Founded by Manish Surapaneni, it guides, demonstrates, debugs, and co-creates in real time, helping learners master concepts faster through hands-on, interactive learning.
Before Thesys, GradientFlo's learning interface looked and felt like a terminal—functional, but hard to follow.
Long paragraphs created cognitive fatigue, key insights were buried in unstructured text, and users moved through content quickly without deeply engaging with it.
"Large text consumption is too heavy to sit and read. It is like a terminal experience for the user. Just like the 80s CLI computing."
~ Manish Surapaneni, Founder of GradientFlo
This made it difficult for the platform to deliver clear guidance or maintain user flow during brainstorming or concept exploration, two core parts of the GradientFlo learning experience.
They needed a way to automatically turn text-heavy responses into structured, visual, easy-to-digest learning elements without spending months building a UI engine themselves.
GradientFlo chose Thesys after seeing a live demo that showed what Generative UI could look like in production. Not pre-rendered mockups, but actual UI components generated in real time with clean structure and polished design.
"Thesys showed us what real-time Generative UI could do. Nobody else matches the design aesthetics."
~ Manish Surapaneni, Founder of GradientFlo
Earlier, when a developer asked a question, they received long paragraphs explaining the concept, followed by more text for examples or comparisons.
For broader topics like "understanding architectural patterns" or "debugging workflows", learners often had to scroll or re-read several times to make sense of the information. This slowed down comprehension and reduced time spent exploring new ideas.
With Thesys, the same queries now generate interactive cards, charts, comparisons, lists, pros/cons, tables, and step-by-step guides instead of dense text blocks. This makes it easier to follow a concept, compare two ideas, or understand a workflow step by step.
But the experience doesn't stop at on-screen components! C1 can also generate slides and report-style artifacts that learners can save, download, print, or review later, useful for revision, deeper study, or sharing.
Brainstorming quickly became one of the clearest areas where Thesys changed how learners interacted with GradientFlo.
Why building this in-house would be a bad idea was evident from the beginning! It would cost weeks of engineering time to design, test, and maintain. Every type of insight, definition card, table, pros/cons, breakdown would require separate components, logic, state handling, and testing.
With Thesys, this transformation didn't require a new UI layer or complex engineering work. C1 plugged into their existing stack with almost no friction.
Within 48 hours GradientFlo had successfully integrated C1 and was demoing a completely upgraded learning experience.
"We were able to integrate in less than two days and instantly give a demo."
~ Manish Surapaneni, Founder of GradientFlo
Because GradientFlo uses a hybrid backend—Python FastAPI for compute-heavy tasks, Node.js for async flows, and ADK for agent orchestration—C1 became an orchestration layer that sits on top of this stack without touching the core architecture.
Agents continue to reason the same way they always had, but Thesys presents their output as clear, interactive UI that learners trust.
During the first two weeks after rollout, GradientFlo closely watched how learners adapted to the updated experience.
The change was immediate. Users spent 2x more time in the interactive chat flow, without skipping ahead, exploring multiple angles of a concept, and navigating explanations more confidently.
GradientFlo is now expanding Generative UI beyond individual responses.
With artifact generation, learners can turn an entire topic or explanation into a compact, visual summary as reports or slides.
That makes it easier to reinforce concepts, revisit complex topics without scrolling through long chat histories, and further increase accessibility for deep, technical learning.
"It's rare to find a product that feels Apple-like in its experience. For me, Thesys is that Apple-like experience for generative AI."
~ Manish Surapaneni, Founder of GradientFlo
About Artifacts:
Artifacts are structured, document-style output like reports and presentations. They are generated and edited directly through prompts using C1 inside your app, and are shareable via a link, making it easy to present, review, or distribute multi-step content without leaving the product.
See how Generative UI can accelerate your AI product with Thesys
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