[HN Gopher] I think I need to go lie down
___________________________________________________________________
I think I need to go lie down
Author : mfbx9da4
Score : 625 points
Date : 2023-11-16 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Very nice... Shame no source code. But super nice idea.
| ideasphere wrote:
| https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Thanks! Somehow it didn't show up when I searched for it in
| github. My fault for sure.
| codingdave wrote:
| I love this part of the README:
|
| > Disclaimer: This is a demo and is not intended for
| production use. It doesn't have any auth so you will go broke
| if you deploy it.
| croes wrote:
| How about the source code of the result?
| steveruizok wrote:
| Click the little Copy icon next to the output iframe.
| guappa wrote:
| Did they just invent Microsoft front page but with 10000x
| more power used?
| dageshi wrote:
| What is this insanity?
| lucubratory wrote:
| Looks like drawing a prospective UI, then having OpenAI
| multimodal AI turn it into functioning UI. Pretty cool demo.
| Probably needs some automated test cases, documentation writing
| etc if it's going to have even a hope of being maintainable. I
| wonder how much of the GPT-4 coding process described here can
| be automated as part of an application: https://gwern.net/tla
| scopeh wrote:
| Lets make ourselves redundant.
|
| At least I won't have to relearn JS every 2 weeks.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| If there is one good thing going to come out of EVEN the fairly
| clumsy LLMs, it is that we probably can forget about this js
| frontend framework crap and can focus on work instead of
| figuring out what the taste-du-jour is. It won't matter; the
| LLM will translate it.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Probably not. Instead we'll be stuck using the old frameworks
| driver because LLMs won't be able to learn anything new
| without years of stack overflow examples.
| msrobot0 wrote:
| Already I bet stack overflow usage has gone down because
| LLMs can help fixing bugs.
|
| I think the documentation, open source code, and code
| examples are more important training sets.
|
| And in. my experience the code is often maybe 95% correct,
| so there will be a greater premium on expert developers who
| can spot and fix bugs (with the aid of LLMs, since stack
| overflow will no longer have any answers since no one will
| use it having moved to LLMs)
| msrobot0 wrote:
| I 10000% agree.
| enlyth wrote:
| These little demos of toy UIs are cute but humans can still
| hold the context of a whole codebase in their heads.
|
| We're not quite at the level (yet) of feeding a whole codebase
| to an LLM and making it add features or make changes while
| understanding the big picture of the problem being solved,
| being consistent with the design principles and coding style of
| the overall existing codebase. And I'm not even talking about
| creating complex UIs where performance matters
|
| Another issue I've ran into a lot is staleness of the knowledge
| the LLM was trained on, a lot of libraries and frameworks get
| really frequent, quite often breaking changes, and LLMs have a
| cutoff date.
|
| Try using ChatGPT for something like Godot's GDScript, it will
| always try to use old Godot v3 style scripting because that's
| what it's been taught, and the whole documentation for Godot v4
| is not something small enough to just fit into context
|
| Maybe this would be a better fit for some agent type workflow
| where it can decide what to lookup from the documentation and
| then retrieve it, but it also needs to know and decide what to
| look up and how. There is still a lot to figure out
| stylepoints wrote:
| > We're not quite at the level (yet) of feeding a whole
| codebase to an LLM and making it add features or make changes
| while understanding the big picture of the problem being
| solved
|
| We are one step away from that. All we need is a more
| advanced form of fine tuning.
| r3d0c wrote:
| lol, this magical thinking; also not AI, it's ML
| culi wrote:
| ML is a kind of AI
| leshenka wrote:
| You don't have to now too
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Don't worry, in 5 years it will just be another layer in the JS
| dev stack, so then not only the version of npm, dependencies,
| docker, and 3 API keys have to match but you'll also need the
| correct commit of the 20GB LLM so the build doesn't fail. All
| for the sake of simplicity and increased productivity, of
| course.
| JCharante wrote:
| We'll have dependency files for LLMs in our mixture of
| experts config and we'll get paged at 2am to update a version
| of an LLM because there's a new social engineering CVE making
| it vulnerable to disclosing secrets.
| culi wrote:
| let chatgpt fix our dependency issues
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| required dependency: leftpad-ai-gpt4
| Havoc wrote:
| Much like cockroaches JS will survive a nuclear explosion
| paxys wrote:
| More like - let's give ourselves better tools. The people who
| hire us won't be able to build this stuff themselves no matter
| how good an AI you give them. The only developers who will lose
| their job are ones who fail to embrace AI.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I was discussing with a client how to integrate our software with
| his.
|
| He sent me a screenshot of the main form.
|
| I put the screenshot into ChatGPT and said "make a react form
| like this in bootstrap".
|
| Made some adjustments, added my software, a few hours later
| showed the client who was knocked out to see a proof of concept
| of our systems integrated so quickly.
|
| When doing web development I often take a screenshot of a problem
| with css layout, upload to ChatGPT and ask how to fix it.
|
| The demo shown in the tweet seems pretty similar.
| nwoli wrote:
| It's most likely using chatgpt in the backend
| OJFord wrote:
| No need to guess, there's a thing at the bottom asking for an
| OpenAI API key at the bottom, and it can't function without
| that.
|
| (So actually technically I think that means no, it's not
| using ChatGPT, but I don't think that was the point.)
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think it's accurate enough to call the OpenAI API the
| ChatGPT API since it's using the same models. But yeah,
| technically not the same thing.
| rob137 wrote:
| Yep: https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-
| ui/blob/2ac633bbbd5fda39e59...
| toyg wrote:
| Yes, the customer will be impressed by your speed the first
| time. The second time, he will expect it. The third time, when
| requirements have grown enough to be beyond what ChatGPT can
| deal with, he'll be angry that timescales have exploded.
| code_runner wrote:
| I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so that
| you never have to set realistic expectations" is a great way
| to do business. Being worse at your job on purpose isn't
| typically a great strategy.
|
| It sounds to me like the commenter has found a subset of his
| work which can be sped up significantly with chatGPT and is
| using that to continue conversations with a potential client.
| Pretty cool if you ask me.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| > I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so
| that you never have to set realistic expectations" is a
| great way to do business.
|
| It's called Expectation Management. It's how successful
| business is done.
|
| Marketing 101: Under promise, over deliver.
|
| P.S. Apple is quite good at this IMHO. I notice they often
| very quickly go from product announcement to product
| availability. My theory for why this is good is that there
| less time in between for people's imagination to run wild
| and fill in the information gaps with their own ideas that
| the actual product might not satisfy. Expectations remain
| ground when their customers receive the product vs a
| product getting hyped to the moon such that it's
| practically impossible for it to ever live up to the hype.
| code_runner wrote:
| i'm not replying about the concept of under promise, over
| deliver, but more like.... why would you avoid a tool
| that helps you do something quickly because you don't
| want to explain to your client that some steps aren't as
| fast to do as others.
| toyg wrote:
| You wouldn't avoid the tool, just avoid surfacing it too
| explicitly - by being too fast or by explicitly boasting
| about it.
| murukesh_s wrote:
| This comment is so relevant.. people underestimate software
| complexity. In software services, often it's not the
| algorithms that are hard to implement or maintain, as they
| often have very clearly defined input and output
| requirements, and you can and test them, but its the ever
| changing and regularly patched up business logic that evolves
| the system into a complex and fragile service needing careful
| maintenance.. Can't imagine an AI system taking 'charge'
| there as a subtle mistake by the AI system would then need a
| human intervention to 'fix' it which by then would be close
| to impossible. At that point you can't also make use of AI
| beyond a co-pilot role as anything complex would need line by
| line and careful inspection by a software dev.
| hobofan wrote:
| Yeah, let's see about the long run.
|
| Right now with the increased productivity, it leads to
| customer engagements that previously wouldn't have been
| possible for me. E.g. now it's feasible from a cost
| standpoint to let me as a freelancer build internal tooling
| that previously would have been to expensive in total. It's
| also easier to deliver initial MVP milestones for projects
| for a price that's in a much more comfortable range for
| smaller companies.
|
| Yeah, that advantage may go away, but just like good
| "googling" was/is a skill that can set you apart from your
| peers, proper usage of LLMs is a skill as well that needs to
| be learned (and that many won't).
| znpy wrote:
| > The third time, when requirements have grown enough to be
| beyond what ChatGPT can deal with, he'll be angry that
| timescales have exploded.
|
| Or worse, they'll feel they've been scammed, and that you're
| a fraud.
|
| AI or not it's not a good strategy, in life and in business,
| to lie regarding on what you can actually do/deliver.
| code_runner wrote:
| its a tool. use the tool. I don't care if the house is
| built using an old fashioned hammer or a nail gun. I do
| care if you used nails when you should've used something
| else, or used the wrong nails.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could,
| they didn't stop to think if they should."
| misja111 wrote:
| But the thing is, creating a basic form page -is- simple. What
| is so amazing, is that after ~25 years of web development, we
| have continued to make it more complicated than it should be,
| by continuously coming up with new web frameworks that are
| brilliant for all kind of fancy use cases but overcomplicated
| for the more common and basic tasks.
|
| Yes, there have been exceptions every now and then, but most
| web devs don't like them. They don't look fancy on your cv and
| face it, who wants to stick to building web forms for the rest
| of their career?
| tootie wrote:
| Not just simple, it's a thing I'd never even ask a coder to
| do anymore. I'd pay for Hubspot or some kind of form-
| management SaaS tool.
| gtirloni wrote:
| The software world is much more flexible than the real world
| (yeah , I know, you're taking to Sherlock here).
|
| Go to a civil engineer and ask to create a building that
| tilts extremely on one side and requires concrete
| reinforcement with titanium whatever... they will laugh at
| you.
|
| Do the equivalent to a software engineer or product manager
| and they will hurry to invent yet another framework to
| satisfy your request, without giving a second thought about
| long-term consequences.
|
| My point is that the real world has the laws of physics
| keeping things in check. With software, we don't have such
| obvious hard limits and each situation is case-by-case with
| lots of variables... it gets messy.
| dartos wrote:
| Also programmers tend to think we're very smart and clever.
|
| We tend to like complex problems and complicated systems
| and build them.
|
| Ironically it's much harder to make simple software that
| covers complex use cases than it is to make complex
| software to do the same.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I don't think this is about flexibility. It's more about
| culture. Software engineering culture does not value
| simplicity, and actually seems to value complexity. Other
| engineering cultures place a lot more value on simplicity,
| and its associated values of reliability and risk
| mitigation.
|
| A civil engineer can build you that building, but they will
| think "what a ridiculous architect." With a software
| engineering mindset, they would happily build that building
| for you, and invent a new type of concrete mixed with
| titanium flakes to do it for you. And then they will go on
| a decades-long campaign about how titanium-flake-concrete
| is the Next Big Thing and that anyone using normal concrete
| is a simpleton.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Clearly, you haven't worked on German automobiles.
|
| There is no one so willing to do things the hard way as a
| German car engineer trying to implement something that
| has existed for decades, and functions perfectly in
| standardized form.
|
| I'm only half kidding.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| The culture is derived from the economics though.
| Software engineers who value simplicity don't get
| promoted, or their software is not as successful, because
| the other engineers who produce complex software produce
| results that users are attracted to and the cost of that
| complexity is not so great as to completely ruin it (at
| least not at first).
|
| On top of that, a little bit of software can be used by a
| lot of people, but a little bit of building usually
| can't, so unless you're Gaudi building the Sagrada
| Familia, nobody really wants to spend a couple centuries
| building a complex building.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Basic "fill out the fields then submit" forms are simple. But
| many use cases these days want intakes or onboardings like
| apps, then complain about complexity or timelines when they
| fail to realize the requirements spawned 45,000 branching
| paths.
| roflyear wrote:
| Yah GPT cannot create a form that has that kind of UX, I
| promise. Try it.
| jorvi wrote:
| If this was an e-mail or chat conversation with a client,
| imagine if your client was asking ChatGPT the best way to
| formulate his requirements to you.
|
| It's turtles all the way down :+)
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Yeah, but maybe the client didn't want you to expose his data
| to ChatGPT.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| how do you put a screenshot into chatgpt?
| j_bum wrote:
| I believe it requires plus*, but I'm not sure.
|
| However, you can paste in an image, or you can click the
| paperclip on the bottom left of the prompt area to upload an
| image (or other files).
