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I think I need to go lie down

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Re: I think I need to go lie down

#131

Post by pc86 »

Filligree wrote: post #56
jprete wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#132

Post by creshal »

gtirloni wrote: post #114
creshal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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, ...

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#133

Post by sarchertech »

yoav wrote: post #120
JCharante wrote: post #90

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.

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

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.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#134

Post by pc86 »

isilofi wrote: post #128
zztop44 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the user care?

Yes. Almost none of those get i18n, hotkeys, shortcuts, taborder, screenreaders and other accessibility right.

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).

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#135

Post by intended »

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.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#137

Post by pc86 »

gtirloni wrote: post #114
creshal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#138

Post by steveruizok »

cwoolfe wrote: post #119

The site requires an OpenAI Key and describes doing this as "risky but cool" ... What data would be exposed by sharing my key?

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.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#140

Post by steveruizok »

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

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