IKEA – 3D Guide | Hacker News Reader

IKEA – 3D Guide

sael.net

210 pointspunnerud68 comments

It's really interesting despite others pointing out that it's a little wrong, that can be fixed.

But I also almost left immediately because this claudism at the top really hurt to read:

> Every dowel, cam lock and nail where the page puts it.

I always feel so manipulated when I read it regurgitating the prompt you gave it in such an advertisey way, like it's trying to assure you it met _every_ word of the prompt, regardless of how it actually did.

The worst part for me is, with a little effort, you can make a final product that doesn't use claude-isms and is 100% correct.

But the creator doesn't care because their goal isn't to make a tool people want to use. They make a minimum viable product, that looks super impressive but lacks that final polish and move on.

It infuriates me enough, that when I get the time I'm going to recreate the 'lighthouses of the world' example I saw the other day. Only I'm going to do it right...

> But the creator doesn't care because

I’ve always found it annoying when people make declarations like this. You can speak criticize a work without attacking someone’s personality.

A person's intent can be the problem though, we can criticise that. We're not factory bots here (yet), the community aspect is human in nature not just output focused.

A person's intent leads to the quality of a final product.

They should care if it actually has errors.

They should care if it has claude-isms.

But it certaintly seems like they don't care, at this point in time, about those things.

I'll take your feedback on board. But I'm not calling them stupid, or a bad person. I'm saying their goals are not aligned with my idea of a finished product.

I honestly don’t know why people get worked up over this. I assume that either the person doing it isn’t a native speaker, or they are a techie that just doesn’t have good English language writing skills. And having those skills is rare for technical people. It’s much easier to deal with Claude than what those people would have written without assistance.

Over the last few decades I’ve read many technical docs that were obviously mechanically translated from some other language. This is much better.

I don't really get worked up over it, but I do have a preference for original writing these days. If it's someone's pet project or something creative, I prefer the authenticity of the creative's actual writing. AI writing is just so boring and sterile out of the box. You lose nuance and personality.

It is a bit different with translation, in that case AI translation might get closer to the original intent than manual translation by the author. But otherwise I want the words from their brain meats, not layers removed and cleansed by system prompts and training.

I just know if the first spoonful tastes like dung then I'm not going to keep eating the soup.

Technology doing code is really cool because you give it an input, a functional purpose, and your intended function output - and it can do a pretty darn good job at producing the code that fulfills the requirements.

But when you want me to read something AI written, without the human refining the UI I see, it almost seems like I'm a test case and all the author cares about is my output in terms of "I like it" or "I don't like it". There's no information about _why_ the author wanted me to see this. Can you tell me your inspiration for making this? Some sort of personal connection I should have with the thing I'm seeing?

Vibe coded apps can still be useful in this state as tools, but don't expect me to use my creative brainpower to provide feedback on your product in a constructive manner if you can't be asked to ensure the text is your intention for the code, not how the AI interpreted it.

I dont find it better. I fimd it significantly worst.

> Over the last few decades I’ve read many technical docs that were obviously mechanically translated from some other language. This is much better.

I don’t think it’s better. Any frontier LLM is capable of competent translation without significantly re-wording the text.

I use Whisper to transcribe foreign language videos and then run them through a couple of models to translate into English. It works really well, and much better than mechanical translation because they can figure out likely mistakes based on how whisper might have misheard (or surrounding context from the script).

Thanks for the feedback! Fair point about the claudism. The copy could definitely use a more human touch. I just don't have the capacity to go through every line myself lol

Just don’t use Claude Code for copy and run your “Claudisms” thru another model like Gemini for better results.

It instructs you to build the shelf wrong. The camlocks go on the bottom of the shelf.

Indeed, step 3 has the shelve boards in backwards.

This is a fun idea, although it doesn't really solve a problem for me since I find IKEA instructions to be extremely intuitive and easy to follow to begin with. Probably only LEGO does a better job at making clear, wordless instructions where e.g. ambiguity is resolved by cleverly using bright colored pieces in places where they are eventually obscured.

What I really would like is a universal furniture planning program which includes all IKEA furniture (and possibly third party furniture as well) and full configurability of the room. IKEA has design apps, but they are so frustrating to use because only some products are available in each app and they are wildly inconsistent in how much each allows you to configure the room shape.

The Lack table is probanly the esayest piece of Ikea furniture to build. But Claude or whatever llm seems to assume that you can screw the screws in fully by hand. But you just put them in a little and use the leg for the rest. As clearly shown in the instructions.

What is the name of this website style that Claude et al loves to build so much? The light text on dark blue background, pill-shapes everywhere, pulsing indicators, etc.?

