[HN Gopher] Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
        
       Author : recvonline
       Score  : 156 points
       Date   : 2024-10-23 20:52 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
        
       | swah wrote:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904595
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41913378
       | 
       | Not sure why no discussion at all - maybe the design is
       | underwhelming.
        
         | mvdtnz wrote:
         | Maybe because we're all exhausted by these kinds of demos. I'll
         | be interested in AI when I can integrate it with a large
         | codebase and it provides any benefit. I'm happy for you that
         | you can stand up little toy apps that pull down an NPM library
         | and call it, but it's not useful in my professional life.
        
           | mattnewton wrote:
           | If you have one of those larger codebases you aren't afraid
           | of Cursor Co. getting a copy of, I would really try out
           | Cursor. The indexing of medium sized mono-repo I've been
           | working in is pretty flawless (contains code for a static web
           | page, a singe page web app, and some python services along
           | with deployment configs)
        
             | stonethrowaway wrote:
             | That doesn't sound like a medium sized repo?
        
             | mvdtnz wrote:
             | There's absolutely no way I'd share my codebase with some
             | fly-by-nighter ~crypto~ AI company, but the codebase I work
             | on is upwards of 60 million lines of code so I doubt any
             | "AI" solution would come close to being useful.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | At 60 Mloc? Sure, for now I'd agree. An AI needs to use
               | other tools to handle that kind of size, it doesn't
               | (practically) work so well if you try to hold the whole
               | thing in context.
               | 
               | And while tool use is being worked on, the results I've
               | seen are are the "that's an interesting tech demo" level
               | rather than the mind-blowing change when InstructGPT
               | demonstrated the ability for a language model to generate
               | any meaningful code at all from natural language
               | instruction.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | > I work on is upwards of 60 million lines of code so I
               | doubt any "AI" solution would come close to being useful.
               | 
               | that's what rag is supposed to solve: they chunk your 60M
               | loc, and then retrieve and process only relevant
               | depending on your inquery.
        
             | sigh_again wrote:
             | That's not a medium sized repo, that is a baby you can
             | entirely memorize in your own head. Cursor is also dreadful
             | at anything that isn't Javascript and Python.
        
           | bloopernova wrote:
           | Exactly. When the LLM can create valid tests that cover all
           | branches, then it will be useful to me.
           | 
           | I use copilot every day, but it's only so good.
           | 
           | The LLM hype feels like it's been driven by FOMO.
        
             | jkaptur wrote:
             | I had a pretty cool experience with that the other day. I
             | wrote some production code (LLM had no idea what was going
             | on), then I measured the coverage and determined a test
             | case that would increase it (again, just using my brain),
             | BUT when I typed "testEmptyString" or whatever, the LLM
             | filled in the rest of the test. Not a massive change to the
             | way I work, but it certainly saved me a bunch of time.
        
               | NitpickLawyer wrote:
               | I swear half the people in this thread have spent 5
               | minutes with the first chatgpt, pre 3.5, wrote it off and
               | are so convinced of their superiority that they won't
               | spend the time required to even see where it's at.
               | 
               | Ever saw someone _really bad_ at googling? It 's the
               | exact same thing with LLMs (for now). They're not magic
               | crystal balls, and they certainly can't read everyone's
               | minds at the same time. But give them a bunch of context,
               | and they'll surprise you.
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | I dunno, i think it's really cool still and i barely use it
             | because i find it more work to use than to not.
        
               | written-beyond wrote:
               | Same. I've felt any LLM for coding has saved me
               | mechanical time, but as of now anything slightly more
               | complex than that just makes me waste more time figuring
               | stuff out.
               | 
               | Other than the automation aspect, it is a pretty good
               | alternative to in-depth googling.
        
           | williamcotton wrote:
           | My duties as a data scientist and forensic investigator
           | involve writing lots of "little toy apps" for ETL and
           | analysis.
           | 
           | BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"?
        
             | mvdtnz wrote:
             | How would you refer to the example apps in the OP's link?
             | They are almost definitionally toy apps, and definitely
             | little (a handful of pages of code including all of the
             | HTML).
        
