[HN Gopher] Show HN: Rapidpages - OSS alternative to vercel's v0
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       Show HN: Rapidpages - OSS alternative to vercel's v0
        
       Hey everyone,  Really excited to share what I've been working on.
       Rapidpages is a prompt-first online IDE, think midjourney for
       front-end developers. I've been working on this for a while and
       it's great to see some interest from companies like Vercel in this
       space.  All you need for self-hosting is an OpenAI key and a GitHub
       oauth app. Simply clone the repo and play with it. It's also
       available on the cloud at www.rapidpages.io  Please give it a try
       and let me know if you have any feedback, and if you like what I'm
       doing with Rapidpages, please give it a star on GitHub.  Thanks!
        
       Author : muratsu
       Score  : 124 points
       Date   : 2023-09-22 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | willsmith72 wrote:
       | Ok this is awesome.
       | 
       | First ux is pretty shitty. Taking time to create a prompt,
       | getting redirected to login, login successfully, then lose the
       | prompt. Surely you can preserve the prompt with a cookie or even
       | in the url.
       | 
       | But the product is cool after that
        
         | willsmith72 wrote:
         | I can't get styling to work nicely. E.g. "make it dark mode" or
         | "make the background dark and text light"
        
       | k_vi wrote:
       | pretty cool to include xkcd for the loading screen :)
        
       | nibab wrote:
       | Great work! I think the barrier to entry here is going to
       | gradually become smaller and smaller (as models become better and
       | we see more multi-modal models) and the big differentiator here
       | is that you will have lots of open source developers building
       | functionality that is relevant to them (vs keeping this closed-
       | source like Vercel).
       | 
       | I am curious how much of the functionality in this area is "write
       | code that does scaffolding and prompt engineering" vs "finetuning
       | and model-level improvements".
        
         | muratsu wrote:
         | 100%!! You need one model to understand the initial prompt and
         | figure out a development plan. Once the plan is created, the
         | subtasks can be delegated to specialized smaller models (I
         | think OSS will play a big role in this!).
        
           | nibab wrote:
           | have you explored using something more lightweight than react
           | ? for example, wouldn't it be easier to generate vanilla html
           | with tailwindcss ?
        
         | toddmorey wrote:
         | I think this kills the CMS market---companies like Contentful &
         | Sanity that charge $400/mo+ just for a team to be able to edit
         | their own website. There's been _a lot_ of money made (and web
         | stack complexity added) because of how much domain-specific
         | skill is required to created and edit html content.
         | 
         | The only missing piece is direct framework integration (Next,
         | Astro, etc) but at the rate of development I've seen for these
         | projects we'll have that by next week. Then you have an
         | intuitive site builder that operates directly on the page code
         | just like another dev on the team.
         | 
         | One thing Vercel got really right is being able to click on any
         | element in the page for it to become the context of your
         | prompt. That way, you don't have to type "change the top icon
         | inside the third pricing box to red". Also you'll get faster
         | responses because you don't have to feed the AI the entire page
         | / component each time.
        
           | muratsu wrote:
           | Yeah - this space is moving really fast. Codesandbox
           | (https://codesandbox.io/blog/meet-boxy-ai-coding-assistant)
           | released the click on any element functionality back in May.
           | 
           | Funny because my original idea was to build a browser
           | extension to modify existing pages with "click on any element
           | and prompt" type of workflow. That approach also has certain
           | limitations/gotchas too. eg if you click on a list element
           | and ask it to push it down the list, it won't work. It'll
           | fail as expected but it may be counterintuitive for someone
           | playing with it for the first time. Having said that, I still
           | believe that there's value in this UX and will most likely
           | implement it soon.
        
           | kill_nate_kill wrote:
           | Hard disagree, this ain't gonna kill CMSs, what are you
           | talking about?! Content management goes beyond just a
           | website, especially in the headless cms world. Also those
           | products can be as low as free.
        
           | crooked-v wrote:
           | There's one huge not-immediately-obvious element there:
           | Vercel bandwidth is expensive. My company switched our CMS
           | content over to Prismic in part because serving all media
           | content directly from them was significantly cheaper than
           | doing so through Vercel, even at a fairly low volume.
        