I've personally been calling it "bad"

Also the weird metrics. Would any human ever implement a counter showing total views and currently viewing users?

It was pretty trendy in 1998.

I recently built a bunch of flatpack furniture by different companies. The last one, by Yamazen, was clearly the best IMO.

1. Every piece of wood had small round sticker on it with a number eg: ③ that could be reference in the manual. No having to try to figure out if the piece in the manual has the exact hole pattern or whatever

2. All of the screws, dowels, etc were in separate bags, each with a letter on it Ⓚ

3. It had extra supports here an there - maybe some ikea furniture has this too but I haven't seen it.

Ikea was best in that the instructions are designed to be universal, no words.

Hope those stickers were easy to remove!

Bought some random name stuff from Amazon. Everything helpfully labeled with a numbered sticker… that required a lot of time with a hair dryer to remove…

I hate hard to remove stickers with a fiery intensity, because there are easy to remove kinds. Its a „fuck customers over a few cents“ decision. There is no excuse for a big company such as Ikea.

And when they put those hard to peel stickers on a "non stick frying pan" that you have to struggle to peel off leaving a gooey residue ...

Built almost the same idea almost a month back. Never posted it

https://flatpack3d.nithen-ac.chatgpt.site

Double the waste, double the fun!

Not to piss on your chips, but the OP version is much more engaging. I think we are going to see taste, steering and preferences become a much more important thing.

But the OP version is also wrong.

OP version is also buggier, laggier, and harder to use. OP's might be flashier with fancy low-poly models, but this one is in much better taste as an actual guide.

turn this in to a puzzle game. i am sure there are some enjoying ikea assembly.

There are a lot of issues, the bigger one is the fact that the drwan line is not on the self level as the shelf.

I recently assembled some IKEA furniture and wow it was so fun. It was the same feeling that I had back when I was manually typing out code.

Now I prompt LLMs all day for my job and it is much different. Yes, AI allows me to write way more than in the pre-AI age, but it is certainly fun in a different way, not the kind of IKEA-assembly fun.

It's incredible. Please, Ikea, hire this guy and generate animated/interactive websites for all of your stuff.

Hire... why, it's AI. They can do it themselves.

I'm showering you with negativity

They could have done it themselves before AI.

IKEAs tech team are incredible.

Are you being sarcastic? Their 3D modeling tools are terrible, and notice I have used the plural because for some reason there's more than one.

It would help if it didn't provide incorrect instructions lol.

I hate to speak ill of this nice page, but the cams are on the wrong side of the two bottom shelves. They are clearly displayed in the included manual pages on the left side of the viewport.

I see Claude is single-handedly bringing back the early-2000's epic "over-bloom" lighting

I might have been one of the first people to recognize the possibility of using a LACK table as an equipment rack. I built a DVD player into one in like 2003, recognizing that a whole stack of 19" pro audio gear could be bolted in there.

Built one in 2001, there were lots of discussions about it on I think it was the Audiogon forums at the time, a whole thread of a good few hundred people building them. I seem to recall a few had been using them since the 90s as well.

built one in 1836 just before the war started

Folks were doing this in the late 90s on AVSForum..

Solution looking for a problem.

I would prefer to see more constructive criticism and less opinionated comments.

really nice. how did you make the models, by hand from the pdf instructions? ikea already has 3d models for a lot of products on their site for the ar view, would be cool if those could be pulled in so it works for any product

I thought I read somewhere that their entire catalog is rendered and they generally don't do photography at all anymore.

Really enjoying all these animation by Ryan Sael. I spent a good part of an hour exploring https://sael.net/river-bend/

this is a great idea and i imagine that somebody could generate the entirety of their catalog. it's tempting. would be nice if ikea paid for this service but it's doubtful!

This is amazing

The idea is awesome but for fucks sake it would have been half an hour at most to replace the slop copytext.

AI can't make visualization that work in different browsers yet.

We’ve been focused on pelican riding bicycles. IKEA assembly will be in the next round of models.

Are there plans to make guides for other pieces of furniture as well?

Nice! How do I get this into Skyrim now?

The comments here are quite strange.

Hard to find an easier thing to build...

Does it make it less complicated?

Absolutely not.

The actual paper instructions are super clear and don’t have all the junk distracting extras.

The art of communication is simplicity.

The AI generated posters everywhere did not get that memo!

so much for cabinetmaking as a hobby

Great, now do the HASVIK sliding doors mount on a PAX, please. Joke aside, however good a manual is, reality is imperfect. Assembly often requires a bit of improvisation that can't be learned online.

Opus 5.5?

If you're going to produce slop then at least show us the prompts.

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