             | skydhash wrote:
             | It's related to this: https://xkcd.com/1205/
             | 
             | As a programmer (which is the requisite to build such tools
             | even with LLMs), I have a plethora of tools to do the
             | tasks, what I choose and how much time I invested in in
             | that depends on something similar to this chart, but with
             | an added dimension: interest.
             | 
             | Take for example the URL extraction. For one single
             | occasion, I'd probably use VIM and macros to quickly do it.
             | If it were many pages, I'd write a script. If it were
             | infrequent, but recurrent, I'd take the time to write a
             | better script and would only write a web page if the use
             | case was shared with other people or if I wanted a cross
             | platform solution.
             | 
             | I believe the first question one should ask before building
             | is why. That leads you to find a better UX than shoehorning
             | everything inside a web app.
        
             | sigh_again wrote:
             | >BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"?
             | 
             | It's an unmaintainable, single use piece of software (that
             | doesn't even implement the features, it just glues together
             | already existing code) that any CS student could write in a
             | week. Congrats on getting a really fast CS student I guess
             | ? Not to mention the fact that perfectly viable, better
             | alternatives are available in many places.
             | 
             | It's like me nailing two 2x4s together to make a shelf.
             | Yeah, sure, I made it myself and I didn't need any
             | woodworking knowledge, but let's just hope I don't put
             | grandma's heavy china on it.
        
               | IggleSniggle wrote:
               | As a professional 2x4 nailer and gluer, I assure you that
               | I have a ton more deliverables for my client. The
               | downside is that now I actually have to put some thought
               | into my work; you know, put some engineering work into
               | it.
               | 
               | The upside is that I can produce a shit-ton of one-shot
               | code in record time, so I've got time to face the
               | downside.
        
         | infoseek12 wrote:
         | It's extraordinary!
         | 
         | Perhaps how quickly we become jaded should be taken as evidence
         | of how quickly the world is changing right now.
         | 
         | When I looked at the examples they seemed like the kind of one
         | off scripts, of limited complexity, that we've seen many times
         | in the last year or so.
        
         | yen223 wrote:
         | To have discussions people need to be able to see your post,
         | and on HN it can be a matter of luck.
        
         | rtzand wrote:
         | Perhaps people want to read other blogs once in a while. We are
         | at a stage of AI glut. If people pump out so much content in
         | such a short time, no one can read it all (or is interested to
         | read it).
        
       | sourcecodeplz wrote:
       | It's just not a big deal.
        
       | M4v3R wrote:
       | It's funny how we went from "it's impossible for a computer to
       | write meaningful code by itself" to "yawn, another one of these"
       | in like 2 years.
        
         | tomrod wrote:
         | It's still not great at complexity. Though autocompletion does
         | have some cool outputs.
        
           | thierrydamiba wrote:
           | Runtime complexity or complex as in difficult problems?
        
           | onion2k wrote:
           | _It 's still not great at complexity._
           | 
           | That's a feature, not a bug. Complexity is something to
           | avoid.
        
             | 7thpower wrote:
             | Sometimes great products require bugs, I guess.
             | 
             | Being able to tackle complex tasks is still a real
             | challenge for the current models and approaches and not all
             | problems can be solved with elegant solutions.
        
             | mvdtnz wrote:
             | How would you suggest writing something like.... say...
             | Photoshop or Chrome, without introducing any complexity?
             | How about an optimising compiler or better yet something
             | behind the firewall like a medical imaging device or
             | financial trading software?
             | 
             | Complexity is inherent in many problem spaces.
        
             | curtisblaine wrote:
             | _unnecessary_ completely is something to avoid. Inherent
             | complexity is something to embrace. We 're trained to
             | remove unnecessary complexity so much that sometimes we
             | think we can remove all complexity. That's a fallacy.
             | Sometimes, things are just complex.
        
           | leptons wrote:
           | Copilot knows what I want to console.log almost before I do.
           | I like that aspect of it. It also gets it wrong sometimes,
           | which is kind of dumb, especially when I just copied the
           | variable name to my clipboard. It should know.
        