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| you mean plus i assume
| ilaksh wrote:
| They are probably using the new GPT Vision API that OpenAI
| just added this month.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Just snip it and paste it. If you're in Windows, I use the
| Snipping Tool Windows + Shift + S. Then just go to ChatGPT4
| (Pro only) and hit paste.
| financltravsty wrote:
| 1. Take your screenshot
|
| 2. Switch model to ChatGPT 4
|
| 3. Click the attachment/paperclip button in the prompt bar
|
| 4. Send
| rchaud wrote:
| Creating the front-end of a Bootstrap form with no backend
| logic isn't particularly impresssive, it's something that would
| be taught halfway through any bootcamp course. Source: me, a
| person who built BS sites for years until I finally got around
| to learning Flexbox and CSS Grid properly.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Hell, I can build that form WITH backend logic with like five
| minutes in django _and I 'm not even good with django!_
|
| If it takes you a long time to build a form, you've done
| something very very wrong.
| agvxov wrote:
| i dont think you grasp the scale difference between seconds
| and minutes correctly. and it will add up quite fast.
| seydor wrote:
| Shudder at the thought of every client expecting this for
| granted
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| They do that anyway. I've lost count of the number of times
| customers have asked me for something that "could be knocked
| out in an afternoon".
| redrove wrote:
| Can we please stop posting twitter links? It's a horror show of a
| website, especially if you don't have an account.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| There should be an extension or greasemonkey-script that will
| allow you to curate the frontpage to your own liking.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| You could choose not to click on it.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| One forum I frequent automatically replaces Twitter links with
| nitter.net, which still isn't great but at least lets you see
| the post.
| masklinn wrote:
| It's a lot better as it lets you see the replies / thread
| which xitter has stopped showing and does not drive
| engagement it.
| rvbissell wrote:
| > xitter has stopped showing and does not drive engagement.
|
| In the specific case in Xitter, I perceive that as a good
| change. I like seeing what was linked to, without otherwise
| getting engaged there.
| masklinn wrote:
| Using nitter is the part which avoids engagement-ing with
| xitter.
|
| Not having any context is the part which makes links to
| xitter useless, most of the time you get a link to a
| reply but without context it's difficult to impossible to
| understand what it's about, and the link is functionally
| useless.
| rvbissell wrote:
| I know this doesn't help you in the particular
| circumstances you mentioned, but: for that I would place
| the blame on the person who provided the link, for not
| giving sufficient context to understand.
| masklinn wrote:
| > for that I would place the blame on the person who
| provided the link, for not giving sufficient context to
| understand.
|
| I would not. First, I would assume logged users do get
| context so they likely are not even aware of the issue,
| and second that is what link for, if you have a to quote
| everything you're linking to in full then the web is
| broken.
|
| xitter is what's broken.
| fyokdrigd wrote:
| install the nitter app (available on fdroid) and associate
| Twitter/x.com links.
|
| problem solved for good
| rvz wrote:
| Good luck trying to make the posters stop posting to Twitter /
| X.
|
| It's almost as if lots of people _still_ use Twitter / X to
| post content, yet a year later people still crying and moaning
| about it.
|
| The hundreds of millions of users still posting their content
| on the platform don't care regardless.
| matsemann wrote:
| The problem is that the content is not accessible unless
| you're logged in, with some recent changes. And even worse,
| it doesn't tell you what it's hiding, so you don't really
| know that you're only seeing parts of it. Makes it really
| confusing when linked to a twitter post.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Hear, hear
| joenot443 wrote:
| I'm confused - what are you specifically having problems with?
|
| I'm not logged in and the site loaded fine on mobile and then
| again on desktop. The video played immediately, I didn't see
| any ads. Are you hoping to be able to comment without an
| account? That's usually not how things work.
|
| I'm guessing this is another case of Elon induced nerd
| grumpiness?
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| The cookie terror footer? The additional giant sign up bar?
| The fact that after a few seconds it will just hide
| everything behind a giant black pop-up about enabling
| notifications?
|
| Malware websites are less awful than this.
| masklinn wrote:
| Also that it has stopped showing either the post being
| replied (unless RT-replied) to or any of the replies so you
| just have one item with no context available.
| phatskat wrote:
| Not who you're replying to but: Im on iOS using the HACK app
| and the built in safari web view wouldn't play the videos,
| and same in chrome. So now I've given up.
|
| Also, if I clicked into the tweet (xeet?) in the web view and
| hit "open in system browser", I just got an X "something went
| wrong" page. Also if I opened the first video that failed to
| play, closed it, and clicked the second video, the first
| would attempt to load again instead until I reloaded the
| whole page and clicked the second...that still failed to play
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > Im on iOS using the HACK app and the built in safari web
| view wouldn't play the videos, and same in chrome. So now
| I've given up.
|
| I use HACK on iOS without any account and everything
| renders fine, the video plays with no issue for me.
| croes wrote:
| I want to see the twitter comment not the sole tweet
| brainphreeze wrote:
| Never been a big fan of twitter, but it looks the same to me
| as it always has. It's never been _that_ user friendly for
| those not logged in.
|
| Anything Elon is bad now though apparently. Seen quite a few
| comments hoping the Starship launch fails tomorrow, strange
| times we live in.
| footy wrote:
| > but it looks the same to me as it always has. It's never
| been that user friendly for those not logged in.
|
| You used to be able to see context, not just a single
| tweet. If that doesn't make a difference to you in cases
| like this I don't know what to tell you.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Also when logged out on mobile I find that it just fails to
| load and you get an error with a try again, and that try
| again never works.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Meh the paywall / medium / etc. ship has sailed. Post a
| workaround if needed.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Does the link load so you can see the content OP thought worth
| sharing here and join the discussion? Yes. What else do you
| need?
| croes wrote:
| >What else do you need?
|
| The twitter comments.
| piva00 wrote:
| Nope, it didn't until I hit refresh for the 5th time, somehow
| Twitter/X has been broken for me where it will _always_
| display the "signup" page even for non-NSFW content.
|
| I need it to load the content when I click, it's pretty
| simple.
| guappa wrote:
| excluding the popups to sign away my privacy, 90% of the time
| it asks me to login and shows no content.
| travoc wrote:
| It loaded faster than a YouTube video would have for me. Since
| I don't have an X login, there wasn't even a temptation to get
| drawn into any other pointless content. I like it.
| prepend wrote:
| Works ok for me in safari. This post shows a video and I was
| able to watch and close with no popups or anything.
|
| Certainly the least scary horror show I've seen in a while.
| olalonde wrote:
| I can help you create an account if you need.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Can we please stop posting twitter links?_
|
| Friendly fyi... the moderator allows Twitter links and
| previously explained the reasoning:
|
| _> We're not going to ban Twitter because, like it or not,
| it's the source of some of the most intellectually interesting
| material that gets posted here._ -- from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30430760
|
| There's also a related moderator's post about allowing
| "paywall" articles :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
| runiq wrote:
| https://nitter.net/multikev/status/1724908185361011108
| stanac wrote:
| FF + Nitter Redirect extension solved most of the problems I
| had with Twitter.
| harryvederci wrote:
| https://holllo.org/re-nav/
|
| Solved!
| smcleod wrote:
| Ugh Twitter / X. That site needs to die - it's honestly so
| broken, none of the redirects seem to work today.
| cduzz wrote:
| I'm trying to get people to pronounce it "eggs" as in
|
| Eggs, the site formerly known as twitter. So instead of a tweet
| you "egg something".
|
| I think it gives the site the dignity it deserves.
| yoav wrote:
| Lay down some yolks
| timbit42 wrote:
| Not bad. I still prefer Xitter though. The X is pronounced
| 'sh'.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| That's a good one; another good one is birdchan.
| SuperCuber wrote:
| i like Xitter and Xcrete
| cduzz wrote:
| Right, but the letter "X" may be pronounced "Eggs" and
| people may not even notice that you're not pronouncing it
| in a cool "Dimension X" scifi way with reverb and stuff.
|
| Double Yew, Eggs, Why, Zee / Zed
|
| Eccentric billionaire Elan Mosk, while cosplaying Howard
| Huges, Laid an egg that "he is going to make a wooden
| rocket that can land on the fondue oceans of the moon"
|
| [edit: added the zed for friends who count on their hands
| starting at the thumb not pointer finger]
| lxgr wrote:
| At this point I'm assuming this is broken on purpose (for
| visitors not logged in).
|
| I wonder if people still on there realize that their posts are
| essentially not visible for unregistered users anymore without
| jumping though major hoops.
| godshatter wrote:
| Did they fix it? Everything seems to be working for me and I
| don't even have a twitter account.
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| I installed this extension, it made me hate Twitter less by not
| having to use it.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| That's fine but why should it be on me? It should just be HN
| policy to not accept twitter as article links. They're
| effectively paywalled. If people must, they should be
| submitting nitter etc links.
| mtmail wrote:
| From the HN FAQ "It's ok to post stories from sites with
| paywalls that have workarounds." Instead of 30 comments on
| the state of twitter one nitter link would've sufficed.
| v7n wrote:
| What still miraculously works for me is
| s/twitter.com/nitter.net/
| andreygrehov wrote:
| What redirects? Everything works fine. Not a single time I
| experienced any issue with Twitter since the acquisition.
|
| Interesting fact is that according to the statistics of
| DownDetector, Twitter is more stable now. It was down more
| often prior to the acquisition.
| callalex wrote:
| Downdetector is completely unscientific and based on user
| reports. It could also be that way fewer people use the
| website now, so nobody is making reports to downdetector.
| world2vec wrote:
| Slowly realising my father was right and should work for our
| family business (construction).
| ergonaught wrote:
| While I've had similar notions throughout my life, they have
| their own host of problems, yeah?
| world2vec wrote:
| Nothing is truly perfect. Maybe in 5-10 years we'll have
| massive 3D printers that can build you any house without
| needing a big construction crew. I doubt but if you asked me
| 5 years ago about AI being capable of replacing me, I'd have
| laughed in your face... Alas, here we are.
| largbae wrote:
| Not replacing, augmenting. Try to find ways to use the new
| tools to become more productive than other engineers. Help
| evolve integration and deployment frameworks to handle the
| snippets from LLMs in the context of larger projects with a
| minimum of glue.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to see some old ideas come back to
| life like encapsulation concepts from enterprise software
| development. But this time we let LLMs deal with the
| boilerplate code needed to use and connect them.
| nwoli wrote:
| South Park was right (panderverse episode)
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe we'll have the robot equivalent of TFA in 20 years. "I
| need a new garage that looks roughly like this sketch." Half a
| day later...
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Computer, please create an adversary capable of defeating
| Data.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| I think it's a good idea that knowledge workers learn the
| fundamentals of at least one trade. I am interested in HVAC and
| building automation.
|
| You can also master a trade and become a knowledge worker. Here
| in Denmark it's possible to mix pre-university/gymnasium
| (equivalent to year 10-12 in the US) with a trade. Combined it
| takes 4.5-5 years.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Squarespace, Wix etc have already taken the bottom of the market,
| and if they hadn't, Indian outsourcing would have anyway.
|
| This is the logical progression of those same concepts. If I were
| a product manager at a website builder, I'd be all over
| integrating ai builders like this. It will never work for barely
| defined complex business tasks, but it might do fine to create a
| cost estimator for a photography business, for example.
| V__ wrote:
| I see this as a useful tool for creating interactive demos and
| prototypes which allow to quickly iterate over ideas. Could
| keep the feedback loop with clients short and allow to minimise
| miscommunication. I could see for example Figma implementing
| this.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > Squarespace, Wix etc have already taken the bottom of the
| market
|
| Meanwhile most SMBs don't have an app/website or have an
| useless one. There is so much space for niche markets and good
| tools.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Why do you think it can only work for trivial tasks? That's
| just denial.
|
| Business process workflow software is quite popular. There are
| many applications where people do something similar with drag
| and drop/interactive widget editors and they can have complex
| forms, parent-child, state transitions, etc.
|
| Using something like GPT Vision means you can skip the widget
| drag and drop and use more freeform drawing tools or freehand
| sketching.
|
| Notion is probably the most popular example today but there are
| more complex ones going back forever.
| roflyear wrote:
| Because so far it has only worked on trivial tasks? That
| isn't denial: it's stating fact.
|
| Business process workflow software is popular, but have
| massive downsides. These softwares consume massive amount of
| resources. One dev becomes one dev plus a business person
| plus another person plus overhead.
|
| > Using something like GPT Vision means you can skip the
| widget drag and drop and use more freeform drawing tools or
| freehand sketching.
|
| To do... what? Where does the UI go? Where does the data go?
| Where is it stored? How is it accessed? How is security? How
| are backups? Version control? Etc..
