Daan Balm
/sandbox/ask-ai
A button that sends someone to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Perplexity with a question about me already in the composer. Two things need deciding: whether it lives quietly at the edge of the page or takes the whole of it, and — if it takes the whole page — whether five cells want to be a row or a column.
Every specimen below is live, and every logo is a real link. The first two are pinned inside their dashed box rather than to the viewport, so both can be on screen at once.
1. In the flow, fanning both ways
Sat between the nav and the socials, with the marks split half to each side so the row grows symmetrically and the note itself never moves. Reads as part of the page rather than an attachment to it. But it spends a line of the hero, and it only has about 250px to fan into before it starts crowding what's beside it — which caps it at four providers, forever.
2. In the corner, fanning right
Costs the page no layout at all, and sits with the 2025 note where this site already keeps its asides. That's also the objection: the corner is the quietest place here, and this is the one thing on the page asking to be pressed. Anchored to an edge the marks can only grow one way, so on a phone they have to stack upward or they walk straight into the biology note.
3. Over the page, one row
The whole page, so the logos can be big and carry their names instead of a title attribute nobody on a phone can reach. Holds one row down to 360px. The row is the constraint though — a fifth provider would need the names to shrink, and it's the layout that cares most about how long 'Perplexity' is.
4. Over the page, one column
Names beside the logos rather than under them, which reads as a menu — a list of places to go, which is what it is. Never has a width problem and takes a fifth or sixth provider without being redesigned. For four items it can look like a lot of vertical page for not much.
5. Over the page, column on a phone and a row above sm
Each orientation where it's actually comfortable: a column has all the room it wants on a tall narrow screen, a row on a wide one. The cost is two layouts to keep honest, and a sheet that isn't quite the same component depending on what you opened it on.
What gets sent
Read daanbalm.com/llms.txt and the pages it links to, then tell me about Daan Balm: what he works on, what he's built, and what he'd be worth talking to about.
4 providers, each opened through its own ?q= convention. Gemini is missing on purpose — it ignores the query string entirely, so it would land you in an empty chat.
Settled on 5. Taking the whole page is what buys the logos enough room to carry their names, and 1 and 2 were both capped at four providers by whatever they sat next to. Between 3, 4 and 5: a single row only holds five cells down to 360px by sizing the names exactly, which is a thing to stop relying on the moment there’s an alternative — and turning the sheet is a cheaper answer than shrinking the type.