         | HaZeust wrote:
         | I said this last year[1] and still FIRMLY believe it:
         | 
         | "It's even crazier to me that we've just... Accepted it, and
         | are in the process of taking it for granted. This type of
         | technology was a moonshot 2 years ago, and many experts didn't
         | expect it in the lifetimes of ANYONE here - and who knew the
         | answer was increasing transformers and iterating attention?
         | 
         | And golly, there are a LOT of nay-sayers of the industry. I've
         | even heard some folks on podcasts and forums saying this will
         | be as short-lived and as meaningless as NFTs. NFTs couldn't re-
         | write my entire Python codebase into Go, NFTs weren't ever
         | close to passing the bar or MCAT. This stuff is crazy!"
         | 
         | 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37879730
        
           | iwontberude wrote:
           | Nay-sayers are taking it for granted because it's not what
           | the they expected or wanted. It's not some flippant inability
           | to have gratitude. Since you brought it up, when JFK said we
           | would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the
           | expectation was succinct and understood. There has been so
           | much goal post moving and hand waving that we aren't talking
           | about the same expectations anymore.
        
             | HaZeust wrote:
             | Well, that's too bad - isn't it? The world will sometimes
             | change before your very eyes, and you'll sometimes be in a
             | group that's affected at the forefront. C'est la vie -
             | never become too comfortable that you stifle your ability
             | to be an early adopter!
        
           | SubiculumCode wrote:
           | I am not a professional coder, being in research I do not
           | need to think about scaling my code as most of it is one and
           | done on whatever problem I am working on at the moment. For
           | me, this is a lot about stringing a bunch of neuroimaging
           | tools together to transform data in ways I want, LLMs have
           | been fantastic. Instead of spending 20 minutes coding it, its
           | often 0-shot visit to Claude...especially when its a
           | relatively simple python task e.g. iterate through
           | directories of images, inspect these json, move those files
           | over here, build this job, submit. Its not ground breaking
           | code, but the LLM builds it faster than I would, and it does
           | what I need it to do. Its been a 20x or more multiplier for
           | me when it comes to one aspect of my work.
        
           | cloogshicer wrote:
           | > NFTs couldn't re-write my entire Python codebase into Go
           | 
           | Neither can LLMs. They can produce output that _looks_ like a
           | plausible re-write of your codebase, but on closer inspection
           | turns out to have many minor and major errors everywhere.
           | 
           | The problem is that the closer inspection part is very often
           | more work than writing the code by hand in the first place.
           | 
           | There hasn't been enough evidence for me that this will be
           | possible to fix.
        
             | HaZeust wrote:
             | I've used GPT-4 to do what I had said. I pasted the errors
             | I was given, and did so for 2-3 more iterations, and it
             | successfully ported critical in-house infrastructure from
             | Python 3 to Go.
        
               | sergiotapia wrote:
               | you're never going to convince people that are in an
               | ideological battle against AI.
        
               | bigstrat2003 wrote:
               | And you're never going to convince anyone if you assume
               | without evidence that they are ideologically opposed to
               | AI. Lots of people have tried these tools with an open
               | mind and found them to not be useful, you need to address
               | those criticisms rather than using a dismissive insult.
        
               | HaZeust wrote:
               | What evidence would you like?
               | 
               | You're posting on a thread that hyperlinks to a list of
               | code and Claude Artifacts for pet-projects that can make
               | thousands a month with some low-effort PPC and an AdWords
               | embed, and some mid-size projects that can be anything
               | from grounds to a promotion at a programming role - to
               | the MVP for a PMF-stage startup.
               | 
               | What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived
               | notions?
        
               | epolanski wrote:
               | Issue is, it takes time to learn how to interact with
               | these tools and get the best out of them. And they get
               | better quite fast.
        
               | sergiotapia wrote:
               | you are replying to a submission with a dozen or more
               | examples of real tangible stuff, and you still argue?
               | pointless.
        
               | VirusNewbie wrote:
               | But how do you know those were the only errors?
        