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That is going to replace about 0.001% of my job! Scary.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The water is just getting lukewarm. Said the frog.
| birriel wrote:
| 0.001% is only 17 doublings away from the whole job.
| postsantum wrote:
| My hobby: interpolating
| imjonse wrote:
| Such recent demos show both how impressively ML/AI has advanced
| recently, and how unimpressively repetitive and unoriginal tasks
| keep being reimplemented by millions of developers worldwide.
| Since most UI screens can be accurately described in one or two
| paragraphs, it's no wonder they can be represented in much detail
| in a relatively small embedding vector.
| jprete wrote:
| A lot of methods of expressing software ideas are also very
| inefficient. The actual interesting part, the entropy, is very
| small. In the demo it's literally two sliders controlling two
| CSS attributes which is not a lot of bits of entropy in a UI
| specification. With an appropriate UI specification language,
| that would be, what, three lines of code? Needing to manage Web
| UI boilerplate is where the difficulty is.
| Filligree wrote:
| But if you use a specification language, then how can you
| build a pixel-perfect, unique set of sliders that's subtly
| different from everyone else's?
| pc86 wrote:
| IME the real "problem" (maybe just interpersonally) is when
| you have a product person, or a designer, who insists that
| something needs to be pixel-perfect and subtly different
| when it objectively does not. Maybe even when it is a grey
| area but the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
|
| Case in point I'm in the middle of, let's just call it what
| it is, an argument, because a new page in a new section of
| our app has a different design for form elements,
| specifically single check boxes (think TOS, affirmations,
| etc). Well we have shared components obviously, so we're
| reusing the component. No sense taking half a day or more
| to reskin this one checkbox on one page.
|
| The amount of grief and manhours wasted discussing this
| checkbox would astound you. Thousands of dollars in payroll
| over multiple meetings so far with no end in sight because
| this particular check box just has to be slightly
| different. The ticket which has been feature-complete for
| over a week has no chance of being merged in November.
| jprete wrote:
| The usability article [1] from yesterday suggested a
| similar problem - design-oriented people want to put
| their graphical mark on their GUIs, and it comes at a
| significant usability cost. GUIs are most usable when
| they are consistent - everyone uses exactly the same UI
| elements, with the same exact color schemes and shapes
| and sizes, to mean the same things every time. And
| that's...not what people do anymore.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38280201
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Dear god another "engineers don't get the difference
| between design and ux and complain that everything should
| just all be the same" thread.
| fidotron wrote:
| I swear the art form here is to provide the product
| people and designers with a tool/framework where they
| make the choices and they suffer the constraints, then
| they have to blame themselves when they can't do it.
|
| There is the old story about Steve Jobs and the Mac
| calculator app, where they made a calculator toolbox to
| build one in order to prevent him demanding seemingly
| arbitrary changes all the time.
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Calculator_Co
| nst...
| lanstin wrote:
| Exactly. Look not at the requirements but at the likely
| space for requirements over time and build an engine that
| can be tuned/tweaked/configed to meet all the likely
| requirements. Makes testing a little harder but makes dev
| and product happy.
| coldtea wrote:
| Hook the resulting GUI code up to customizable styling?
| LordShredda wrote:
| I blame Microsoft for having five different UI toolkits
| across three languages. Web browsers aren't that cross
| platform, is the GUI toolkit that is, so use that!
| creshal wrote:
| Which of the 7251 reactive JS frameworks do you want to
| pair with which of the 15281 css frameworks to achieve the
| result?
| zztop44 wrote:
| Does the user care?
| isilofi wrote:
| Yes. Almost none of those get i18n, hotkeys, shortcuts,
| taborder, screenreaders and other accessibility right.
| pc86 wrote:
| Most users don't care about any of that, either. And I
| would argue that i18n and l10n belong outside your
| language's framework (and obviously outside CSS).
| projectazorian wrote:
| Accessibility is legally mandated in many cases and if
| you ever want to sell your app to government or
| enterprise customers, it's likely to be a requirement.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Most users don 't care about any of that, either._
|
| That's because they don't know what they are. They suffer
| the consequences of not having them though.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > Most users don't care about any of that
|
| This is 100% incorrect. Users do care about software
| being built for them, in a language they can understand
| and use, and they very much want it to be usable and
| accessible to them. You'll have to provide me with some
| citation showing otherwise for me to take that argument
| seriously.
|
| > I would argue that i18n and l10n belong outside your
| language's framework (and obviously outside CSS).
|
| Obviously Frameworks and CSS disagree with this
| assertion. Considering you've presented no argument
| though, I don't see why you would think that, for
| example, it wouldn't be important to style your site
| differently for different languages. Are Americans
| routinely reading rtl?
|
| Edit: It just occurred to me you think this way because
| most everything you create is specifically created for
| you and those like you. You care, you just don't realize
| you care until it's taken away.
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| You mean "I don't care about any of that".
|
| We know this, you don't need to tell us (and it makes
| your argument weaker that you did...).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Most users only use about 10% of the features of your
| software...
|
| The problem is, for every user it's a different 10%.
| wpietri wrote:
| If we're taking that route, most people don't care about
| any specific thing, so we can just skip all this
| development effort and play video games all day.
| lovasoa wrote:
| I have been thinking about that a lot recently. Where I work,
| we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things
| that are unique to our business. Maybe we are doing something
| very wrong, but I am under the impression that most of the
| code that gets written anywhere is extremely low-entropy.
|
| This low-entropy, repetitive coding is not limited to the
| user interfaces. We do tend to describe the same structures
| and logic over and over again in front-ends, backends, and
| databases.
|
| I am currently building an open-source project that tries to
| make the definition of applications from database structure
| to business logic to user interfaces, much more declarative
| and compact. If you are interested, you can try it on
| https://sql.ophir.dev
| withinboredom wrote:
| > we spend a very small fraction of our time on building
| things that are unique to our business.
|
| I usually see this in places/cultures that value code-
| beautification projects rather than delivering value to the
| customer. Sometimes, they even want to do the latter, but
| actually do the former.
|
| If you work somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the
| devs constantly complain about technical debt that will
| never, ever get fixed. That's the only sucky part.
| nine_k wrote:
| "Code beautification" is not the point, but a tool.
| Smaller and clearer code could be faster to write, and
| harder to make mistakes using. This is why e.g. Rails can
| be so good at producing certain kinds of apps very
| quickly and in very few LOCs.
|
| The problem is, of course, that simplicity follows
| complexity, not the other way around. Because of that,
| it's mostly "trivial" and "repetitive" tasks that receive
| polished tools for easy and compact expression. Anything
| new and non-trivial usually grows ugly and uncouth for
| quite some time.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Code Beautification is a waste of time and ossifies a
| code base. It's a form of optimization that actually
| makes the code harder to change and the business less
| agile. It is pretty though.
| nine_k wrote:
| Beauty for the beauty's sake is art, not business.
|
| Usually simple, lean, and logical is _also_ beautiful;
| beauty is not a random quality. But sometimes too simple
| and too lean is not flexible enough; then that 's a case
| of a wrong abstraction, or of premature optimization.
| davio wrote:
| I describe our work as an endless loop of taking data
| from the screen to the database and back again.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| This reminds me of the introductory scene of the amazing
| game The Stanley Parable: Stanley worked
| for a company in a big building where he was Employee
| #427. Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his
| desk in Room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.
| Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk telling
| him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in
| what order. This is what Employee #427 did every
| day of every month of every year, and although others may
| have considered it soul rending, Stanley relished
| every moment that the orders came in, as though he had
| been made exactly for this job.
|
| It was a sobering moment when I realized that accurately
| described most of my job too.
|
| https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Dialogue#Introd
| uct...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs
| constantly complain about technical debt that will never,
| ever get fixed
|
| Value, or short-term value? When the codebase gets hard
| to manage, the value is there.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I generally try to steer any team I work on away from
| short-term value. It's an addictive drug to managers that
| eventually gets used up.
| evntdrvn wrote:
| Hopefully this sounds like helpful feedback instead of
| annoying nitpicking: I found that the substantial "flash of
| unstyled content" when the page first loads to be very
| jarring/unappetizing. I think it would be worthwhile to
| investigate one of the approaches that can mitigate this
| FOUC effect.
|
| Cheers and good luck!!!
| lovasoa wrote:
| thanks for the feedback ! I cannot replicate that on my
| computer with any browser, and all seems normal to google
| pagespeed insights as well:
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-sql-ophir-
| dev/4o7q6...
|
| Which browser/device are you using, and from where ?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Disable the cache in dev-tools, you can't miss it.
| lovasoa wrote:
| It would be great if someone could open a github issue
| with reproduction steps and maybe a screenshot:
| https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/issues
|
| The worst I'm able to get when manually disabling the
| cache and simulating a slow 3G connection is this: a
| blank page first, then text in the browser's font, then
| the text re-renders with the right font, then the icons
| load. The user should never see completely unstyled
| content.
|
| The site uses "font-display: fallback" so this happens
| only on slow network connections. If the font loads fast
| enough, then the fallback never appears.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The browsers font switching to the right font is exactly
| what we are talking about. I'm in the Netherlands, so
| maybe I am just far away from your servers, but there's
| about 200-300ms (essentially when reading the title, at
| least that is what I was doing when it switched on me)
| and that's when it switches the font.
|
| You can probably just use the system font for the title,
| and nobody would ever notice the issue.
| lanstin wrote:
| My email signature sometimes says "software done right is
| always solving novel problems." I wish people always had
| the time and mandate to find the simple generization of
| their sequence of one offs.
| brundolf wrote:
| Your company is doing something very wrong, but so are the
| vast majority of software orgs, including mine. Which maybe
| casts new light on the OP
| api wrote:
| People used to write assembly language manually too, writing
| the most simple control structures over and over hand crafted
| for each case.
|
| This is even more automation of drudgery and easy repetitive
| work.
| gtirloni wrote:
| I welcome these tools but when you need to be completely
| accurate with something, you have to drop the nice graphical
| tool and actually edit code.. and then it's a mess. Either
| the code is super complex to humans or going back to
| graphical mode breaks everything.
| skor wrote:
| that sounds quite like dreamweaver
| spyder wrote:
| Huh? UIs should be repetitive not impressive or original, so
| users don't have to learn different new interface for every
| app.
| another-dave wrote:
| I think the parent's comment isn't saying that UI should be
| wildly different from each other but moreso highlighting that
| this is a prime usecase for an easy abstraction over the top.
| creshal wrote:
| UIs _should_ be repetitive, but we keep reinventing them
| anyway to satisfy the vanity of product owners
| /designers/managers/clients/... and built entire industries
| around making slightly the UIs slightly more differently than
| the last time.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Usually things naturally get mature and stop changing so
| much (e.g. some software reaches such maturity level that
| it starts offering LTS releases).
|
| This doesn't seem to be the case with UI toolkits. Is that
| because we still don't understand things well enough to
| design a decent foundation?
| creshal wrote:
| I suspect a large part is that the visual nature of the
| topic simply lends itself to endless bike shedding and
| fashion cycles; maturity and stability are going to be
| anathemata in these contexts.
|
| But it also doesn't help that input/output formfactors
| keep changing. We just about understood what did and
| didn't work with terminals when desktop GUIs sprung up,
| by the time those started maturing, we had to figure out
| how to adapt to PDAs and pen inputs, then came
| smartphones and tablets, then 3D for a while, then VR,
| and in parallel to that increasingly exotic "classic"
| form factors like folding devices with fluid screen
| sizes, ...
| pc86 wrote:
| In my experience it's because every time you give a page
| or product spec to a designer they give you something
| slightly different based on however they happen to be
| feeling that day. Combine that with whatever product
| people do, and you get basically random UIs for each
| task.
| dogleash wrote:
| > Is that because we still don't understand things well
| enough to design a decent foundation?
|
| Nope. Don't let the conmen fool you that the incremental
| changes in HCI justify all the new coats of paint. Form
| and function changes are happening in parallel.
|
| Fashion has to change, that's just the nature of fashion.
| Fashion will also spin yarn to justify itself. That's
| also just the nature of fashion. Don't get me wrong, I
| want all my software to be palatable to modern tastes.
| But entropy always increases with time.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I would say that in the long term/big picture we have
| figured out a pretty standard UI for computers. In the
| 1980s you probably had to read a pretty hefty book for
| any given model of computer to be useful. Now, we can sit
| down in front of just about any computer and trust that
| the Mouse and Keyboard will exist, and act like we expect
| (i.e. the left button on the mouse is for selecting,
| there are arrows on the keyboard which can control a
| cursor, etc), and that the GUI software will be
| substantially similar regardless of manufacturer
| (windowed programs, a bar of some sort on the lower edge
| of the screen for controlling the OS, a bar at the top of
| the screen for controlling the active window, etc.)
|
| The parts of the UI toolkits that change are the least
| consequential. Round or square corners, buttons,
| skeumorphism, etc...
| rakoo wrote:
| OK but if it's that common it shouldn't take more time to
| create the final result than the time it took to draw it and
| render it. We don't want to spend time at such a low level
| abstraction, we want to be describing higher-level behavior.
| danShumway wrote:
| > it shouldn't take more time to create the final result
| than the time it took to draw it and render it
|
| Ideally it should be faster. Ideally it should be slower to
| draw and render it than it is to create the final result.
|
| My controversial hot take on UI is that I don't think
| graphical tools like Figma encourage good UX habits. Unless
| you're doing something really creative, (opinion me) you
| will get better results if your UI starts in a text editor.
| You want a slider? What you want is: <input
| type="range" id="volume" name="volume" min="0" max="11" />
| <!-- And then you get more boilerplate double-binding the
| input and wiring it up to whatever component it controls
| -->
|
| Or better, in a way that your UI designer can understand:
| Volume (0-11 slider) => Music Volume
|
| When we say that these kinds of tasks contain too much
| boilerplate, its more about the amount of code required to
| actually wire these things up and about the defaults and
| caveats of the systems that we're using to build them.
