alt.hn

8/20/2026 at 8:52:31 PM

Ameliorate

 https://ameliorate.app/

by hakkikonu

8/21/2026 at 1:57:47 AM

Cool to see this posted :) I'm the creator.

For those interested, I've slowed work on the app in favor of refining the app's ontology in markdown form[1], building an ontology playground[2], and building a prototype[3] to show off features that the updated ontology enables. I had some major changes I wanted to make and making it work in the real app was going to be too much effort.

I'll likely be making a Show HN for one/some of these soon^TM (in the next month or two?) but they're currently still a bit early.

[1] https://github.com/keyserj/reasoning-tools/blob/main/amelior...

[2] https://keyserj.github.io/reasoning-tools/ontology-playgroun...

[3] https://github.com/keyserj/reasoning-tools/tree/main/amelior... (not yet deployed)

by keyserj

8/20/2026 at 11:33:34 PM

This might be more interesting if you could read other people's discussions. As it is, it's like visiting an empty forum.

by skybrian

8/21/2026 at 2:04:52 AM

Thanks for the feedback, I agree. I hadn't gotten around to adding an Explore page. There haven't actually been many users so it'd be mostly my topics and topics from some small group discussions I've hosted, but would be good to have more for people to see.

by keyserj

8/21/2026 at 2:59:57 AM

- stupid question: i really dont understand what your product does

- mind explaining it like how you would do to a 5yr old kid

by vivzkestrel

8/21/2026 at 4:08:22 AM

If you have a problem that's hard to think through or agree on with someone else, this app can help you make a (cause & effect) diagram to understand it better. Use numbers (scores) to show others how important you think something is (nodes) or how much you think something causes another thing (edges). You can add reasons (supports/critiques) to justify your numbers, and tradeoffs (criteria) to compare options for dealing with the problem. The app can show where you disagree with people or what people think are most important (generated views).

I might need LLM help to figure out how to explain to a 5 year old haha.

by keyserj

8/21/2026 at 4:47:22 AM

Man you could have used this a small piece of marketing with a shareable link to show people how did you reason about the product.

by alex7o

8/21/2026 at 3:21:28 AM

I can only hope this is a joke to ask for an explanation of a product that breaks down complex problems into clear pieces.

by msephton

8/21/2026 at 2:56:49 AM

this is interesting, does it use IBIS on some level? i discovered IBIS and added it and mermaid diagrams to my app but it was a bit of a lark. i think what i pictured was similar to what you have here (and should be possible though i have not tested the IBIS > mermaid pipeline).

in any case: cool

by 0gs

8/21/2026 at 4:27:35 AM

It's not exactly IBIS, but inspired for sure. IBIS I think is better for modeling a live discussion, it's almost an append-only structure (to model back-and-forth), whereas Ameliorate's structure (the core is concepts with cause & effect relations) is intended to have new information integrated without duplication (which can be more annoying to do live because it can involve modification rather than appending).

Ameliorate models questions and arguments, but they're more auxiliary (modeled as being _about_ a cause or effect) than in IBIS, where they're pretty central. Questions in Ameliorate are more "unknowns" than "core questions we are trying to answer".

If you see my root-level comment in this post, I mention refining the Ameliorate ontology (ameliorate-v2) which elevates questions to first-class (to address the issue where it's hard to know where to look in the diagram, without questions to identify motivation). You might also be interested in my ontology playground in that comment if you want to see an IBIS > mermaid pipeline.

by keyserj