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Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#121

Post by dmuso »

immortalloom wrote: post #86
rkuodys wrote: post #84

Honestly was waiting for something like this (or at least the version I imagined it would be) In my imagination - what I'd like to have as a lead of a small dev team - basically to write AI/Bot whatever, what is the issue, and for THAT tool to fix me the issue. Coming from non-tech company, where software development is not core business, we struggle to hire _good_ developers to give them a enough _interesting_ work…

Thanks! Yes I see it the same way! Today, my bots specialize in Next.js (React). Honestly I haven't had a lot of requests for Angular, but I suspect that is because I have mostly been working with startups. My intent is to support any major UI framework that my customers ask for. I would bet that I will eventually support Angular for this reason, but it will depend on demand.

It would be great if you could support Phoenix primarily and Rails. Any plans to go full stack not just JS UIs? Seems limiting if there’s no backend AI help.

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#122

Post by immortalloom »

johnwheeler wrote: post #120

This is what AWS Amplify is trying to do. But they don’t call it AI

Kinda sorta. Second is actually using AI to rationalize your codebase, and modify your files. It's pretty different.

I will say though, that a lot of my users / customers prefer to use AWS Amplify Hosting to keep everything on the same VPC (vs using Vercel). I would say about half. AWS Amplify Hosting is fairly good actually.

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#123

Post by immortalloom »

immortalloom wrote: post #122
johnwheeler wrote: post #120

This is what AWS Amplify is trying to do. But they don’t call it AI

Kinda sorta. Second is actually using AI to rationalize your codebase, and modify your files. It's pretty different. I will say though, that a lot of my users / customers prefer to use AWS Amplify Hosting to keep everything on the same VPC (vs using Vercel). I would say about half. AWS Amplify Hosting is fairly good actually.

The deployment module is a Pro module, but it includes AWS Amplify Hosting as a hosting option. But for Second, it's pretty much a no-op, because with AWS Amplify Hosting you just point to the GitHub repo that Second has been modifying.

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#124

Post by joshuabaker2 »

This looks very cool, would love to see something like this take off - boilerplate code is such a hassle to stand up for each new project. Does this work with existing hand-made repos or is it mostly intended to work with projects that it generated?

I'm imagining it would be quite challenging to add in e.g. an auth system to an existing backend service and have it match the same coding paradigm as the rest of the app but maybe there'd be some way of annotating your code with comments to make it easier on this system to understand what it's looking at?

Suggestion: the PRs should be draft PRs, otherwise it'll probably be very noisy for teams.

Also, have you thought about doing any integrations with Replit? They are a yc company too and seem to be going all-in on AI and I think the bulk of their user-base is students and junior developers so there might be some synergy there.

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#125

Post by [deleted] »

immortalloom wrote: post #106
efishnc wrote: post #105

What could be nice is the developer providing some unit tests, and Second using those to ensure the PR is functional, re-generating if not. Given a set of tests, I guess you could try to generate the code as well, though I could imagine it might overfit on the given tests and create a "hack" solution.

One of the great things about Second is that uses GitHub as the handoff of code between bot to human. This means you can run your own CI against the code changes that the bot generates, triggered by GitHub actions.

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#126

Post by ilaksh »

shubhamjain wrote: post #7

From the video, Second looks more like a UI wrapped over a boilerplate generators that have existed for quite a while. It's a pretty powerful one, and that can be very useful in itself but how is AI involved here? If it is, was it needed in the first place? I was expecting the inputs to be more along, "give me an app to manage a restaurant", but the inputs are modules (Forgot password, billing), which are generic pie…

I just released the new version of https//aidev.codes which you can use a prompt kind of like "give me a web page for managing a restaurant" .. it will output it and host it for pennies and if you want a subdomain its $5 per month. It is currently limited to simple static pages. But it can still manage something like recording restaurant schedules in localStorage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086436

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#127

Post by ggregoire »

On existing projects, how do you know/verify that the modifications made by GPT-3 actually work? Do the commits need to be manually tested by a developer?

Or does it work only on generic projects (e.g. bootstrapped with next.js) where the bot already knows the files to modify? (hence it always works)

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#128

Post by gabereiser »

immortalloom wrote: post #73
atleta wrote: post #70

While I have been expecting AI to replace programmers for a while, the thing I was never sure about whether this will manifest itself as a business for some companies or whether it means the end of people creating apps altogether. Another risk for building businesses on AI in general is that unlike with software that anyone can build (e.g. for a niche), AI solutions seem to be costly because they require a lot of dat…

Yea, it's going to be interesting to see how this all unfolds. In my opinion, the future of software development looks like this: 1) Human developer instructs A.I. bots to build large volumes of code (like Second) 2) Human developer uses A.I. code assistants in the IDE to make "low level" changes or additions I do not believe that developers or engineers will be replaced. The world needs more software, and there's no…

3) AI bot claims IP rights to code it wrote, but so does the AI company that provided the service, and you end up in an Oracle vs Google vs John Doe scenario.

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#129

Post by maxchaplin2000 »

The future of software development is, I think, a collaboration between human developers and AI bots, where bots can build large volumes of code and human developers can use AI code assistants to make low-level changes or additions, but the AI is a tool to enhance human developers ability, leading to better products.

I think it'll bridge the gap between low level and high level engineers dramatically. AI is a tool, like any other powerful tool, it'll empower humans to do more and deliver better.

Re: Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps

#130

Post by nodemaker »

299 per month is reaching for a non battle tested product. At most I would pay 30 usd one time and see what it gives me. Amjad at replit is already building this with a whole bounty thing thrown in so tough market. Good luck to you though. Getting yc investment is already a big deal and i think you can definitely lock on to a niche and find PMF soon
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