|
| And we say that this kind of boilerplate should be
| eliminated rather than plugged into an AI, what we're
| talking about is trying to get rid of the stuff that makes
| people feel like "well, I just need to draw my interface,
| it's too much work writing it out or programming it."
| Because web authorship isn't actually there yet, it isn't
| efficient and easy to do this boilerplate from scratch.
|
| But in a way, visual representations of high-level behavior
| are themselves an inefficient way to describe behavior.
| It's lossy, it doesn't always represent multiple states
| well, people forget to handle other setups or states. You
| need to draw boxes and move them around and if you want to
| reposition anything you have to move everything else around
| it? Nah, it's a slider from 0-11, it should be double-bound
| to some kind of variable. And I don't want to think about
| boxes, I want to think about what the control _is_ and what
| it _does_. When I start building UIs, the first thing I do
| is I make a markdown list that just lists the controls. I
| don 't start by drawing.
|
| This is viewed as a kind of programmer-centric way of
| thinking about design, but I don't think it is, I think it
| results in better designs across the board. Drawing shapes
| should be a step that comes much later in the design
| process. It should happen, you want to do these kinds of
| visual tweaks to make sure things line up well and to think
| about presentation, the same way you want to do a visual
| pass when typesetting a book. It's not that it's not
| important, butthe visual position of every element is not
| the part of the design that's most difficult, figuring out
| what to show the user and when and how to represent it is
| the difficult part. And in the same way that you wouldn't
| write a book and start out thinking about the page breaks,
| it doesn't make sense to think about the positioning of
| every control before you've figured out what your controls
| even are.
|
| It's kind of a failure of modern UI/UX toolkits that people
| are so hungry for visual design. It's backwards, we treat
| the behavior of controls as an implementation detail and
| the positioning of controls as the primary design step.
| It's the opposite, how a control behaves is important, and
| how it looks is an implementation detail that we may need
| to change or polish in the future depending on whether our
| current app-wide default styles work well for the control
| or not. But that's because people are so used to feeling
| disconnected from the implementation and are so used to the
| implementation being a repetitive chore.
| blehn wrote:
| So then every app should be a CLI? Not sure how you can
| actually believe a statement like that.
| rchaud wrote:
| You've put into words what has bothered me about the relentless
| boosterism of B2C AI solutions on the backs of hundreds of
| these "Hello World" type demos. "OMG, programming is dead!"
|
| The strange thing is that on HN, the limits of these approaches
| re: extensibility and maintenance are easily recognized when
| talking about traditional no-code platforms. But somehow with
| AI, these problems are now fixed, and we wont have to worry
| about unspooling spaghetti spat out from a black box.
| dartos wrote:
| Well yeah, you just put the spaghetti into another black box
| and have that deal with it
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Do you really care about extensibility and maintenance when
| you could just generate an entirely new component when you
| want more features or need to upgrade the library?
| rchaud wrote:
| If the team that came up with the prototype assumes that
| responsibility, then no, I don't. I'm sure an AI will
| understand how to refactor the codebase on an adhoc basis
| without creating any problems down the line.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm far from an AI booster, but I notice that the "AI-powered
| coding" goal posts keep moving as soon as something is
| accomplished. Ten years ago, if you showed someone a text box
| where you could type "Write me a C++ Hello World program" and
| it actually would do it, it would have been considered
| wizardry. Then, it became "Well, sure... it can only write
| Hello World--what good is that?" Now, it's "Well, sure... it
| can do basic slider controls, who needs such a toy app?"
| What's next? "Oh, the full first person shooter game it
| conjured up from a prompt is generic and uncreative. Who
| would want to play that?"
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I mean who cares about hypothetical benchmarks - when I try
| to apply these tools they fail more often than not.
|
| The only tool I can say I'm reliably using is Copilot
| context aware completions work very nicely and it's easy to
| get used to when it will be usefull and when it wont so it
| improves productivity.
|
| Copilot chat interface is terrible - I gues it tries to be
| stingy about the context tokens it's always so much hassle
| to get it to do anything useful - takes more explaining
| than doing a google search and read.
|
| ChatGPT is hallucinating so much, mostly in times you want
| it to hallucinate the least.
|
| I've tried using Midjurney and DALLE to generate
| placeholder art and memes - it's worse than ChatGPT.
|
| I've built stuff on top of the API and it's very
| inconsistent and falls apart at totally random unexpected
| places (not to mention undeterministic).
|
| I want these tools to work, but they are just so
| inconsistent and introduce so strange failure cases I'm not
| used to that it's just more trouble than worth over
| existing workflows.
| roflyear wrote:
| I agree - largely. ChatGPT cannot program for me (it
| fails on anything that is a bit more complicated than
| very-common problems). It cannot write a good algo for me
| (unless the algo is a very standard one, if so, why do I
| need it to write it?). It gives incorrect information, a
| lot of the time. The docs it is trained on are outdated,
| many times methods, etc.. it suggests no longer exist, or
| the API endpoint has been deprecated. It doesn't seem to
| have a "sense of time" meaning it seems just as likely to
| suggest data from 10 years ago as data from 1 year ago.
|
| But there are some times, where something is behaving
| very strangely, and ChatGPT helps me work through it.
| Examples are complex SQL queries, quickly combining
| existing queries, oddities in CSS, etc..
|
| It may not give super-accurate answers, but at least it
| gives something that I can work with or work on.
|
| I think this makes it a valuable tool, but it's not going
| to replace developers. Well, sure. Some people will just
| use ChatGPT rather than hire a programmer - I've worked
| with business owners who learned to code rather than hire
| programmers. I don't expect different results in either
| of these cases, the code will be very flawed, have huge
| security issues, and not be maintainable.
| rchaud wrote:
| I don't think the goalposts have changed. Websites (not
| webapps) are one of the easiest things to automate because
| the patterns used are ultra-predictable. All the way back
| in 2017, there was a semi-vaporware startup called
| theGrid.io that was going to automate that using prompts.
| It went dark in 2020:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399357
|
| GPT 3.5 should be able to handle this functionality easily
| on the basis of these demos yet a full-fledged product that
| does this has yet to make an appearance. Squarespace,
| Wordpress page builders should be all over this, yet
| they're not. Neither are any "disruptors" like Webflow.
| Maybe they know something that Hello World prototyper does
| not?
| solomonb wrote:
| I think its totally reasonable to move the goalpost when it
| turns out the original goalpost didn't actually get you
| anything more then a 'gee-whiz' demo.
|
| If those old goalposts actually helped solve engineering
| and product needs then there would be huge praise for the
| achievements.
| geodel wrote:
| Well billions of human beings are living remarkably repetitive
| and unoriginal life. Doing few categories of work, living in
| few categories of home, and eating few varieties of food. Same
| for entertainment, transport and so on. Most people are just
| running in rather tight loops.
|
| Perhaps to start with, one way to have vastly more
| creativity/diversity of things people do is to have vastly
| fewer humans on earth.
| seydor wrote:
| Html supports a lot of UI widgets now but everybody keeps
| reimplementing their own. And because nobody is using them they
| arent improving so nobody is using them so they arent
| improving.
| danenania wrote:
| While I agree at a high level, it's also important to
| understand that most of these demos are being carefully cherry-
| picked. If you are just seeing the viral demos on social media,
| you're going to think AI is further along than it actually is
| for more complex tasks. People who are non-technical and not
| using AI in anger to get real work done are going to be the
| most susceptible to this.
|
| Those in the weeds are generally going to have a more nuanced
| view of the benefits and challenges--i.e. that it's incredibly
| useful but also very fallible and requires careful hand-holding
| to get production-ready results.
|
| I say all that as an AI optimist. The value is real and the
| most impressive demos are glimpses of where we're heading. But
| it's going to take some time before the median result catches
| up to the hype.
| benatkin wrote:
| I think the examples by naysayers of what AI can't do are
| often cherry-picked.
|
| The way has been shown with the web. Now many people who
| would have been paying a designer are using things similar to
| Wix. A lot of people don't need top of the line custom work,
| and most custom work isn't top of the line. I've seen AI
| frequently, but a bit unpredictably, hit the high notes.
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-
| high-n...
| danenania wrote:
| You know, that's a great point! Both the negative and
| positive outliers can be cherry-picked to misrepresent what
| working with AI is really like in practice. Some want to
| pretend it's much further along than it actually is, while
| some want to pretend it's all just a flash-in-the-pan. The
| truth lies, predictably, in between: it's useful and it's
| real, but it's not consistent or reliable... yet.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| is it a great point? the failure cases will recede as
| people figure out what to do with it, but right now the
| failures are extremely numerous.
| themagician wrote:
| > how unimpressively repetitive and unoriginal tasks keep being
| reimplemented by millions of developers worldwide
|
| This extends far beyond just developers. This is a majority of
| all office work, from data entry to accounting to creative
| work. Most office work is just doing the same thing over and
| over again, often times with different people repeating what
| are essentially the _same tasks_ , just at different companies.
| titzer wrote:
| It just exposes how stupid our software stacks are. Everything
| is driven by "well, maybe they'd want to customize this and
| that and that and three hundred irrelevant details". When in
| reality all we ever wanted was to separate the functionality
| from its presentation. Which, incidentally, was exactly the Web
| we had in 1996 with just bare HTML. Things have gone horribly,
| horribly wrong in such a mind-bogglingly stupid way and nobody
| is better for it. Oh but those dropshadows and inner flexboxes
| or something.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| In that vein, I wonder if you use these embeddings and
| compression to work out a new sort of programming language
| which could extremely concisely represent these concepts.
| Probably the actual result would be so complex as to be
| worthless, like code golf languages but worse, but maybe it
| could help us come up with an interesting new programming
| language paradigm.
| croes wrote:
| That's the equivalent of a todo app. How about something more
| complicated?
| tomrod wrote:
| Technology like this is interesting from a progression
| standpoint because this is now the new baseline.
| spoiler wrote:
| I think the point isn't something for AI to do the hard
| complicated parts for us, but help us with the boring
| repetitive ones that pop up all the time.
|
| Making forms UI is one of those.
|
| The challenging part here is creating the design language or
| style guide) and I plementing the business logic once the form
| gets validated (which AI could generate code for, too).
| roflyear wrote:
| Often it's really hard to integrate something like this vs.
| writing it yourself.
|
| An example I recently had was, I was handed a UI kit from a
| product team. Ok, fine. We only wanted to use about 10% of
| the kit - basic interface elements. OK.
|
| It took me a long time massaging that into what I wanted,
| because it was a bit of a mess, honestly. And I'm still
| dealing with random issues that pop up in their CSS.
|
| It takes me a few minutes to create a form: but if what I get
| back is some insanity that I can't read, and each time I get
| a new form it gives me different flavors of that, well, it's
| going to add up and be a huge pain to maintain.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Same thing I tell my toddler any time he gains a new skill and
| people try to act impressed. Like bro come on I've been doing
| that for literal decades.
| croes wrote:
| Did your toddler get billions of dollar from MS?
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Do you think he'd be further along if he did? He'd likely
| spend it all on cars.
| criddell wrote:
| > How about something more complicated?
|
| This is still very early days and nobody thinks this is as good
| as it's going to get.
|
| It's nuts how quickly something magic becomes mundane.
| code_runner wrote:
| to be fair though, most apps are just over complicated CRUD
| apps that shouldn't be much more complex than a todo app
| underdeserver wrote:
| Well, there still doesn't exist a todo app that matches my
| needs.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's easier to fill the hype cycle this way. Complexity
| introduces nuance, which is not what Twitter is about.
| yellowsir wrote:
| and who will maintain it?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I just see this as a tool to help make UI designers (and maybe
| POs) look smart and competent, but the real work is going to go
| to the programmers, just as it does today.
|
| UI designers will be able to give a "demo" but how will this
| basic functionality translate to the rest of the app? It won't.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I hate it when designers present what looks like polished and
| complete UIs in Figma. To the execs it looks like a finished
| product which frequently creates unreasonable expectations that
| interfere with what should be the iterative nature of UI
| design.
|
| I don't know how many times I've come across a project where a
| terrible system design was foisted on a group of engineers
| because of the constraints required by a Figma design that was
| blessed by some exec or other.
|
| Granted there are worse problems in these orgs, but easy high
| fidelity mock-ups vs wire frames has made it worse.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I hate it with engineers complain moan and drag their feet on
| implementations that are hard but worth it. Because really
| under the surface they just don't like doing something new,
| even if it has clearly defined user and business value.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I suspect you're on the wrong side of town for a comment
| like this, haha.
|
| Almost always its just conflicting requests. Every ticket
| has a clearly defined user and business value to the person
| who wrote it.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I managed a 250 person engineering team at FANG. The
| number of times I had to explain to a jr or mid level
| engineer what our fundamental business was, was
| astounding. They would constantly argue tickets on a
| premise that was entirely self contained inside their
| code -- and be entirely oblivious to what the product was
| accomplishing outside in the real world with real users.
| Now this wasn't always the case, and frankly I ran into
| it much less there than I had at smaller companies. But
| it still happened a lot.
|
| And these engineers would always boast the most about how
| they knew best about X or Y.
|
| Maybe that was my fault as a leader -- but I couldn't fix
| the incurious.
| macNchz wrote:
| > how will this basic functionality translate to the rest of
| the app? It won't.
|
| It certainly will lead to fun and productive conversations like
| "it's already working right there! Why is it going to take _so
| long_ to get it into the app?!? Can't you just download it?"
|
| Since well before GPT there has been an argument for making
| very early prototypes/mocks more obviously lo-fi, such that
| their visual polish is proportional to how functional they are
| under the hood.
|
| Beautiful, seemingly "working" UI-only prototypes have a way of
| setting unrealistic expectations even with clear communication,
| leading to a higher probability of proto-duction.
| ilaksh wrote:
| How? You literally just give GPT-4 a new prompt: "Thanks.
| Please connect it to the rest of this code:"
|
| If you want it to do a better job, add "it's very important for
| my career".
|
| Lol.
| thawab wrote:
| more examples are available on the app account:
| https://twitter.com/tldraw
| marban wrote:
| Building an HTML Widget > $0.
|
| Knowing what Widget to build and where to place it > $Invaluable.
|
| Also, you end up with an isolated code fragment that will look
| different the next time you generate it, so what's the point?
| replwoacause wrote:
| I won't visit Twitter but reading these comments I think I've got
| the gist
| drexlspivey wrote:
| very brave of you
| replwoacause wrote:
| Is it? I didn't think it had anything to do with bravery.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| That's a sarcastic attempted put-down people say when they
| feel attacked for their terrible choices.
| Loeffelmann wrote:
| You can try it out here: https://makereal.tldraw.com/
| replwoacause wrote:
| Thanks!
| andreasley wrote:
| Note: This requires an OpenAI API key with access to the
| model 'gpt-4-vision-preview', so a paid subscription.
| reidjs wrote:
| Isn't the whole point of all this so I don't need to use a web UI
| anymore? I can just tell the computer what I want and it does it,
| then I can go about my life?
