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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

#151

Let me guess...simple image recognition of the slider, the names need to match a CSS property? Wow, so impressive .

You are both wrong an arrogant, congratulations. Next time, don't guess.

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?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#152

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#153

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 w…

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

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#154

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…

how do you put a screenshot into chatgpt?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#155
post #53
post #33

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.

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.

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

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#156

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 w…

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?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#159
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differen…

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

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#160

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 w…

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

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.

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