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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

#171

Post by intended »

meiraleal wrote: post #167
intended wrote: post #135

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…

> 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%. Ok but if you would do the same task again, how much would it help you? > 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. You are one step closer to become this person.

>Ok but if you would do the same task again, how much would it help you?

100%, since I would never do it again.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#172

Post by mcintyre1994 »

steveruizok wrote: post #140

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…

That last example is fun, it's amazing how you can give it feedback like that. When you select the generated app + your text, what's it actually receiving as input? Is it receiving its previously generated code plus your new text?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#173

Post by rchaud »

imjonse wrote: 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.

You've put into words what has bothered me about the relentless boosterism of B2C AI solutions on the backs of hundreds of these "Hello World" type demos. "OMG, programming is dead!"

The strange thing is that on HN, the limits of these approaches re: extensibility and maintenance are easily recognized when talking about traditional no-code platforms. But somehow with AI, these problems are now fixed, and we wont have to worry about unspooling spaghetti spat out from a black box.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#174

Post by meiraleal »

coldpie wrote: post #152
sarchertech wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wond…

I'd prefer a "bad human code to AI-readable code" AI.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#175

Post by bsima »

sarchertech wrote: post #127
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.

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…

If you can so easily and cheaply generate a new version of the app/widget, why would you even use traditional version control?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#176

Post by withinboredom »

lovasoa wrote: post #155
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.

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…

> we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business.

I usually see this in places/cultures that value code-beautification projects rather than delivering value to the customer. Sometimes, they even want to do the latter, but actually do the former.

If you work somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever get fixed. That's the only sucky part.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#177

Post by Greenpants »

intended wrote: post #135

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…

I've been in the same boat. Earlier this year I wanted to up my game as well with an improved website and blog to go along with it, not even sure which frameworks to use.

Using ChatGPT has been a hit or miss experience, helping me maybe 30% of the time as well. But when it did help, it helped me massively, especially for quickly setting up Wordpress PHP designs and accompanying CSS. I can honestly say I couldn't have done my web and blog redesign if it weren't for ChatGPT. Not because I wouldn't have been able to get the knowledge without it– more so because I wouldn't have had the patience to figure all of this out in my spare time.

Using ChatGPT has certainly been a more fun experience than browsing documentation, but I did have to do the latter about half the time anyway.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#178

Post by meiraleal »

geraldwhen wrote: post #23

Squarespace, Wix etc have already taken the bottom of the market, and if they hadn’t, Indian outsourcing would have anyway. This is the logical progression of those same concepts. If I were a product manager at a website builder, I’d be all over integrating ai builders like this. It will never work for barely defined complex business tasks, but it might do fine to create a cost estimator for a photography business, f…

> Squarespace, Wix etc have already taken the bottom of the market

Meanwhile most SMBs don't have an app/website or have an useless one. There is so much space for niche markets and good tools.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#179

Post by kubiton »

intended wrote: post #135

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…

I'm mind blown because it's already so good and I do imagine that it will get as good as you need it to become.

And yeah as you said with domain knowledge it works very well

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#180

Post by rchaud »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6

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…

Creating the front-end of a Bootstrap form with no backend logic isn't particularly impresssive, it's something that would be taught halfway through any bootcamp course. Source: me, a person who built BS sites for years until I finally got around to learning Flexbox and CSS Grid properly.
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