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Telnet is the future! We've gone full circle.
| largbae wrote:
| Or maybe we can call it "Tell net" when using audio
| gumby wrote:
| A nerd can dream...I can stay in the command line, work on the
| fun hard stuff, just explain the UI to a transformer and then
| push straight to production, sight unseen.
| thawab wrote:
| He is using an open source app called tldraw and this is the
| prompt used:
|
| https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui/blob/2ac633bbbd5fda39e59...
| chatmasta wrote:
| I gave it a mockup from a FB interview question (two lists of
| checkboxes with two buttons to swap checked items between them)
| and it nailed it:
| https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/2a2f77d4bfb19c3b28dc...
| zagrebian wrote:
| I checked in a screen reader. Nothing is announced when
| pressing the buttons. This is a problem. It should say
| something like "Checkbox B moved to the left". Without any sort
| of announcement, the user has no idea if pressing the button
| did anything.
|
| Test page: https://output.jsbin.com/jixoqur/quiet
| rewtraw wrote:
| > This is a toy project
| chatmasta wrote:
| Thank you very much for your insightful review and valuable
| feedback regarding the accessibility of our recent list
| transfer feature. Your suggestions were instrumental in
| enhancing the user experience, especially for those relying
| on screen readers. I have incorporated your recommendations
| into the updated code [0], ensuring better accessibility and
| usability. I'm also including a link to our conversation [1]
| for further context and transparency. Your thoroughness and
| attention to detail are greatly appreciated, and I look
| forward to your continued guidance and expertise in future
| projects.
|
| [0] https://output.jsbin.com/hawelubaxo/quiet
|
| [1] https://chat.openai.com/share/faa9e2b7-8e4c-4ee3-9386-1f7
| 4ea...
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Exciting and very useful for quick demos or Proof Of Concepts,
| we're living through interesting times.
| kungfufrog wrote:
| I mean, cool, but surely if this is a technical feat it speaks
| more to the complexity of our tooling and platforms than it does
| the impressiveness of AI. What I'm trying to say is that all of
| this is pretty primitive if you built the right tooling to
| express those ideas trivially. Like even a 6 year old could
| create noughts and crosses if the paradigm they were using
| allowed them to express the game rules in a way that was natural
| to them. So yes, while I think this is cool, I don't get how it
| warrants the hype and hysteria. It makes me sad that this minor
| technical accomplishment seems impressive because the web is an
| unintuitive medium for expressing logic entangled with UI.
| dottjt wrote:
| How would you go about editing the final product though? Wouldn't
| you then still need intimate knowledge of the system?
| jameshart wrote:
| Change the sketch and get it to build it again. It only takes a
| couple of seconds.
| dottjt wrote:
| That seems a lot more complicated than just coding it. How
| would you go about drawing a box shadow on the sliders? What
| if you wanted a background image behind it? How would the
| model know that it's a box-shadow, or that the background is
| an image?
|
| I feel like for that level of granularity, you'd spend more
| time figuring out how to style it than just writing it in
| code, since you'll need to start using descriptors on things,
| which is literally just coding again.
| jongjong wrote:
| What about the back end, deployment, hosting, dev ops,
| architecture, etc... I think that's where the opportunity is.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Huh?
|
| You know ChatGPT produces a whole REST Api with authentication
| and db migrations backend in 5 seconds too right?
| jongjong wrote:
| You still need to host it somewhere, deploy new features and
| then keep it running, generating code isn't enough and
| besides, back end is higher risk, so there needs to be a
| human there for insurance purposes to verify that access
| controls are properly defined and to rectify any urgent
| issues that arise. Same reason they still want human pilots
| inside planes even though most of the flight is automated.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Of course but analogous things can be said about front end.
| Pretty sure tldraw would fail spectacularly at anything
| slightly more complex like interactive world maps or
| parallax animations with dynamic break points.
|
| Point being I'm not sure which of the two is safer from
| ChatGPT.
| JCharante wrote:
| Call me an unbeliever, but I don't believe in the future of no
| code solutions. You will still have to align that button at
| smaller device resolutions, leave extra space so it looks nice in
| another language, and other requirements. Maybe it'll enable us
| to use even more abstracted languages to build apps faster at
| most. This only works for extremely basic and common things like
| tic tac toe and not original works.
| code_runner wrote:
| I think a lot of these demos aren't _necessarily_ trying to
| push forward a no-code purist approach, but rather showing how
| you can get basically a live wireframe going in no time at all.
| I think tools like canva, figma, etc will be all over this
| stuff and really improve high-fidelity wireframes /demos
| twoquestions wrote:
| That was my initial gut reaction, this will be an utter
| nightmare to customize and integrate. Wonderful for prototyping
| though.
| yoav wrote:
| It's like autotune.
|
| Artisans who can sing on key will continue to make very
| interesting things.
|
| But also in parallel a whole new wave of people that couldn't
| or didn't want to learn to sing on key will make entirely new
| genres of music and also pop for the masses with far less
| effort.
|
| Even the artisans will use it sparingly to enhance and perfect
| and speed up some of their workflows
| sarchertech wrote:
| Unlike software, a song doesn't need to be maintained to keep
| working. A song doesn't need to grow in complexity as more
| people use it, and a song can't contain subtle bugs that
| steal listeners' credit cards or damage other songs.
|
| Of course metaphors have limits, but the limits of this
| particular metaphor hide all of the flaws of this technology.
| brlewis wrote:
| "Entirely new genres" of anything is unlikely from ML models
| trained on existing work. Someone using AI to implement an
| entirely new idea will be frustrated as the AI keeps
| gravitating toward convention.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It's more like autotune in that "literally everyone will use
| it all the time."
| sarchertech wrote:
| A huge part of the problem with LLM based no code is that the
| output is non-deterministic, so you can only check in the
| output to version control.
|
| Imagine what happens when you have dozens of barely technical
| people all adding features by sketching them and clicking "make
| it real". Each one is producing hundreds of lines of code. At
| the end of the day someone is responsible for understanding the
| output because since the output is non-deterministic, that's
| all we have.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Imagine what happens when you have dozens of barely
| technical people all adding features by sketching them and
| clicking "make it real". Each one is producing hundreds of
| lines of code. At the end of the day someone is responsible
| for understanding the output because since the output is non-
| deterministic, that's all we have.
|
| Joking reply: Have you _seen_ modern software development?
|
| Joking-but-not-really reply: I wonder if someone could train
| a "bad AI code to human-maintainable code" AI.
| meiraleal wrote:
| I'd prefer a "bad human code to AI-readable code" AI.
| bsima wrote:
| If you can so easily and cheaply generate a new version of
| the app/widget, why would you even use traditional version
| control?
| sfink wrote:
| Generally because although you can easily generate new
| versions, it is difficult to generate a new version that is
| different from the old version in a specific way, without
| also being different in 100 other ways that you didn't
| want.
|
| It's like a revision control system where when you submit a
| commit that changes one line, which it faithfully records,
| it also records a change in dozens of other lines in the
| file. (Which leads you down the merry road of Stable
| Diffusion where you can "inpaint" that one line, but now
| it's not able to adjust the rest of things to accommodate
| that change because you told it not to...)
| saddlerustle wrote:
| The gpt4-turbo api is now deterministic
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| It isn't. It's "mostly deterministic," whatever that means.
|
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-
| generation/repr...
| nick222226 wrote:
| From the link: Sometimes, determinism may be impacted due
| to necessary changes OpenAI makes to model configurations
| on our end. To help you keep track of these changes, we
| expose the system_fingerprint field. If this value is
| different, you may see different outputs due to changes
| we've made on our systems.
| jonnycoder wrote:
| This reminds me of what I've been saying to friends... we
| will either see al lot more layoffs of us software engineers
| or another big boom because the technology is moving way
| faster than normal humans can learn. Non tech people will
| just hire software engineers to do it for them.
| kubiton wrote:
| Either LLM / ai becomes perfect or we will start writing
| code/frameworks which makes it much easier for LLM/ai to use
| them.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Look at the success of ComfyUI in the Generative AI world and
| node-based editing in the graphics world (i.e. blender). "No
| code" works, but it has to be tailored towards experts who want
| to actual write code sometimes, not billed as making it
| possible for suits to write software.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| The site requires an OpenAI Key and describes doing this as
| "risky but cool" ... What data would be exposed by sharing my
| key?
| steveruizok wrote:
| Hey, this is Steve from tldraw, I was up late last night
| putting this together.
|
| I've added a note next to the input with more info here, but
| basically: the vision API is so new that its immediately rate
| limited on any site like this, and because OpenAI doesn't have
| a way of authorizing a site to use their own API keys (they
| should!), this was the best we could do. We don't store the API
| key or send it to our own servers, it just goes to OpenAI via a
| fetch request.
|
| Putting an API key into a random text input is obviously a bad
| idea and I hope this doesn't normalize that. However, you can
| read the source code (https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui) and
| come to your own conclusions--or else just run it locally
| instead.
| intended wrote:
| Earlier in the year I wanted to understand LLMs and GenAI so I
| tried to push their limits to see what broke and what didn't. One
| of my projects was to build a blog/site from scratch. I had 0 web
| dev/design background.
|
| My experience was starkly less optimistic, and am curious if any
| one else has tried something similar.
|
| -----
|
| First off, I must state a deep respect to people who build +
| design websites, while dealing with Clients.
|
| I had assumed that ChatGPT would be very useful in helping me
| pick up and build things. However, I had to jettison ChatGPT
| fairly soon. I just couldn't trust the output of the model. It
| would suggest things that wouldnt work, then link to sites that
| didnt exist.
|
| I switched to teaching myself. I had to watch hours of videos,
| learn CSS, Astro, and several other things from scratch.
| Definitely not the LLM experience I was expecting.
|
| Code from Figma was great - but if I wanted an actual responsive
| site, I had to write the CSS myself, because boilerplate CSS had
| all sorts of odds and ends.
|
| Getting an image to come out as I liked from Midjourney was fun -
| but it was also a massive time sink.
|
| I had hoped to be able to get complex tasks done entirely with
| assistance from the LLM. In the end it helped maybe 20-30%. Its
| greatest use was to clarify concepts instead of me having to wade
| through specification docs.
|
| When I went back to the videos of people using chatgpt to build a
| website in under 30 minutes - its always someone who knows the
| domain extensively.
|
| I did get a site up and running after ~1-2 weeks of work
| including the necessary ritual sacrifices.
|
| edit: writing in a rush, grammar and text are messed up. edit:
| GPT 4, copilot and midjourney. AFAIK I had no half measures.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Was GPT4 out then? I self taught to build a Web app before
| LLMs, for the second one, I had LLMs and it helped me so much,
| in the area you mentioned: clarifying concepts and spotting
| obvious bugs due to inexeprience
| intended wrote:
| Yup. I had Gpt 4, copilot, and midjourney to assist.
|
| There is a difference when an LLM is used in limited ways, by
| someone who knows enough to discard bad output.
|
| I'd put it this way - ChatGPT will help you build a ship in
| the desert without hesitation.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Its a bit of a game changer if you already understand things so
| can point it to the right tasks and also clock that it's
| screwed up just from glancing at the code.
