Launch HN: Sim Studio (YC X25) – Figma-like canvas for agent workflows
7 months ago
Hey HN! We're Emir and Waleed from Sim Studio (https://hn.simstudio.ai.
We’d love to hear your feedback! Do you think our visual solution is a good approach to building agents?
The one thing I find a bit odd about a lot of these orchestration tools is that they aren't AI first on their own UX.
Surely the first thing I should be presented with is a prompt window that can help be scaffold out the orchestration.
Thanks for the suggestion! We're adding in a prompt to workflow this week.
It would be great to see how this compares (why it's better, or what it does differently) to the myriad of competitors in this space - from established players like n8n adding 'AI' features, to AI-specific workflow tools like Rivet, to AI libraries adding visual designers like Langflow.
Site looks great!
thank you! We believe Sim Studio is different because we built it from the ground up to be ai-native - not an automation tool that bolted on ai features as an afterthought
A few points on this:
- Super intuitive & highly configurable visual canvas where there are no abstractions over the model providers' parameters
- Seamlessly works with the dev tools everyone uses (supabase, pinecone, mem0, exa)
- Handles complexities like branching, loops, and concurrency by default
- Built-in debugging that actually makes sense (with trace spans and logs)
- Actually open source (apache 2.0)
There is nothing about this that you can call it "ai-native" -its just another visual editor (amongst which i've seen like 5+ from YC).
I like the product. But I have a feedback: Your homepage doesn't exactly help understand your product. Your github has a GIF that describes your product better, so you should consider having something like that describes your product better on your website.
thanks for the feedback, will add the demo directly to the website!
Congratulations on the public launch!
I had the honor of meeting these founders in person, and was pretty inspired by how fast these guys ship features and iterate on the product with their customers. Definitely the best React Flow work I've ever seen!
thank you! appreciate the kind words
Lovely! I’ll give this a shot soon. Two questions: 1. Pricing - I presume y’all will eventually charge for hosting like n8n? I’m feeling a bit sheepish trying a new service without any mention of price. Even mentioning a free tier would be nice to see.
2. Any plans for integrating MCP servers? I’m looking to build a WhatsApp based Text to SQL service and this seems like a solid fit, but I’d like to use an MCP server that groks the business domain to query supabase. Any suggestions on how to pull this off?
appreciate it!
1) we are completely open source and you can self-host it if you so please. for the hosted platform, we have a free tier to let you tinker and get some free inference credits, and then we have a pro plan with is $20 worth of inference, team plan with $40. we only charge for inference, not to use the platform
2) we are planning on integrating with MCP servers, although hesitatn because its a newer protocol and may not be here to stay (might be a hot take). in the meantime, we have pre-built integrations for whatsapp & supabase, so you can definitely build this out today
I think that "Figma/Excalidraw-like" canvas for <insert interesting problem domain here> is an underrated solution space. At least in terms of variation on the problem domain.
I agree, I especially find it useful when prototyping. I recently built a canvas node-based tool that connects LLM prompts and passes the model's response into the next node as context. It was fun to create and great for testing/comparing outputs from different models. https://littleworkflow.com/
That's awesome! I like the visual rendering on the canvas.
1 reply →
(should add TLdraw which is specifically built for extensibility)
no, it is overrated. there are many many canvas workflow builders like this one. they're all beautiful, intuitive and easy to use. they all also dont get traction. go ahead, name one that everyone else here will know. its weird but theres a huge gulf here between what people think they want and what people really use outside the figma/excalidraw/tldraw/miro/canva space
we bet that its just because they pre-dated LLMs and don't really allow for granular control. the goal is to make it easier to develop automations/workflows, not harder. we think the future of development is 90% transformations/routing/fallbacks (boring) and the only part that actually impacts the end result is the call to the LLM (fun), the tools you give it, and a memory component. if we abstract away all the boring stuff, and only leave the stuff that impacts the results then it makes iterating and building with AI much faster and easier.
1 reply →
We believe a visual solution is the best way for developers — and LLMs — to build applications in the future.
It would be nice to see the examples populated with real life examples.
Try out https://hn.simstudio.ai for a live example, but we're also releasing templates this week to see community workflows.
I think OP is more referring to examples on how to set a workflow, like what would the equivalent "Hello World" / "FizzBuzz" / "Send an alert notification to [location] if [condition]". We're still trying to identify when and where using an agent is beneficial, so some use cases that I can review and fiddle with to match my workflow will help.
Really cool platform, so I'm interested in using it!
1 reply →
thanks for the feedback, we are launching a ton of templates on the platform this week that you can add to your workspace with a single click. also, we'll add some examples to the home page
Does SimStudio support embedding within a SaaS under the hosted version? Or is it not meant for multi tenanted deployments?
Looks like IFTTT for LLM agents :-)
i like to think of us as the version of these automation platforms that doesn't make you hardcode in all the non-determinism & edge cases, because now we can just use llms :)
I love this space, been really enjoying Rivet which is open source and free. It's made coding a joy.
Can you share this project you are referring to?
https://github.com/Ironclad/rivet
1 reply →
[flagged]
Did you use SIM studio to set up this AI spam bot?