AI tool comparison
Eyeball vs Terrarium
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Developer Tools
Eyeball
Embeds source screenshots in AI analysis to kill hallucinations
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
Eyeball is a GitHub Copilot CLI plugin with a deceptively simple idea: instead of trusting the AI to accurately summarize documents, it captures screenshots of the actual source material and embeds them alongside the AI's claims in the output report. If the model says "Section 10 requires mutual indemnification," the report shows that exact section highlighted in yellow directly below the claim. The underlying insight is sharp — screenshots cannot be hallucinated. Text can be subtly reworded, paraphrased incorrectly, or synthesized from nowhere. But a screenshot is a literal capture of the source. Built for legal review, compliance analysis, financial due diligence, and any domain where the stakes of an AI error are high. Built by indie developer dvelton, it handles PDFs, Word documents, and web pages. MIT licensed, free to use. Surfaced on Hacker News Show HN today, where it sparked an active discussion about AI verification and the underrated value of visual evidence in AI-assisted analysis workflows.
Developer Tools
Terrarium
Evals that actually simulate real deployment — stateful, multi-turn, alive
50%
Panel ship
—
Community
Paid
Entry
Terrarium is a multi-turn evaluation and optimization engine for LLM agents built by evolvent-ai. Unlike static benchmark suites that measure agents against fixed input-output pairs, Terrarium creates persistent, stateful "living environments" — simulated deployment contexts where agents operate over extended sessions, accumulate state, use tools, and interact with simulated external systems. You evaluate agents the way you'd test a car: by driving it, not by measuring its doors. The system supports configurable environment complexity, including simulated databases, APIs, file systems, and user personas. Agents are scored not just on final outputs but on trajectory quality — how efficiently they reached the answer, how often they hallucinated intermediate steps, and how well they recovered from dead ends. The engine also supports continuous optimization loops where poor-performing trajectories trigger automatic prompt refinement. With 17 stars and created April 14, Terrarium is extremely new. But it's addressing a genuine gap: the disconnect between how agents perform on static benchmarks versus how they behave in production. As enterprise AI deployments scale, the need for realistic pre-production evaluation is becoming critical.
Reviewer scorecard
“This is one of those ideas that makes you think 'why isn't every AI analysis tool doing this?' The implementation is simple — capture screenshots of the source during analysis — but the trust it builds in the output is enormous. I'd use this immediately for any contract or regulatory review workflow.”
“Static evals are lying to us constantly — agents that ace benchmarks fall apart in production because benchmarks don't have state, side effects, or accumulated context. Terrarium's living environments model is the right approach to catching real failure modes before deployment.”
“Screenshots prove the source exists but don't verify the AI's interpretation of it is correct. A model can still misread highlighted text or draw wrong conclusions. Also, PDF-to-screenshot pipelines get messy with scanned documents, multi-column layouts, and complex tables — exactly the docs where hallucinations are most likely.”
“Building a realistic simulation of your production environment is often harder than just running the agent in staging. The value proposition assumes your eval environment is meaningfully closer to production than your existing test suite — which is a big assumption for complex deployments.”
“Eyeball points toward a future of verifiable AI outputs — not just 'the model said this' but 'the model said this, here's the evidence, here's the reasoning chain.' Legal AI adoption hinges on explainability, and embedded source screenshots are a practical step toward outputs that hold up under professional scrutiny.”
“The eval-optimize loop is the missing piece in most AI agent development workflows. Tools that can automatically identify weak trajectories and suggest improvements will become as fundamental as unit tests. Terrarium is early, but the category is inevitable.”
“For research, journalism, and content work where you're citing sources, this is a game-changer. The ability to produce a report where every claim is visually anchored to the source makes the output publishable rather than just useful. The design of the output document matters — would love to see more control over the visual layout.”
“This is deeply technical infrastructure that won't affect my daily workflow. The people who need this know they need it — but for most creators building with AI tools, static evals are already more than they use.”
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