Show HN: Domainotron.com uses GPT3 to help you find a great domain name
Last weekend I built Domainotron.com, which uses GPT-3 to generate domain names for you, and then shows you the best available domain names. It’s free, accurate, fast, and surprisingly creative. And I built it in a weekend using an AI-enhanced IDE (more on that below)

Just type in a short description of your business, website, or product idea and within a few seconds you’ll have domain names ideas being generated and validated for you. Unlike other domain name generator tools, all domains generated by this service are verified available, no “premium” parked domain names for thousands of dollars here. I’ve used a variety of prompts and filters to ensure a nice mix of professional, short, easy-to-spell .com domain names, as well as puns, wordplay, web 2.0 clevr [sic] names, and alternative tlds where appropriate. But feel free to provide additional guidance in the prompt, like “Mainly suggest .ai domains names that must contain the word “domain”. Results take a minute to finish generating but stream in via Server Sent Events so it’s pretty responsive. You can also pin your favorite domain names and then re-run the same or new query to come up with more variety. You may hide/show various TLDs by clicking the tld buttons. And simply click any result to register it (I get a small commission from Namecheap if you register a domain with them, which hopefully will cover my costs for hosting this service. I’m not getting rich from this.)

Of course I used it to come up with its own domain name domainotron.com!

If you have any feedback or find any bugs (especially alternate tld’s having inaccurate availability, which I’ve tried to eliminate but I can’t guarantee 100% accuracy), let me know here or send me an email (contact info is on my homepage which is linked in the footer).

Of note, even though I’ve been building websites and apps for the better part of two decades, I’ve never built a website using python. For Domainotron, I wanted to try building it in python with flask, as I’m trying to up my python game for obvious reasons. But a new web framework can turn a weekend side project into a much longer slog, so I used this as an opportunity to try out cursor.so, a fork of VSCode that uses GPT-4 as a pair programmer. It’s definitely not anywhere near a human junior engineer level but it is a lot more useful than Github Copilot if you’re trying to figure out a new framework and way of doing things. As one particularly compelling example, after I got the main functionality up, I tried pushing it by asking it the following prompt (copied verbatim) and it did a great first stab at implementation which I only had to slightly clean up:

“Add a little pin icon to the left of the domain name text that if clicked, toggles the pinned state of this domain name by adding or removing it from the pinnedDomains set. Domains that are pinned should not be cleared when the form is resubmitted, instead they should stay in the list as new domains get added from the new query. This allows the users to save domain names they like even when starting a new search. Pinned domains should also have a css class "pinned" so they can have a distinct style.”

Anyway, props to cursor.so for a compelling start. It’s extremely buggy so I don’t recommend switching to it as your main IDE, but it’s exciting to try it out and see how far things are getting. And it helped me build this project in a weekend using a language and web framework I’m not very familiar with.

Enjoy Domainotron.com and let me know if you end up using it to choose a name for your new project! Of the few friends I sent it to over the last week, I know of 4 domain names that have been purchased due to this already, plus itself.