               | HaZeust wrote:
               | What's this question even mean? Because they're the only
               | ones that came up in the debugger portion of the IDE, the
               | output serves the intended purposes, the logging and
               | error handling that I wanted to include were in the
               | initial write-up prompt, and I could read the code it
               | wrote because I partially knew the outputted language -
               | and when I wasn't sure of a line, I asked it for
               | clarification and a source from a reputable knowledgebase
               | of the language, and GPT provided it?
        
           | lionkor wrote:
           | It can autocomplete, it can't write good code. For me, that
           | goal post has not moved. It it cant write good code
           | consistently, I don't care for it all that much. It remains a
           | cool autocomplete
        
             | HaZeust wrote:
             | Tell it to write code like a Senior developer for your
             | respective language, to "write the answer in full with no
             | omissions or code substitutions", tell it you'll tip based
             | on performance, and write more intimate and detailed specs
             | for your requests.
             | 
             | Since mid 2023, I've yet to have an issue
        
               | mrbungie wrote:
               | What I would expect is a lot of "non-idiomatic" Go code
               | from LLMs (but eventually functional code iff the LLM is
               | driven by a competent developer), as it appears scripting
               | languages like Python, SQL, Shell, etc are their forte.
               | 
               | My experience with Python and Cursor could've been better
               | though. For example when making ORM classes (boilerplate
               | code by definition) for sqlalchemy, in one of the
               | filesthe assistant proposed a change that included a new
               | instantiation of a declarative base, practically dividing
               | the table/class metadata in two. I had to stop for at
               | least 20 minutes to find out where the problem was as the
               | change was hidden in one of the files. Those are the kind
               | of weird bugs I've seen LLMs commit in non-trivial
               | applications, stupid 'n small but hard to find.
               | 
               | But what do I know really. I consider myself an skeptic,
               | but LLMs continue to a amuse everyday.
        
             | lelandfe wrote:
             | My friend who can't code is now the resident "programmer"
             | on his team. He just uses ChatGPT behind the scenes. That
             | writ large is going to make us tech people all care, one
             | way or another :/
        
               | leptons wrote:
               | I'll care when I get to consult for that company to fix
               | all the messed up code that kid hacked together.
        
             | epolanski wrote:
             | Nobody really cares about code being good or bad, it's not
             | prose.
             | 
             | What matters is it meets functional and non functional
             | requirements.
             | 
             | One of my juniors wrote his first app two years ago fully
             | with chatgpt, could figure out by iteratively asking it how
             | to improve it and solve the bugs.
             | 
             | Then he learned to code properly fascinated by the
             | experience. But the fact remains, he shipped an application
             | that did something for someone while many never did even
             | though they had a degree and a black belt in pointless leet
             | code quizzes.
             | 
             | I'm fully convinced that very soon big tech or a startup
             | will come up with a programming language meant to sit at
             | the intersection between humans and LLMs, and it will be
             | quickly better, faster and cheaper at 90% of the mundane
             | programming tasks than your 200k/year dev writing forms,
             | tables and apis in SF.
        
           | leptons wrote:
           | The "AI" is still just as much hit-or-miss with code as it is
           | writing a paragraph about anything. It doesn't really know
           | what it's doing, it's guessing an output that will make the
           | user happy. I wouldn't trust it with anything important, life
           | life support systems or airplanes, etc. but I'm sure with the
           | race to the bottom that we're in, we'll get to that point
           | someday soon.
        
           | randito wrote:
           | To state the obvious (again), it's shocking the rate of
           | progress is with these tools. If this is 2 years of progress,
           | what does 10-20 look like?
        
         | foobarqux wrote:
         | If what you said were actually true in a practical sense there
         | would have been a perceptible revolution in products and
         | services. There hasn't been.
        
           | IggleSniggle wrote:
           | I have no idea if you're correct about this or not. With 8
           | billion people in the world, and a significant number of
           | those people working as "intelligent agents," how would you
           | perceive the difference?
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | I think we have different definitions of meaningful code, most
         | of these are pulling a library from NPM which practically
         | completes the given task by itself. For example the "YAML to
         | JSON converter" uses js-yaml... which parses YAML and outputs a
         | Javascript object that can be trivially serialized to JSON. The
         | core of that "project" is literally two lines of code after
         | importing that library.                 const jsonObj =
         | jsyaml.load(yamlText);       const jsonText =
         | JSON.stringify(jsonObj, null, 2);
        
         | betaby wrote:
         | YAML to JSON literally has `script
         | src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/js-yaml/4.1.0/js-
         | yaml...`. I don't see how went anywhere judging from examples.
        
