[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Artemis (YC S22) - Use comments to give c...
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Launch HN: Artemis (YC S22) - Use comments to give code an
interactive interface
Hello Hacker News, we're Austin, Manvir, and Kyle, the cofounders
of Artemis Labs (https://artemisdevtool.com). We turn your in-line
comments into a UI that can be used to visualize, test, document
and share your code. This helps engineers and scientists quickly
create quality scripts. Artemis was born in a Caltech robotics lab
where I saw firsthand how much time and effort it took to create a
quality script. Engineers were spending hundreds of hours making
slide decks, hybrid Markdown / LaTeX documents, and demo GUIs just
to make their tools accessible and usable by others. As someone who
has been on the learning end of things, it can be nearly impossible
to decipher or use even the smallest scripts if they lack quality
documentation and interactive interfaces. Although these methods
worked they were an incredible time sink and documentation became
stale quickly. Artemis was devised as a solution to this problem.
We wanted a tool that allows developers to create high-quality
interfaces and documentation without forcing them to invest
substantial time, alter their codebases or make significant changes
to their workflows. The way it works is simple: First add special
comments to your codebase; Artemis uses these comments (called
"anchors") to automatically generate a GUI for your code. Then run
your program using our command-line utility. Artemis launches in an
offline browser window that displays your code on one side and your
new interface on the other. To see how this looks, you can watch
our demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDL12DkS2Hc.
This interface scrolls vertically, so as your code runs new GUI
elements appear one below another at the relevant time organized
into "cards." For example, if a program takes two numbers and adds
them, your interface will first show input fields for the variables
in one card. When you enter numbers and press "continue," a new
card showing the result will appear. There are three types of
anchors: inputs, outputs and documentation. Inputs let you change
variables in your program via the interface, outputs represent the
products of your program as graphs, text, etc. and documentation
lets you create interface elements that explain what is happening
as your program runs. Documentation can take the form of text,
Markdown, LaTeX, syntax-highlighted code snippets, multimedia, and
links, and more. These anchors all follow the same format: you put
them in a comment, beginning with "@," followed by its type--
"input," "output" or "doc." For "doc" anchors you just proceed to
add whatever you would like to appear in the document card. For
inputs and outputs, you need to specify which variable they act
upon by typing "data=x," with x being your variable. We provide a
suite of default anchors, such as text inputs, and outputs in the
form of text, tables, and graphs--but we also let you create your
own, using regular Python. Do you need to create a custom anchor to
quickly display your statistical data using Seaborn? Do you want to
automatically render advanced 3D plots in Matplotlib? Artemis makes
this, and more, easy. The reason we opted to have anchors work
from comments is to avoid requiring you to alter your code or the
way you work. You don't have to toggle between different
environments--you stay in your preferred IDE, bringing more
functionality to it rather than requiring you to go somewhere else.
For example, we subsume the functionality of Jupyter as a
visualization tool without requiring you to use a notebook. In our
experience, notebooks are rather constraining relative to a full
Python environment-- they require you to restructure your code for
the notebook, run your programs on an IPython kernel, and often
import new third-party libraries or widgets. With Artemis you get
the interactivity of a notebook, as well as the display of UI
elements and documentation alongside code, but it also works with
professional-grade codebases and tooling. Artemis interfaces can
be exported as an HTML file that runs offline. This is a key
feature that makes us a portable, effective
documentation/walkthrough tool. These interfaces are small enough
to send via email and can even be embedded in web pages. When a
third party opens your HTML file, they'll see exactly what you see
when you run your program with Artemis: an interface on the left
and your code on the right. We thought the most obvious
applications of this approach would be for quickly building
interactive computational tools and making test scaffolding for
complex programs. But it turned out to also be really good for
making code walkthroughs that can explain your program to coworkers
or managers, or teach people how to use your program. You can see
this in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4c3Q6lHFPo.