|
| I haven't tried Cursor yet, I just get it to write or refactor
| functions bit by bit maybe that's better for monolithic tasks?
| intended wrote:
| I should probably write a post about this, but comments are
| easier.
|
| 0) LLMs introduce the challenge of automated semantic
| verification.
|
| 1) LLM work should be broken up by usecase. These use cases
| lie on a semantic complexity continuum.
|
| 2) Tasks like classification are simple to verify (precision
| recall etc.). Tasks that require semantic complexity like
| summarizaiton are on the other end.
|
| 3) Anything on the high semantic complexity end of the scale
| needs expert human review.
|
| 4) Chained or complex calls greatly complicate verification
|
| Which is why you are getting use out of it. There is a human
| (you) in the loop, and the calls are not complex.
|
| As long as a human is reviewing the output of the LLM every
| time, its great. This is the vast majority of "generative"
| output.
|
| Its when you have things like agents, or chained calls that
| things go awry. ITs why proof of concepts are easy, but
| production is hard.
|
| For the record, many people have called this out, including
| people at Open AI, and AI ops was the largest sub group in
| YC's fall batch.
| golergka wrote:
| What model did you use?
| meiraleal wrote:
| > I had hoped to be able to get complex tasks done entirely
| with assistance from the LLM. In the end it helped maybe
| 20-30%.
|
| Ok but if you would do the same task again, how much would it
| help you?
|
| > When I went back to the videos of people using chatgpt to
| build a website in under 30 minutes - its always someone who
| knows the domain extensively.
|
| You are one step closer to become this person.
| intended wrote:
| >Ok but if you would do the same task again, how much would
| it help you?
|
| 100%, since I would never do it again.
| Greenpants wrote:
| I've been in the same boat. Earlier this year I wanted to up my
| game as well with an improved website and blog to go along with
| it, not even sure which frameworks to use.
|
| Using ChatGPT has been a hit or miss experience, helping me
| maybe 30% of the time as well. But when it did help, it helped
| me massively, especially for quickly setting up Wordpress PHP
| designs and accompanying CSS. I can honestly say I couldn't
| have done my web and blog redesign if it weren't for ChatGPT.
| Not because I wouldn't have been able to get the knowledge
| without it- more so because I wouldn't have had the patience to
| figure all of this out in my spare time.
|
| Using ChatGPT has certainly been a more fun experience than
| browsing documentation, but I did have to do the latter about
| half the time anyway.
| kubiton wrote:
| I'm mind blown because it's already so good and I do imagine
| that it will get as good as you need it to become.
|
| And yeah as you said with domain knowledge it works very well
| msrobot0 wrote:
| I have generated some toy experiments for a monthish - gpt to
| generate code to do something - and did generate some web
| frameworks and pipelines - I did not have it generate a
| database - although that may be something to try next. I wanted
| to it generate circuit diagrams and molecules
|
| My experiments https://www.qualitycontainers.io/
| https://github.com/msrobot0/llmlexperiments/
| g051051 wrote:
| Let me guess...simple image recognition of the slider, the names
| need to match a CSS property? Wow, _so impressive_.
| thatguyagain wrote:
| You are both wrong an arrogant, congratulations. Next time,
| don't guess.
| g051051 wrote:
| Really? Then show me a video that _doesn 't_ look like what I
| described, if you want to be taken seriously. That demo is,
| what, 5 clicks with a decent gui builder?
| random_cynic wrote:
| ITT: people in denial while the writing on the wall is literally
| shoved into their face.
| rchaud wrote:
| Alternatively, ITT: people who have been through the design-to-
| dev handoff process and understand the comparative advantages
| of both teams.
|
| Tools like this can be good for indie developers, the ones who
| in the past may have had to learn a bit of dev/design to
| release something. The division of labour is larger teams is
| different. The product manager may have a user research
| background instead of a software one. The designer may be good
| with semi-complete prototypes in Framer, but the responsibility
| for delivering production code may still rest with the dev
| team.
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| I am still erring on the side of skepticism around AI "taking
| all jobs with computers" but have to admit that seeing the
| progress has made me doubt my position a bit. Even if it
| doesn't take ALL jobs and only relatively low level ones that
| is still an enormous amount of work that will at the very
| least change drastically.
|
| What really shook me is that GPT-4 can spit out quite solid
| code for various things. I know there is a lot more to
| software development than just writing code but if you had
| asked me 3 years ago if AI would be able to code AT ALL
| within 10 years I would have said "no chance" with 100%
| certainty. Had to accept I was very wrong about that and
| don't have the technical background to really assess how
| far/fast this stuff can go.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Writing was on the wall over a year ago, shocked how many were
| in complete denial then. Even more surprising now.
|
| People don't even seem to grasp that the next gen of these
| tools wont be rolling the dice once it'll be rolling it 1000
| times then you pick the one that nailed it. Then the next
| generation will roll 10,000 times and it'll be picking the one
| that nailed it even without your input at all.
| culi wrote:
| Meh. We've been here before:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I see it - the majority of knowledge work in the next 20 years
| will done better by computers than by humans. This will destroy
| the middle class world-wide.
|
| That's the fear anyway.
| culi wrote:
| To be fair, people also said that 20 years ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| "Create an app that prints hello world"
|
| > print("hello world")
|
| holy shittttt :o :o
| steveruizok wrote:
| Hey, Steve here from tldraw. This is a toy project with a
| horrible security pattern, sorry. If you want to run it locally
| or check out the source, it's here:
| https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui. You can also see a bunch of
| other examples at https://twitter.com/tldraw.
|
| Happy to answer any questions about tldraw/this project. It's
| definitely not putting anyone out of work, but it's a blast to
| play with. Here's a more complicated example of what you can get
| it to do: https://twitter.com/tldraw/status/1725083976392437894
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| That last example is fun, it's amazing how you can give it
| feedback like that. When you select the generated app + your
| text, what's it actually receiving as input? Is it receiving
| its previously generated code plus your new text?
| steveruizok wrote:
| Yes! If you have a previously generated shape selected, it
| incorporates the code from that file into the prompt for the
| next one. i.e. "here's what we had before, here are the notes
| that came back"
| aketchum wrote:
| Hey Steve! Super exciting project and congrats on the launch! I
| tried to use my open AI key and am getting an error around "you
| exceeded your current quota, check billing". Does the standard
| $20 a month OpenAi Pro subscription work for this or are there
| additional permissions needed?
|
| Edit: found the answer on the github readme
|
| "*To use your own API key, you need to have access to usage
| tier 1. Check out your current tier, and how to increase it in
| the OpenAI settings."
| ed wrote:
| Launch launch launch!
|
| Seriously this is lightning in a bottle. Charge $5/mo and have
| users bring their own OpenAI key.
|
| Here's a freshly MIT'ed licensing server you can use. It's
| written in elixir and powers https://go.robocoder.app
|
| Reach out if you need help getting it running!
|
| https://github.com/emcmanus/robocoder-server/
|
| (Or I'm sure Robocoder.app can walk you through the dev setup)
| humbugtheman wrote:
| hey I'm Lu from tldraw, I worked on some of this.
|
| The point of this demo is to experiment with new ways of
| interacting with an LLM. I'm very tired of typing into text
| boxes, when a quick scribble, or "back-of-the-envelope" drawing
| would communicate my thoughts better.
|
| It worked a lot better than I expected! If you give it a try, let
| me know how it goes for you! And please feel free to check out
| the source code: https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui/
| dangerface wrote:
| AI truely is just a marketing term.
|
| Spend half an hour making a simple demo.
|
| Film it 100 times until you get a passable result.
|
| Post on twitter "Oh WOW AI!?! GUYS AI!"
|
| Pick up your VC check.
| rchaud wrote:
| Cheap hype like this is why public perception of AI is turning
| into "the new crypto'. The revolution is here! Get in now!
|
| Instead of Coinbase P&L screenshots, it's short demos of what
| amounts to a TODO app.
| specialist wrote:
| What is the letter 'A' supposed to look like?
|
| Every scribe had their own style and flourish. Every scribe was
| an artisan. Discerning patrons favored particular scribes for
| their uniqueness and quality.
|
| Somehow, someway, the hivemind mostly settled on today's 'A'.
| Something good enough.
|
| Moveable type replaced scribes.
|
| And so it is with sliders and flexbox layouts.
| meiraleal wrote:
| The Tiktokization of software development. Software made to look
| good in videos
| rchaud wrote:
| It needs that fuzzy glow filter that every AI art generator
| spits out.
| amai wrote:
| From the Readme at https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui
|
| ,,This works by just taking the current canvas SVG, converting it
| to a PNG, and sending that png to gpt-4-vision with instructions
| to return a single html file with tailwind."
| JanneVee wrote:
| I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as
| fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more
| deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it
| from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything
| in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using
| huge amount of compute of some generative AI model.
|
| Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!
| ilaksh wrote:
| There are still tools to do it. I think the reason they are not
| more popular with programmers is that it's basically some
| stupid subconscious thing where we are afraid of being accused
| of being users or beginners. Not something we realize
| consciously, but anything that doesn't involve complex colorful
| text naturally gets kind of peer pressured out because it looks
| like a "beginner tool".
| jszymborski wrote:
| I first started programming with VB6 and have yearned to make
| a GUI program as simply as I did then. Can you point me to
| something as simple?
|
| I've tried Glade before but the time I used it I didn't find
| it a particularly pleasant experience
| ilaksh wrote:
| I also used VB6 back in the day. It was great.
|
| Sadly I, like all programmers, have been peer pressured or
| something into avoiding tools like that. But I know they
| exist. I also made one several years ago. (No one was
| interested).
|
| But I think if you search for "RAD" or "Rapid Application
| Development" or graphical component based development may
| get quite a lot.
|
| I think that there are several plugins for WordPress that
| have similar functionality, although less code integration.
|
| Maybe search for "drag and drop React editor".
| password4321 wrote:
| Windows Forms for .NET Framework 4 using Visual Studio was
| (is?) a simple Windows-only option.
| lanstin wrote:
| I used VBA and Tk. They were good. I always assumed front
| end web people have similar tools?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Glade is actually annoying enough that it's easier and
| faster to construct your UI in-code.
| monknomo wrote:
| I have enjoyed using windowbuilder and formdev when I need
| a desktop gui
| ilaksh wrote:
| The most up to date version might use something like
| Streamlit with a drag and drop editor.
| Guvante wrote:
| You are missing a huge caveat of those tools. They tend to
| have limits in functionality.
|
| It isn't uncommon that you prototype with a tool and it is
| super fast but before you can launch for real you need to
| rewrite everything.
|
| At that point it is difficult to know if the prototype was
| valuable. Certainly quickly visualizing is good but a
| prototype tool that is non functional is even faster to use.
|
| Having a tool that allows easy drag and drop without any
| friction on the generated code (including difficulty of using
| that code) while also having all the powers of HTML would be
| really cool.
|
| Such a tool wouldn't be a beginner tool but any that fail
| this and can't really go all the way to final product gets
| discarded as "I am going to have to rewrite anyway".
|
| Less of a "I am too good for that" more a "not a useful
| abstractions level" when considered holistically.
| ilaksh wrote:
| That's a good rationalization for doing everything
| manually, but I don't believe it really holds up. I think
| it comes down to some social psychological effects that as
| I said are subconscious. So people don't realize it's
| effecting their decision making.
|
| When they decide not to use those tools they will use
| rationales like you said rather than admitting that they
| felt peer pressure.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Some people want to be good software developers, not just
| good website builders.
|
| If you want to use low code website builders, feel free.
| If that suits your work style and the projects you're
| building, great.
|
| But you will never develop the skills you need to
| actually build software. A person who spends their life
| using website builders instead of writing software will
| never be able to build their own website builder, for
| example.
|
| Some of us actually like to have the skills to build the
| tools ourselves.
|
| If you want to call that peer pressure, then sure. It's
| peer pressure to elevate your own experience and attain
| mastery, instead of settling for only ever using tools
| that other people built for you.
| ilaksh wrote:
| You have perfectly illustrated the peer pressure I am
| talking about.
|
| By the way, I have been programming for 38 years on many
| platforms and have built my own drag and drop UI editors
| and frameworks. I don't use these types of tools today
| because they are not popular and because of psychological
| factors as I said. But I still think that it would be
| more logical if programmers used them more often. And the
| times that I used them in the past they did increase my
| productivity.
|
| The types of tools I am talking about often require
| editing code to customize functionality. They are not no-
| code tools.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| If you hire an architect to design a house, then make
| some adjustments to the blueprint before it gets built,
| it doesn't make you an architect. In fact if you give
| your adjusted design to builders and have it made without
| consulting an architect first, you have a good chance of
| unknowingly violating some building code somewhere.
|
| Similarly if you use a code generating tool written by a
| software engineer and then adjust the code output, it
| doesn't make you a software engineer.
|
| Yes, software engineers can use those tools, but they're
| limiting their growth as engineers if they rely too
| heavily on those tools.
|
| If that's peer pressure, then I am unapologetic about it.
| I'm not hiring people who can't build their own code to
| work as software engineers.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Disagree, it's a very conscious choice from having been
| burned repeatedly by being asked to do something
| leftfield.
| MattRix wrote:
| I get your point, but it only applies to the most simple of
| these examples. This can do all kinds of stuff, for example
| look further into that thread and you'll see it implementing
| tic tac toe. The tool works by basically sending a screenshot
| of your diagram to GPT4 and saying "implement this".
| lolinder wrote:
| Which in turn only works for simple stuff that GPT-4 can
| implement from a single screenshot, and is, as OP pointed
| out, non-deterministic. The code OP is referring to would
| have been written to integrate with the rest of the project,
| to connect to data stores and services that the screenshot
| has no way of knowing about. People built huge applications
| in VB and similar tools.
|
| Don't get me wrong, these new tools are cool, and I imagine
| they'll be great for prototyping small things quickly!
| MattRix wrote:
| Human beings build stuff non deterministically too. The key
| is just to give the tool more information along with the
| screenshot, for example showing it your current codebase so
| it writes code using the same conventions.
