Hi. My name is Eric Brandon and I’ve built an AI chat app that feels really different.

While you talk with an AI model in a chat pane, a second AI model is reading over the conversation and seeking out useful, interesting, surprising, amusing, and fact-checking information that wouldn’t have appeared in the main chat.

You can read those “discoveries” on their own, or click them into your main chat to steer the conversation in a new direction.

This is based on the observation that talking to smart people is usually more enjoyable, interesting, and informative than talking to a smart AI.

There’s many possible reasons why - the AI isn’t smart enough, it has no “real” emotions, it has no real long-term memory of your relationship, and so on.

But certainly one big reason is that the AI has been trained and instructed to simulate a “helpful assistant.” And helpful assistants stay on topic. They don’t interject with something super interesting, or wise, that is only thematically related. They don’t chime in with amusing related anecdotes. They don’t complicate the conversation with contrasting views.

I find this chat experience much much more interesting and useful than any of the first person apps from Anthropic, openAI, or Google.

This is combined with many power-user features like branching conversations, access to powerful models like chatGPT 5 Pro without a subscription, sophisticated output for sharing chats, and much more.

I find the freedom of having access to all the latest big-lab models in one app, and even in one chat, extremely convenient.

This app is a bit of a glimpse into the future, I believe. Today’s AI ecosystem means that having this experience: - Requires more technical sophistication than the average user because you need to bring your own API keys - Costs more than regular chat, because you can’t benefit from subsidized monthly plans, and because the “discoveries” add to the AI token costs of every conversation

But this user experience is so much better than the standard one that it’s hard to believe, in the future, when you can bring your subscriptions to third-party apps, and when inference is cheaper, that this won’t become the standard experience.

You can read about the app and download it at https://sidestream-app.com and https://github.com/ericbrandon/sidestream

It’s a non-commercial, open-source project built just because I wanted it for myself, but I hope you enjoy too!

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Show HN: Sidestream – an AI chat app with a side of insight

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