       | foobarqux wrote:
       | I just don't seem to find this stuff as useful to me as people
       | are portraying. Take the "extract URLs" example: I would just do
       | curl -sL $URL | htmlq 'a' -a href
        
         | cpursley wrote:
         | Yeah, sure - if you have the memory that allows that sort of
         | recall. For the rest of us, LLMs are like Alzheimer's
         | medication or eye glasses. Believe it or not, these types of
         | esoteric commands are very difficult for some of us to remember
         | - but AI is amazing at this sort thing (Unix commands, etc as
         | well as trouble shooting them).
        
           | skydhash wrote:
           | > _Yeah, sure - if you have the memory that allows that sort
           | of recall._
           | 
           | You don't memorize them. You learn the foundational knowledge
           | (in this case how http works and the html format, and a bit
           | of shell scripting), then read the manuals and compose the
           | commands. And as days pass, you save interesting snippets
           | somewhere. Then it becomes easier each time you interact with
           | the tools.
           | 
           | Anyone would find ffmpeg or imagemagick daunting if they
           | don't know anything about audio or graphics.
        
           | sureglymop wrote:
           | I mean they may also make your memory worse if you always go
           | straight for the llm instead of trying to remember.
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | I can't remember, was it Aristotle or Plato who said that
             | about _writing_?
        
           | foobarqux wrote:
           | That might be a reasonable argument if the LLM suggested
           | something similar to the command I posted instead of an
           | incredibly complicated webapp.
           | 
           | As is it just spits out migraine-inducing "it-works-
           | doesn't-it" solutions from someone starting to learn to
           | program.
        
         | pnut wrote:
         | That's pretty happy path for one, and for two, how exactly are
         | you doing it? Not by holding down a red button on your phone
         | and talking into it, that's for sure.
         | 
         | For three, add one more subtle requirement to the task, and now
         | you're reading awk manpages and trial-and-erroring perl
         | oneliners.
        
       | throwup238 wrote:
       | The new Sonnet version is pretty great at code but I keep hitting
       | output size limitations in the Claude app when I usually didn't
       | use to before. Anyone else experiencing "Claude's response was
       | limited as it hit the maximum allowed length at this time" a lot
       | more now?
       | 
       | At this point their limited output limit is far behind
       | o1/o1-mini. I really hope they significantly improve that next.
        
         | shubb wrote:
         | It's annoying but if you you just type continue it's pretty
         | good at writing the rest of the code in a new file that you can
         | copy paste together...
        
       | StickyRibbs wrote:
       | i'll start panicking when it can productionalize an app and
       | deploy it to GCP without any errors.
        
         | shishy wrote:
         | I used cursor to manage spinning up and deploying a full stack
         | app in AWS last week. Took me one afternoon.
        
         | trhway wrote:
         | I think you've just gave an idea to somebody's next startup,
         | and we'll probably see it is being done in half-a-year. In
         | general all that tedious YAML/etc. is ripe for the
         | "autocompletion AI".
        
           | skydhash wrote:
           | And then you'll find out a node was deployed with no backup
           | strategy while there are multiple useless ones burning money.
        
           | sigh_again wrote:
           | "Don't look at your Kubernetes configuration, trust our AI to
           | do it well" sounds like a psyop straight out of GCP or AWS to
           | charge you four times what they need to before telling you
           | "no, you absolutely need that $500 charge for your 1RPS
           | static website, yes yes absolutely."
        
             | trhway wrote:
             | And for auditing your config and for reviewing your cloud
             | provider's [autogenerated by AI] offers and suggestions
             | will be another AI which will also be able to chat with
             | their customer support AI.
        
       | corytheboyd wrote:
       | Just in case you need it: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef
       | 
       | I was just trying to be helpful, since it was relevant to content
       | in the post...
        
         | burgerquizz wrote:
         | if i want to just paste an url, of full page of HN, and extract
         | all comments in a json format. would that tool work?
        