             | BoorishBears wrote:
             | Vercel/Guillermo Rauch are really onto something
             | 
             | It's established that cloud is paying a premium for not
             | having to hire: but they've gone a step further and started
             | testing the limits of how much you can overcharge _on top
             | of cloud pricing_ for good DX
             | 
             | Clerk.dev (another investment of his often pitched along
             | side Vercel) follows a similar model, and almost without
             | fail if I see a Vercel sample pushing a SaaS, Rauch is
             | usually listed as an investor
        
       | TheSisb2 wrote:
       | How difficult would it be to feed in design system components to
       | the AI? Design system building blocks could serve to improve the
       | quality of outputs vs straight CSS/Tailwind
        
         | muratsu wrote:
         | This is a good idea. I think this is worth experimenting with.
         | Are you familiar with any repos with good design systems? I'll
         | take a look when I've time.
        
           | nwienert wrote:
           | If you're interested in collaborating, I've been thinking of
           | a feature like this for our platform (https://tamagui.dev) to
           | integrate with the studio we're launching soon, send me an
           | email or DM on Discord.
        
         | geniium wrote:
         | Am wondering about the process it would require to build such
         | thing. Maybe cut out in smaller component and then prompt from
         | this smaller component image to code?
        
       | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
       | I think the future is about to have a fork: dumb content and
       | smart content. dumb content will be all the ai created articles,
       | websites, music etc. and the actual creative people will move to
       | creating much more intelligent works.
        
         | sramam wrote:
         | Not sure I understand the rationale behind this comment in the
         | context of OP. How would you classify RapidPages on your
         | measure: smart or dumb?
        
           | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
           | It will be used to create dumb sites which all look the same.
        
       | codetrotter wrote:
       | Same problem here as experienced by others.
       | 
       | When I try to use it it asks me to sign in with GitHub, but after
       | having signed in with GitHub and I try to use it again, it still
       | asks me to sign in again.
       | 
       | The hamburger menu on your page shows that I am logged in,
       | displaying my GitHub username and my email address.
       | 
       | The prompt I used was not long either.
        
         | muratsu wrote:
         | Do you mind refreshing and giving it another shot I've just
         | pushed a quick fix
        
           | codetrotter wrote:
           | Thank you, now it works :)
        
       | geniium wrote:
       | This is amazing! Have been looking at this. First steps to get
       | prompt to Ui
        
       | fuddle wrote:
       | This is great, I'd love to see an explainer in the readme of how
       | it works with OpenAI.
        
       | morgante wrote:
       | The hosted version doesn't seem to work at all. Any time I enter
       | a prompt it just brings me back to login.
        
         | muratsu wrote:
         | Ah sorry if it wasn't clear, you need to login to be able to
         | prompt. I need accounts to prevent openai abuse.
        
           | morgante wrote:
           | I did log in. It still just keeps bringing me back to the
           | login page when I enter a prompt.
        
             | muratsu wrote:
             | That's odd! Do you have anything installed that would
             | prevent from storing the session?
             | 
             | Also happy to debug further if you don't mind jumping over
             | to discord: https://discord.gg/W6jYq46Frd
        
         | residentraspber wrote:
         | This was happening to me until I started with a much shorter
         | prompt at first. Then once you get to the editing view, you can
         | use longer prompts.
        
         | DLA wrote:
         | +1 do loop of login
        
           | HakuG wrote:
           | Had it too, but worked with the the OP on discord. It's fixed
           | for me now.
        
       | marcc wrote:
       | Type a prompt and then get asked to log in. I see this as a dark
       | pattern because if I don't want to log in, I've put data and time
       | into your site and not getting results. If you want to keep this
       | workflow, I'd suggest maybe letting people try it once without
       | logging in?
       | 
       | Curious if you measure this and how much drop off there is
       | between fill out a valid prompt and not logging in to see the
       | results.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | Sounds promising but website seems to require a login which
       | shouldn't be required for examples.
        
         | muratsu wrote:
         | Thanks for the advice! I'm working on building a gallery for
         | people to be inspired next.
         | 
         | In case if anyone wants to see what things may look like after
         | a few simple prompts:
         | https://www.rapidpages.io/r/clmuv2p2r0003l808x4pzdpe6
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-22 23:00 UTC)