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| ... and our opinions about how badly this is going to pan
| out are based on decades of experience with how badly
| that panned out.
|
| Nobody that has ever had to maintain software is going to
| look at this and be impressed. Without a reproducible and
| predictable set of transforms from the source artifact to
| the product artifact(s), maintenance of software
| generated in this fashion will be impossible. The concept
| of a "localized" change doesn't exist; you have to assume
| that any and every change risks breaking the entire
| product.
|
| This is, of course, just another version of folks looking
| at something that mimics a (structured, evolved) human
| activity and assuming that it is in fact reproducing that
| activity, rather than just copying some subset of the
| visible consequences of that activtiy.
| MattRix wrote:
| I don't know why you'd assume the AI behind this wouldn't
| end up with access to both the source and product
| artifacts, implementing changes in the most
| constrained/localized way possible.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The tic-tac-toe example really makes it clear that oh -- this
| works by plagiarism. Until you see that one, it's kind of
| easy to forget.
| MattRix wrote:
| What about that example makes it clear?
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| Where do you think it got the game logic from?
|
| Recall that this is an LLM; it doesn't "think", it's just
| cutting and pasting "likely" scraps of things from its
| training set. At this point, the vast majority of those
| scraps were human-generated, so a) many of them work, and
| b) copying them in this fashion is plagiarism ("the
| offense of taking passages from another's compositions,
| and publishing them, either word for word or in
| substance, as one's own")
| olddustytrail wrote:
| From someone else describing it, just as you did?
| MattRix wrote:
| It really doesn't work by just cutting and pasting
| scraps, I think you might need to do a bit more research
| on how this stuff works.
| nine_k wrote:
| The industry has a number of repeating tasks ("Make me a
| CRUD app"), so "plagiarism", aka "following an example",
| can go a relatively long way.
|
| The interesting part is going to be stitching such parts
| together into a whole which has no direct analogs, but each
| stitching step does.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| There was a reason why we moved away from this. Everything is
| code, the UIs for creating such interfaces are just
| abstractions. The code generated by those no-code approaches to
| interface design was horrible and would break down quite fast
| in larger projects. Maintainability for such interfaces was
| non-existent.
|
| I think just regretting an old feature long gone without proper
| context is dangerous. If we are to bring back those approaches
| we have to keep in mind exactly why they went away in the first
| place.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > Everything is code, the UIs for creating such interfaces
| are just abstractions. The code generated by those no-code
| approaches to interface design...
|
| I'm not sure you're replying to the same thing. I never used
| VB much, but Delphi was not and is not no-code. In fact it
| emphasised using libraries a lot ('components' in its terms
| are classes provided by libraries) and the UI had a text
| description, which was streamed and created at runtime.
|
| Delphi today could indeed create something doing this just as
| fast, and you wouldn't draw a trackbar and hope it's
| recognised in the image by the AI... you'd drop an actual
| trackbar.
| protomolecule wrote:
| That's not how VB6 or Delphi work.
|
| Delphi's visual editor allows you to position, link together
| and configure visual and non-visual components in design
| time, automatically serializes all the components into text
| file and in runtime your program deserializes these
| components from the resource embedded in the program's binary
| file. It also allows you to create handlers for events like
| OnButtonClicked or OnDBConnectionOpened where the usual
| arbitrarily complex programming happens.
|
| The first result from google showing what this looks like:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyWm24ekSVM
| insanitybit wrote:
| I don't use these tools (I do backend dev), so perhaps I'm
| mistaken, but the benefits here are, I assume,
|
| a) For UX people who have minimal programming knowledge but
| need to produce mockups.
|
| b) For people like me who might want a basic UX to start with
| for demo purposes.
| easeout wrote:
| I think we'd all be gladly sitting atop high abstractions like
| that if not for the fact that brands pay the bills, and brands
| want custom experiences. Website and app design often begins
| with "what does a button look like," and design tools focus not
| on prebuilt widgets but on paths and fills, because the last
| thing a brand wants is to speak with different tones in
| different media. Their software has to feel like their stores
| and advertisements in order to create a brand-consistent
| customer experience. Design systems are a hot topic today
| because what brands got with this design method is a different
| voice in each of their sites and apps, because they're all
| independently custom.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This is what kills _Horizon Worlds,_ which is Facebook 's
| earnest answer to the problem of making VR authoring much
| easier than "making a video game"
|
| I want to make a 3-d world based on photographs (even stereo)
| and visual art and to do that I need to import JPG or PNG
| images. No can do. They have a short list of textures they
| supply, but you cannot import media assets like images,
| audio, video, geometry, point clouds, whatever, ...
|
| McDonald's would insist on putting a Coca-Cola logo on the
| cups and so would every other brand.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Website and app design often begins with "what does a
| button look like,"
|
| Yup. Been a long time since I've used an un-customised
| standard button outside my personal projects, no matter how
| much R&D has been spent by Apple on working out what it means
| for a UI to be good.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| You still see this using just about any major native UI
| toolkit. They may not be RAD-fast, but all kinds of elements
| and interactions that require custom and usually-janky
| JavaScript to implement on the Web are available "for free".
| And actually work correctly, interact with the rest of the
| toolkit the way you'd expect, and i18n and a11y and all that
| work correctly and consistently.
|
| There's no reason HTML can't do a lot more than it does out-of-
| the-box, saving crazy numbers of developer-hours and piles of
| user frustration every year. It just doesn't.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| I have kind of the same opinion. Maybe more provocative. When
| people show me figma to HTML with AI I tell them "have you ever
| heard of Dreamweaver?"
|
| Ok, dreamweaver code was ugly and unusable when AI generated
| code is not too bad (sometimes). But still, I also feel we
| kinda were already close to where we're at today.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Are you sure? I remember one of Dreamweaver competitive
| advantages was that it produced much cleaner HTML than it's
| competitors. FrontPage was the big offender with awful code.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Toward the end of its life, Dreamweaver's code was quite
| readable. Webflow today is kind of an equivalent, and also
| puts out relatively readable HTML. I think most of the
| reputation comes from people looking at its early output.
| lakpan wrote:
| I'd say nobody who "hand crafts" code finds any generated
| code readable. AI almost puts a dent in that, but even
| that often produces really ugly code.
| Zetobal wrote:
| People also produce really ugly code.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I once spent a week as an intern building a really clean
| and well done java swing UI options panel for a portion
| of our team's app. I was so proud of myself and thought
| it was so clear and concise and great. I told my manager
| it was all finished.
|
| Well, no one else on the team was that familiar with java
| swing so they couldn't work with it, so one of my
| coworkers had to spend an hour rebuilding the panel in
| the UI builder that the rest of the app worked in. It
| produced a perfectly functional UI that had all the
| features requested and could be maintained by anyone on
| the team. Sure, the raw java file was twice as long, but
| who cares? It gets compiled.
|
| I was enlightened on that day. "Elegant" is worthless in
| most cases. Five years later that entire app was rebuilt
| as a web app and nobody gave a shit whether one of it's
| option panels was artisanally hand crafted with care and
| love or spit out by an actually really good and
| regularized UI builder.
|
| We are data plumbers. Nobody cares if the pipes you laid
| out are arranged to look like the mona lisa, and it's
| probably worse for the customer and maintenance that way
| anyway.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| To be honest I can't remember when was the last time I used
| dreamweaver but it sure wasn't towards the end of its life.
| So, it could very well be that it got better after my last
| experience. What I remember was way too many tags and
| almost unreadable classes or repeated styles. It was not
| possible to directly take over without quite some re-
| writing.
| hliyan wrote:
| Not sure about Dreamweaver, but the fact that no Frontpage
| equivalent exists this day and age, and armies of developers
| are grappling with HTML, React and GraphQL (e.g. Gatsby) to
| generate what are essentially websites, is very surprising.
| lakpan wrote:
| Of course it exists, it's just not produced by Microsoft
| and therefore relatively few people use it.
|
| Webflow has been around for a while and I'm sure they
| implemented AI already (I didn't even check). Other React-
| based tools surely also exist, but have an even smaller
| user base.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| There are countless of no-code tools to build landing
| pages, static site content.
|
| For web apps the level of custom logic makes it unavoible
| to just code. Since web developers tend to be coders they
| would code static sites too. And use what they are most
| comfortable with, usually React.
| andai wrote:
| My friend works on a low code system marketed to small
| governments. (Basically just CRUD builder optimized for
| bureaucracy.) There's definitely a niche for it, it just
| hasn't caught on much for some reason.
| quest88 wrote:
| I'd like to talk about today's sponsor, Squarespace.
|
| (in Jest, I know it doesn't solve every problem!)
| andai wrote:
| I used to look down on it but when I heard it handles
| payment it blew my mind and I decided I'd rather use it
| myself if I ever make a shop instead of building it
| myself. To quote a random guy "I trust their code more
| than what I wrote at 2am."
| fallingknife wrote:
| I am a SWE. When I needed a website for a small business
| I was running, I used squarespace too. If you just need a
| static public facing site it's absolutely great.
| eloisant wrote:
| That's because things that were made with Frontpage back in
| the day are not made in HTML/React/GraphQL today.
|
| They're made with Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I used Dreamweaver significantly back in the day, and use
| Figma professionally today. I see what you're saying, but
| there's no question about them being equivalent in
| functionality, except insofar as I do not consider generated
| code from either of them particularly useful. In that respect
| they are the same, but in every other way Figma is 100 times
| better.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| Completely agree. Was trying to find the current parallel
| of the design to code process. But there is no doubt
| dreamweaver is almost not comparable to Figma (at least the
| version I knew).
|
| As others mentioned the closest descendant of dreamweaver
| today is most likely Webflow.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I hadn't seen that comparison, but Webflow is really
| cool! I had to make a company website using it a few
| years ago, because it needed to be maintained by people
| with no coding skill at all. I found it really awesome.
| Also, their Youtube tutorials were about the most
| impressive tutorials I've ever seen, so well produced and
| fun that I would recommend just watching them as
| entertainment.
| andai wrote:
| We're so close! Now we just need to reinvent Flash and life
| will be complete again.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Inb4 wasm with native extensions
| aa-jv wrote:
| Once upon a time, there was a fresh new operating system, the
| next step, being demo'ed in the Graphics pavillion of Comdex.
| Some huge nerd stood there, dragging things around with a
| mouse, 'proving' that you didn't have to be a programmer to
| build applications.
|
| A decade after that, something floated around for a year or two
| called Visix Vibe, which gave the same thing, but for this
| relatively new language (at the time), Java.
|
| Every few years, maybe 4-5 or a decade or so, someone gets the
| itch to make all the complexity fade away. Eventually though,
| they build an OS.
| golergka wrote:
| HN has this weird nostalgic thing for VB and Delphi, but I feel
| that most people who express it either haven't actually used
| these tools or don't remember it well. There's no way to do
| responsive interfaces with it. If you want anything but your
| OSes native controls, you're in the world of hell too. Even
| localisation is a problem. No unit, no integration tests.
| WYSIWYG editors mean that form files are changed automatically
| and it's often not realistic to review the diffs. And the
| languages itself -- while being adequate for their time,
| they're don't even have support for functions as first-class
| objects, so compared to modern alternatives they're almost
| unusable and require enormous amount of boilerplate.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| No way to do responsive interfaces?
|
| Oh sweet summer child. (if you are going to call us weirdly
| nostalgic)
|
| There were ton's of methods - from extremely manual code-
| based detection of window resizing events, then subsequent
| calculating and scaling contained controls, to a myriad of
| third-party libraries/components that would provide an
| automatic resizable host container for other controls.
|
| Localization was not a problem - VB6 supported 'resource
| files' like every other Win32 app. Unit and integration tests
| were possible - but uglier with visual forms - typically
| requiring third-party products, and/or low-level Win32-API
| integrations. But in reality - you would abstract all of your
| business logic into classes/modules/units with very little
| within the UI, so that those would be unit-tested, instead of
| the UI.
|
| Now - don't get me wrong, VB was limited in many many ways,
| and I am not nostalgic for it - but, it was more capable than
| the picture you are painting. Delphi even moreso, as it had
| easy and direct access to the entire Win32 API and could
| handle threading and pointers as well.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| You couldn't have a conversation with Dreamweaver.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Is it because you couldn't have a conversation with
| Dreamweaver that you came to me?
| agvxov wrote:
| you could, it would be just a bit one sided.
