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Launch HN: Vela (YC W26) – AI for complex scheduling
mvh 14 minutes ago [-]
Hey! Fellow YCer (S24) here. Super cool idea. Depending on how b2c you want to be, one area to maybe consider would be surgeries. Scheduling rooms for surgeries is quite challenging, and has a cost component associated with it which makes the problem even harder. Especially since, as you can imagine, it's not at all obvious how long a procedure will necessarily take, and other procedures may need to start at a certain time.
someguy101010 13 minutes ago [-]
have built in this space which led me to develop a minizinc mcp server [0] for scheduling bocce tournaments [1]. scheduling with constraints is a np hard problem and it makes sense people struggle. tools exist to solve this problem but they are complex and hard to use for non technical folks, and even technical folks. am hoping a tool like this can bridge the gap and would like to bring it to your awareness if you aren't already thinking about the problem this way :)

edit: after reading a bit more of description looks like yall are taking a similar approach, kudos!

[0] https://github.com/r33drichards/minizinc-mcp

[1] https://github.com/r33drichards/bocce-scheduler

kristianc 46 minutes ago [-]
> One of our first customers is a staffing firm that searched for a scheduling solution for almost eight years. Their coordinators manage hundreds of candidate-client interviews where each side needs separate email threads, separate Zoom accounts to avoid double-booking links, and calendar invites connecting parties who never directly communicate. A client reschedules one interview and it cascades into four others. A candidate responds on SMS to a thread that started on email. Vela solved this in just 10 minutes of onboarding.

My very strong advice would be to pick one of these use cases and niche hard. Multi channel, multi party scheduling isnt a problem anyone thinks they have (even if they actually do). They wake up thinking they have 40 truck driver shifts to fill tomorrow.

Deputy cleaned up by going after rota scheduling for independent coffee shops. Logistics sounds like a great shout. Each have messy edge cases which you can develop a strong solution around but you'll get crushed trying to go horizontal in this space. Best of luck!

Gobhanu 18 minutes ago [-]
Thank you for the advice - really appreciate it.

Was actually chatting with a large industrial staffing firm and they were saying the same thing that it was super painful to schedule 1000s of workers for drug tests and then shifts too!

aleda145 37 minutes ago [-]
Really cool! During my university years I had a lot of fun with scheduling 200 interviews for different 20 companies for a career fair.

Created a problem statement and then solved it with Gurobi, repo here: (https://github.com/aleda145/interview-scheduling-kontaktsamt...)

Agents feel like the perfect fit for the whole rescheduling loop that happens in the real world!

Have you had to use an optimization solver yet? If so, which one?

aleda145 34 minutes ago [-]
Also "vela" means "to be undecided" or "to go back and forth" in Swedish, great fit!
Gobhanu 17 minutes ago [-]
wow what a wonderful coincidence
pilooch 17 minutes ago [-]
Hello! Not commenting on content or functionality. Scheduling in AI is a very dense field. An a past researcher in AI decision making, I got confused by the 'Scheduling solved' slogan. FYI recent AI for scheduling include GNNs and RL applied to NP and P-space problems that plague many industries. A larger scope I believe from vela's (rightful) target, a bit confusing IMO. Good luck with your endeavor, all scheduling problems are beautiful :)
Gobhanu 5 minutes ago [-]
very fair callout - and I can see how "scheduling solved" reads very differently to someone coming from the optimization/planning side of AI. You are right.

Appreciate the note on the slogan, definetly thinking of revamping our landing page in the near future to speak more directly to our audience.

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