Engineers at Mayo Clinic use Artemis in this way, using our
Markdown, LaTeX, and multi-media documentation capabilities coupled
with custom anchor outputs to produce step-by-step walkthroughs for
their internal tools. Artemis is ready to go, and we offer a free
trial on our website. Setup and installation only take a minute,
but we'd also be delighted to answer your questions personally
and/or give you a walkthrough--we like to meet our users! Our
current pricing model is $15/month for basic Artemis. There's a pro
version that allows you to create custom anchors (beyond inputs,
outputs and doc), and export your interfaces as HTML files. We also
do the "contact us" enterprise thing for larger teams. We'll be
around in the comments below and are super interested in whatever
you have to say!
Author : austinmccoy6251
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-08-25 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
| elanning wrote:
| This looks like a nice piece of work. This area and adjacent
| tooling areas are ripe for improvement.
| austinmccoy6251 wrote:
| Thank you! I appreciate the support! We're focusing hard on
| covering applications, languages, and challenges that lack
| coverage from existing products like Jupyter Notebook.
| tadatafatada wrote:
| That's so cool. I had built something similar (invasive C++
| probing) in grad school using txt files as IO
| austinmccoy6251 wrote:
| Thank you for the compliment! How funny! The inspiration for
| this project actually came from my work in a lab during my
| undergraduate work. Being constantly emailed mega-scripts with
| no context wears down the soul, haha. You can see traces of its
| academic roots in some of our features (eg. LaTeX support for
| documentation).
| bla54321 wrote:
| Interesting app.
|
| I'm curious about your choice of using comments, was there an
| advantage to using this approach over something like decorators?
|
| As it is currently, commments are often a bit weird to debug /
| view (grayed out) I'm sure there's some advantages to using them
| here, just thought I'd ask.
| austinmccoy6251 wrote:
| Thank you for taking a look at it! Great question!
|
| Funnily enough, we actually pursued this approach initially for
| the same reasoning you provided. I absolutely agree with your
| point regarding highlighting. However, we pivoted to using
| purely comments after several realizations:
|
| 1. Artemis can be used in contexts beyond simply decoration.
| For instance, if you want to create a documentation card whose
| sole purpose is to display some Markdown, LaTeX, or Multimedia,
| there isn't really something to decorate.
|
| 2. By making ourselves comment-based, it ensures that it won't
| throw off any IDEs or linters, and it ensures that these
| commands will have absolutely no impact on production code when
| ran without our command-line utility.
|
| 3. If you force the user to use a decorator, it restricts the
| user to only being able to create inputs or outputs for a
| particular variable right above that line of code. TLDR; it
| gives the user more freedom to organize their code however
| they'd like.
|
| 4. It lets us allow users to use our special comments to output
| more than just simple variables. For instance, if a user wrote
| "@output table data=<<np.arange(5)>>", this would display a
| table of np.arange(5). However, if we forced users to use
| decorators, this would prevent functionality like this, which
| can often be useful.
|
| 5. Artemis will be language agnostic, so we wanted to pursue an
| approach that could be held relatively consistent across other
| languages.
|
| Nonetheless, your point about highlighting is absolutely valid.
| We're actually looking to push out extensions for popular IDEs
| to correctly detect and syntax highlight our commands to try to
| remedy this concern.
| bla54321 wrote:
| Cool! Thanks for sharing. There's always complex nuances to
| problems like this, it's interesting to see what the design
| considerations were and why this approach was taken.
| neojebfkekeej wrote:
| Is this language agnostic?
| austinmccoy6251 wrote:
| Yes! That's actually one of the primary motivations behind why
| we made this "comment-based." The caveat of course is that we
| _presently_ only support Python at the moment, but you can
| expect to see C++ and Java support rolled out in the next few
| weeks. This particularly excites me since these languages are
| heavily lacking these sorts of tools IMO.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Heh, I've also been working on an app called Artemis
| (https://getartemis.app) for the last few years, although not
| related to dev tooling. Guess naming a company after the Greek
| goddess of the moon is not very unique.
| austinmccoy6251 wrote:
| Not to mention NASA's Artemis -- looks like we both have an
| uphill SEO battle ahead of us!
| throw827474737 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_(brothel) :|
| alecfreudenberg wrote:
| Cool preview, Satvik. Happy to help break it if you'd like a
| well-intentioned tester.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| Your comment made me look, I agree it looks interesting.
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