This looks a good idea to let people choose their preferred medium. I am not into video either, but I turned one of my latest blog article into a video using Claude, since I thought it would be “easy.” I asked it to build the video by screencasting a browser presenting the interactive diagrams of the article and add some titles. It build some kind of recording app for me. It still took me many hours, but I think I would be faster if I redid it. I would pay to have it done faster, but I want to keep control of the text, not have a summary.
This is actually quite impressive from an engineer viewpoint. I just have the feeling that the videos quickly become very monotonous and rather boring due to the monotonous AI voices. If somehow you could bring dynamic variation in these videos that would be fantastic.
Presumably you also like that they are explaining things right? I mean that seems like the more critical step. Otherwise if it's just Marquise Brownlee, you could just watch Marquise Brownlee say the same sequence of random words for 3 minutes a few times per day.
All of what you said is great, and I especially detest the proliferation of slop videos on YouTube, where it makes no sense to drown out the ample supply of such personalities and insights with AI voices summarizing wikipedia or Reddit threads over AI imagery slideshows.
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.
These AI explainers are taking over. I tried getting this working back in May. The models were okay but not quite there and it was a ton of effort. Opus 5.5 seems like the tipping point.
This is well done! Not just for the video generation - it makes me realize that a short AI generated paragraph summary added to the top of each HN thread could vastly improve 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.
I just tried it out - it's pretty cool. The postscript was actually noted in the generated video about this topic, which I find amusing.
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
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.
This feels like when a decent book is made into a movie, and then the movie does well so someone will take the movie and summarize the plot in a YouTube video. TLDR: this is TLDR for TLDR. Just read more from the source.
Yeah I feel like this would be better as summaries of textbook chapters or information rich sources, a lot of HN posts are already basically text summaries of a complex topic that it doesn't really make sense to further summarize them.
This is great - many of us who are technical but not working in hardcore tech probably scroll by quickly on stuff we have never heard of. Getting a quick synopsis like this may drive more traffic and understanding.
I would stick with this. There's huge potential here. I'm not going to lie, I did a video of this, and it was pretty slop. Some of it didn't even make sense and was super irrelevant. That being said, refined, there's really actually some major potential with this idea.
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...
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!
This is pretty crazy. It's not hard to imagine something like Reddit deploying this as a first party feature.
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.
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 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)
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
I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
"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.
Thanks!
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.
I watched the videos and confirmed they are worse than brainrot.