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| I think this is kind of missing the point. The fact that the
| underlying implementation is not a hand-coded-deterministic one
| is the interesting thing about this demo. This is clearly going
| to be useful by making people more efficient and only going to
| get better with time.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I, for one, love to have my code generated non-
| deterministically. Makes debugging so easy.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I'd just ship drawings and have it generate the code at
| runtime.
| darkwater wrote:
| You made me chuckle but that could realistically be some
| form of art in the near future.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Now, instead of looking in some cryptic symbols which you
| don't understand, you just mash "regenerate" button until
| it works. Can anything be more simple? Of course, with
| newer models you need to hit that button even less, it's
| progress, isn't it?
| mmanfrin wrote:
| You're right, chatGPT and AIs will go nowhere.
| theptip wrote:
| Keep in mind this could equally be a picture of a napkin.
|
| Ignoring that though, I t's fair to make this point for the
| current level of capabilities, but look at the trajectory... in
| a year or two when the training set has lots of examples of
| people using this, it should be pretty competitive.
| api wrote:
| You're absolutely correct.
|
| When we went to the browser we took 30 years of UI development
| knowledge and UI/UX principle and flushed it down the toilet.
|
| Only very recently have we started to gain _composability_ in
| browser UIs through things like React, and it 's a sad
| facsimile of the widget composability we had in WYSIWYG UI
| development on PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
|
| The web is a shit UI platform, but that's because it wasn't
| designed to be one. UIs were shoehorned into a hypertext system
| designed for viewing documents.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It's also a shit document platform even though that is what
| it was designed for.
| api wrote:
| It's really a quick hack that got mass adopted and then
| became the center of gravity due to network effects.
|
| ... like DOS, Unix, BASIC, JavaScript, and loads of other
| things we got stuck with at various times.
|
| Network effects are a force of nature that doesn't care
| about you. They are not your friend.
| financltravsty wrote:
| HTML is a shit spec. Without strong semantic elements, it's
| impossible to reliably parse any HTML document without
| using your eyes.
| meiraleal wrote:
| The web is a much better UI platform than what's available in
| linux desktop and whatever took 30 years of UX development in
| Linux wasn't flushed down the toilet (emacs, vi, GNU, ...).
| MS Windows users miss their Delphi/VB software.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Also old(ish) and agree, everything in here could just be a
| drag-and-drop component.
| goodpoint wrote:
| And don't forget this stunt took some kilos of Co2 released in
| the atmosphere to run the AI.
| insanitybit wrote:
| My laptop from multiple years ago (6GB VRAM) can run local
| models with decent performance. It's my understanding that
| the major energy cost is from training the models, which you
| do somewhat infrequently, and that generation isn't nearly as
| costly.
|
| Someone who knows more, please correct me if I'm wrong!
| jes5199 wrote:
| I would like to see an actual report on this
| city41 wrote:
| I'm also reminded of Steve Jobs's Interface Builder demo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY&t=70s
|
| I still think it's impressive that AI can just look at 2
| rectangles and discern slider though.
| brundolf wrote:
| It has nothing to do with the browser, it has to do with how
| opinionated your framework is.
|
| VB was _highly_ opinionated; it made native windows-style UIs
| and nothing else. Nobody was taking arbitrary mockups from
| designers, with a wildly custom look-and-feel, and replicating
| them down to the pixel in VB.
|
| Today, most product GUIs are part of the _brand_. For better or
| worse, every company wants a distinctive look and feel and set
| of UI behaviors. This requires the tools used to build them to
| be much more complicated.
|
| You could replicate VB in a browser. Many people have done
| roughly that. But nobody uses them to build products, because
| their company doesn't want boring/generic UIs.
| qup wrote:
| VB6 allowed you to use bmp files as guis. I built an mp3
| player that looked like an artist's pallette, completely
| curved.
|
| I'm sure it was some monstrosity of a hack. I didn't
| understand it at the time.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Honest question: what's the point of saying that something
| could be done 20 years ago (when most people weren't online or
| using a computer)?
|
| 20 years ago we also had music, pizza, movies, games and old
| people yelling at clouds.
| demondemidi wrote:
| So does this mean in the future GUIs will be custom and on demand
| depending on the situational context or personal preference?
|
| Did we get every spaceship control room wrong? Where the Star
| Trek bridge would simply morph into whatever gui objects were
| necessary? (I can't imagine them going away entirely and EVERYONE
| talking to the ships computer as it would be audio chaos and
| annoying a/f so I guess we'll always need a nice quiet user
| interface.)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| LCARS, the control panel UI in TNG/DS9/VOY/LD was always
| supposed to be quickly reconfigurable to the task at hand. But
| the prop implementation was usually sheets of translucent
| acrylic under glass, which isn't that easy to update.
| robbintt wrote:
| That is pretty compelling. Probably another layer you use by
| default but can swipe to the gui search layer or full control.
| As usual, nerds will default to full control.
| mplewis wrote:
| Wow, I have always had so much trouble building things in the
| browser when two sliders were involved. Glad someone has solved
| this problem.
| tolmasky wrote:
| Can someone with an API key try making a rectangle labeled "URL",
| and a bigger rectangle underneath it, and then see if it is smart
| enough to make a simple browser out of that?
| simonw wrote:
| First attempt didn't work, but it nailed it when I added text
| saying "Show web page here" to the second box:
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/dac37e575b214c7e13ec907a026e5...
| paxys wrote:
| All the developers out there who make demos for scaling and
| rotating a box are about to lose their jobs!
| danjc wrote:
| Only the ones that don't align their sliders.
| madhato wrote:
| <p><label>Scale<br><input id="scale" type="range" value="1"
| max="2" step=".01" oninput="transformSquare()"></label></p>
|
| <p><label>Rotation<br><input id="rotation" type="range"
| value="0" max="360" oninput="transformSquare()"></label></p>
|
| <div id="square"
| style="width:100px;height:100px;background:gold"></div>
|
| <script> const transformSquare = () => square.style.transform =
| `scale(${scale.value}) rotate(${rotation.value}deg)`;
| transformSquare(); </script>
| strawhatguy wrote:
| Great, now the LLMs will see this too... ;)
| culi wrote:
| wow TIL `id`s can be used like that
| carabiner wrote:
| Fuck. I just lost my job.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| this lol
| emorning3 wrote:
| I think we need to get started on organizing the resistance to
| our robot overlords.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Butlerian Jihad when?
| resiros wrote:
| The code for the demo is open-source
| (https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-
| ui/blob/main/app/api/toHtml...). The prompt they use interesting:
|
| You are an expert web developer who specializes in tailwind css.
| A user will provide you with a low-fidelity wireframe of an
| application. You will return a single html file that uses HTML,
| tailwind css, and JavaScript to create a high fidelity website.
| Include any extra CSS and JavaScript in the html file. If you
| have any images, load them from Unsplash or use solid colored
| retangles. The user will provide you with notes in blue or red
| text, arrows, or drawings. The user may also include images of
| other websites as style references. Transfer the styles as best
| as you can, matching fonts / colors / layouts. They may also
| provide you with the html of a previous design that they want you
| to iterate from. Carry out any changes they request from you. In
| the wireframe, the previous design's html will appear as a white
| rectangle. Use creative license to make the application more
| fleshed out. Use JavaScript modules and unkpkg to import any
| necessary dependencies
| wg0 wrote:
| What's beyond me is - how just simply predicting the next token
| brings up this kind of magical comprehension in a model that
| otherwise has no sense or is aware about itself.
| culi wrote:
| > simply predicting the next token
|
| ... it's doing _A LOT_ more than that. The technique you 're
| referencing is very limited and rarely used for any practical
| purposes
| Biganon wrote:
| I don't get what's so amazing in the demo
|
| It takes seconds to pick a button and place it somewhere. Is it
| really so much better to let an AI guess that a green rectangle
| is supposed to be a button?
| ks2048 wrote:
| We need to differentiate "Wow!"[1] (these ML/AI systems are
| impressive), and "Wow!"[2] (this is something I want to use).
| tantalor wrote:
| Is this thing self-hosted? Can it make itself?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Seems pretty loose with the input prompt. Good thing stake
| holders are notoriously forgiving and would never ask to push
| pixels.
|
| I do see the potential as a professional tool if it came in the
| form of a "fix up" button in a WYSIWYG editor. It would be great
| if you could haphazardly slap together a UI and have a button
| that unifies the margins and spacing style without taking too
| many liberties.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| That's nice, can it work out of web browser to actually make
| something usable?
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Does this export to HTML/JS/CSS and if so, is the code on par
| with what a good dev would write?
|
| Dreamweaver's output was terrible. Figma's is decent but still
| requires a good deal of cleanup to fall in line with best
| practices.
| ausbah wrote:
| interesting content but this title was very clickbaity for hacker
| news
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Anyone remember IBM's Rational Rose? You fed it a UML diagram of
| what you wanted to do, and it generated C++ stubs. That was two
| decades ago or more. I tried it once, and that was it. You still
| had to do the "last 10%" which is the most important 10% in
| software.
|
| These tools are definitely more "magical", but these are
| essentially an iteration of what we've already had.
|
| Code generation from UML was all the rage for a while too, until
| it wasn't. People realized its limitations at some point. Sort of
| like ORMs - if you are not policing SQL generation like a hawk,
| you are going to end up with an awful non-performant system.
|
| Ultimately it is a productivity and prototyping tool - it will
| not do the hardest parts and integrations for you, at least not
| in the way you may want exactly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rational_Rose_XDE
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Oh god, you're making my PTSD kick in. What this will all lead
| to? Clients going in making UI that appears to work fine and
| then asking developers to wire it in to the greater eco-system
| that will necessarily surround it, telling you "Look! It's
| almost done!" and then you're going to have PTSD too.
| jfhufl wrote:
| Wow, I did something like that for my senior project back in
| '94 using Inventor on an SGI workstation.
| neilv wrote:
| FWIW, I'd guess that the 2 sliders with labels like those, and a
| square or other shape, matches very closely some GUI and
| pedagogical graphics toolkit tutorials upon which the LLM was
| trained (in which a slider rotates the shape).
| nilslindemann wrote:
| I wonder if it makes sense to learn web development. When I am
| done in two years, how to find a job which is not already done by
| an AI? :-(
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| I think it would make sense to learn web development and use AI
| alongside it. Seems like no matter what you end up doing
| working alongside AI tools will be a part of the job so the
| experience with it will be useful.
|
| If AI advances to the point where large swathes of workers even
| amongst developers are put out of work, then worrying about
| your own job is a little beside the point. Will be a large and
| apparent social issue then. I am still skeptical this will
| happen but if you had asked me 3 years ago could AI do what it
| is capable of already by today I would have said with 100%
| certainty there is not chance so I'm holding back my opinion at
| this point.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Its best to approach learning from a place of curiosity and
| never be 'done'.
|
| However, as an answer to your question: If you're looking for a
| skill to learn once in a short time and apply that for a
| decade; then web front-end coding is among the worst options.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Hi, coder/founder of 25 years here. I'm genuinely conflicted
| as to whether or not we will get to a point where front end
| web development loses its utility. It's one thing to have an
| AI assist in coding some simple UX/UI. But an entirely
| different thing to stitch all those together into a fully
| working web application. Particularly when it's a very
| complex app with multiple pages, client/server architecture,
| DB, etc.
|
| Perhaps I'm just being shortsighted here. I can sort of see
| how AI tech would evolve to achieve this. You would need an
| AI assistant able to persist the entire context of your
| application across months/years in a stable way to act as
| your ongoing "web developer". Will that be feasible?
| firexcy wrote:
| The system prompt used as found in the repo:
|
| ``` You are an expert tailwind developer. A user will provide you
| with a low-fidelity wireframe of an application and you will
| return a single html file that uses tailwind to create the
| website. They may also provide you with the html of a previous
| design that they want you to iterate from. Carry out any changes
| they request from you. In the wireframe, the previous design's
| html will appear as a white rectangle. Use creative license to
| make the application more fleshed out. if you need to insert an
| image, use a colored fill rectangle as a placeholder. Respond
| only with the html file. ```
|
| (not sure about why the creative[commons?] license is referred
| here and why does it help.)
|
| and for each generation the user prompt is:
|
| ``` [IMAGE_LINK] Turn this into a single html file using
| tailwind. ```
|
| https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui/blob/8a889bf36afc06fbb0c...
|
| Looks simple enough to run "privately" by screenshooting a normal
| tldraw canvas and passing the prompt with it to the API.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| "creative license" in plain English, means essentially "don't
| worry too much about constraints, do what you feel will is
| best." I don't think it has anything to do with software
| licenses.
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