           | sigh_again wrote:
           | [...document.querySelectorAll(".commtext").values().map((it)
           | => it.innerText)]
           | 
           | Works in every single web browser. No calls to OpenAI needed,
           | and I'm rusty on Javascript. Make it a bookmarklet, and you
           | don't even need to run a dedicated webpage on your machine
           | for that.
        
           | corytheboyd wrote:
           | You already know the answer to that. This is just a very
           | helpful interface for arbitrary data conversions, that I
           | thought passers by might like to know about. It's not an LLM,
           | but it does what some of the examples in the article does,
           | and more.
        
       | xster wrote:
       | Anthropic is so close to getting to a WeChat-esque store-less
       | super-app state. It just needs a way to gather all your published
       | artifacts and surface them easily in the sidebar like your
       | favorited chats.
       | 
       | Since Elon is so interested in that model, if xAI had Claude's
       | capabilities, they would surely go with that angle
        
       | skydhash wrote:
       | I don't know if I'd take less time, but I would definitely type
       | less.
        
       | ToJans wrote:
       | I fully agree.
       | 
       | I think Claude offers me 10x productivity, especially for all
       | these helper apps and technical POCs that I typically create
       | during the week.
       | 
       | And that's without even mentioning mail chain replies, analysis
       | of legal or financial documents, helping my kids with their math
       | assignments,...
       | 
       | It's a huge enabler for me, and it's getting better every month.
       | 
       | We are getting up the abstraction ladder faster and faster, and I
       | cannot even imagine where we will end up within a few months, or
       | a few years.
        
       | djoldman wrote:
       | @simonw: jina is getting cranky:
       | 
       | https://tools.simonwillison.net/jina-reader?
       | 
       | {"data":null,"code":451,"name":"SecurityCompromiseError","status"
       | :45102,"message":"Your request is categorized as abuse. Please
       | don't abuse our service. If you are sure you are not abusing,
       | please authenticate yourself with an API
       | key.","readableMessage":"SecurityCompromiseError: Your request is
       | categorized as abuse. Please don't abuse our service. If you are
       | sure you are not abusing, please authenticate yourself with an
       | API key."}
        
         | flakiness wrote:
         | TIL Jina Reader API has (low rate limit) API key free option.
         | https://jina.ai/reader/
        
       | rty32 wrote:
       | I'm sure there are plenty of examples like this, but one thing
       | that I find really hard to deal with is to integrate such tools
       | into existing codebase -- you can make all these things as
       | standalone pages, but for a professional developer, you have
       | certain standards and conventions, and often it takes a lot of
       | work to review/revise the code to make it work with existing
       | codebase, so much that you end up using inline completion just to
       | help with obvious stuff or boilerplate. I woule rather spend 20%
       | extra amount of time to write the code myself yet have
       | confidence, than spend time tweaking the prompt or giving follow
       | up instructions.
        
         | salviati wrote:
         | Have you tried https://aider.chat ?
        
           | kridsdale3 wrote:
           | Can those kinds of things work in monorepos with 50 million
           | files?
        
             | salviati wrote:
             | I believe they can as long as you're able to identify a
             | contained task that touches no more than a handful of
             | files. Still very useful to automate some tedious work or
             | refactoring if you ask me.
        
         | codingwagie wrote:
         | cursor.sh, add context to the prompt
        
       | v3ss0n wrote:
       | None of them worth writing home about
        
       | nichochar wrote:
       | We built an open-source and local tool that allows you to take
       | these even further. Highly recommend plugging in the latest
       | model, but you can keep iterating on the apps.
       | 
       | Currently also on the front page
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41926067
        
       | thimabi wrote:
       | I take tools like these as an inspiration. All of us have at
       | least some trivial tasks that can be automated. In the past,
       | automating them might have been a hassle, but with LLMs, that's
       | no longer the case. I, for one, have a "scripts" folder with
       | dozens of one-off mini-apps to handle specific tasks, and this
       | folder keeps growing every day.
        
       | yapyap wrote:
       | wish there was an option to hide all chat AI related topics on HN
        
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