[HN Gopher] MonkeysPaw - A prompt-driven web framework in Ruby
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MonkeysPaw - A prompt-driven web framework in Ruby
Author : daviducolo
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-04-06 14:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worksonmymachine.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worksonmymachine.substack.com)
| dunefox wrote:
| I don't know if I would use a framework named after something
| that's by nature unreliable, or even devious.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| It's only an issue if you get a copy by cURL-ing it, dohohoho.
| lgas wrote:
| It's literally a nod to the fact that the framework may give
| you something close to what you want but off in some way. It's
| pretty much the perfect name for what it is.
| sethammons wrote:
| My very first thought was similar, followed by recalling a ruby
| whitespace issue that treated the non-space-whitespace as an
| undefined function. That was harder to debug than it should
| have been.
|
| Instead, after reading the page, it is LLM generated pages
| where "you get what you ask for," hallucinations and all.
| Fantastic name.
| latexr wrote:
| It's clearly on purpose. The tagline on the page is "Be careful
| what you wish for..."
| bnchrch wrote:
| While "silly" this is likely the next paradigm/abstraction for
| intent based pages.
|
| You can imagine given 1,000,000 page views just how many
| experiments could be run. Basically our A/B tests start to
| resemble natural evolution and survival of the fittest more than
| decision trees.
|
| However, something feels like it's missing. I wonder what's still
| yet to be built before we arrive at that future.
| Stwerner wrote:
| Yeah, totally agree that something related to this will likely
| be the next paradigm. I've been putting together experiments in
| different directions trying to find that thing that's missing
| but haven't really found a killer use case yet to pull it all
| together.
|
| That's a really cool idea that once you can get something
| somewhat reliably consistent generated, you can kind of let
| your A/B tests start to run themselves with just rough
| guidelines on what you're trying to optimize for...
| dartos wrote:
| I think that'd make for interesting experiments and fringe
| sites, I don't really see like your average e-commerce site
| ever doing anything like that.
|
| You'd want the A and B to be intentional, not automatically
| generated. Every VP thinks their idea for a feature will
| revolutionize the company.
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| > Every VP thinks their idea for a feature will revolutionize
| the company.
|
| Now imagine that everyone of them is given a tool that could
| get them an POC quickly. I think a lot VPs are about to
| figure out that their ideas are shit.
| ljm wrote:
| This pre-supposes that said VPs have the self-awareness to
| realise their ideas are shit.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| yeah, sorry, I don't want optimal dark patterns.
|
| We got enough of that atm.
| weego wrote:
| Well, you missed the bit where ad and marketing networks get
| involved and corrupt it into some god-awful granular targeting
| system.
| Stwerner wrote:
| Wow, cool to see this make it on to HN!
|
| Author here, happy to answer any questions about this or chat
| about the ideas behind it :)
| ianbicking wrote:
| I love that this is more art piece than serious software...
| more like offering someone an expedition than a product.
|
| (Though I'm not sure I'll get on the expedition, I am a little
| worried about sandboxing and setup and getting distracted...)
|
| If I was to start the expedition, I'd probably try to overshoot
| by describing a site that I could not myself fully imagine, or
| using attributes that lacked a single meaning. Like, "the
| artist's interactive portfolio, as though the artist is looking
| over your shoulder, the artist keeping a carefully neutral
| expression while seething inside." Then I'd probably continue,
| imagining just the outline of some site that satisfies some
| unarticulated desire, putzing around as I see a concrete
| articulation of that idea, as much reforming the idea in my
| head in response to those results to an equal degree that I am
| articulating the idea in more detail.
| Stwerner wrote:
| Ahh I absolutely love this idea of trying to infuse more
| emotional and fuzzy attributes to see what the LLM comes up
| with!
|
| When I broke out the layout and style components I was
| thinking of being able to change the whole site aesthetic
| from something like "standard b2b" to "geocities fan page",
| but I'm excited to try getting fuzzier with the descriptions!
| siliconc0w wrote:
| I also created an experiment for this, giving the AI an ability
| to write/read from a database so you could build full CRUD apps.
|
| It works somewhat but even with the smaller/faster models it's
| very slow and even with the big models it is pretty unreliable.
| Long term I can definitely imagine this will get more viable and
| maybe become a complement to the 'chat' interface with most SaaS
| apps essentially being replaced with a AI in front of system or
| systems of record.
| jollyjerry wrote:
| > Natural language as source code: Your intention becomes the
| program
|
| Reminds me of Cucumber testing framework
| eterps wrote:
| Interestingly, Cucumber (with its Gherkin syntax) works quite
| well for detailed and structured prompting to LLMs.
| sethammons wrote:
| I have always hated Gherkin because the extra layer of
| language expression / abstraction is superficial, and PMs
| can't write any ol' thing that makes sense, it has to be
| supported by the parser.
|
| But LLMs can make sense of any ol' thing, so, and it shocks
| me to admit such, maybe Gherkin is back on the menu.
| thunder-blue-3 wrote:
| It's been about 15 years since I've worked with RoR, but my
| favorite aspect of ruby was and will always be the library names.
| Shout out to factory_girl which I found out this morning was
| unforunately renamed to factory_bot
| blonky wrote:
| This reminds me of something _why the lucky stiff would create.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| This is it folks, we have finally reached peak of webdev
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I imagine the perfect programing language would have 3 levels.
|
| 1.LLM "code" , this should work for most basic use cases. Should
| be so basic any random person can create a CRUD app.
|
| 2. Scripting, something like Python. This should handle 95% of
| use cases.
|
| 3. Systems programing. Zig, Rust, etc. For when you need
| extremely specific performance requirements to be met.
|
| My dream language would integrate all three of these in the same
| stack, ideally the same project would be a mix of all three (
| most of the time a mix of the first two).
| siva7 wrote:
| At least this is the end of the js framework of the week. We
| developers deliberated ourselves from software development. Hell.
| We made our own jobs redundant. How stupid and genius at the same
| time can a profession be
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