in weird topic boxes and that wasn’t helpful at all.

It does seem that it’s SOTA for LLMs to take forever to respond. In that sense it’s in good company. More and more, lately, I send a prompt to an LLM and switch tabs because it’s likely to be 20-60 seconds at best.

A curious regression, even if I understand why.

Thanks for the specific example -- I'll take a look at this. In the meantime, you can use old.phind.com if you still want the old experience.

As someone who never used Phind, how was it better than copilot? Did it integrate data from broader sources or just do a better job of presenting it? Was it faster?

It did so extensive online search.

try old.phind.com