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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

#221

I just see this as a tool to help make UI designers (and maybe POs) look smart and competent, but the real work is going to go to the programmers, just as it does today. UI designers will be able to give a "demo" but how will this basic functionality translate to the rest of the app? It won't.

How? You literally just give GPT-4 a new prompt: "Thanks. Please connect it to the rest of this code:"

If you want it to do a better job, add "it's very important for my career".

Lol.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#223

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

There was a reason why we moved away from this. Everything is code, the UIs for creating such interfaces are just abstractions. The code generated by those no-code approaches to interface design was horrible and would break down quite fast in larger projects. Maintainability for such interfaces was non-existent. I think just regretting an old feature long gone without proper context is dangerous. If we are to bring b…

> Everything is code, the UIs for creating such interfaces are just abstractions. The code generated by those no-code approaches to interface design...

I'm not sure you're replying to the same thing. I never used VB much, but Delphi was not and is not no-code. In fact it emphasised using libraries a lot ('components' in its terms are classes provided by libraries) and the UI had a text description, which was streamed and created at runtime.

Delphi today could indeed create something doing this just as fast, and you wouldn't draw a trackbar and hope it's recognised in the image by the AI... you'd drop an actual trackbar.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#225
post #4

Lets make ourselves redundant. At least I won't have to relearn JS every 2 weeks.

More like - let's give ourselves better tools. The people who hire us won't be able to build this stuff themselves no matter how good an AI you give them. The only developers who will lose their job are ones who fail to embrace AI.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#226
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still tools to do it. I think the reason they are not more popular with programmers is that it's basically some stupid subconscious thing where we are afraid of being accused of being users or beginners. Not something we realize consciously, but anything that doesn't involve complex colorful text naturally gets kind of peer pressured out because it looks like a "beginner tool".

I first started programming with VB6 and have yearned to make a GUI program as simply as I did then. Can you point me to something as simple? I've tried Glade before but the time I used it I didn't find it a particularly pleasant experience

I also used VB6 back in the day. It was great.

Sadly I, like all programmers, have been peer pressured or something into avoiding tools like that. But I know they exist. I also made one several years ago. (No one was interested).

But I think if you search for "RAD" or "Rapid Application Development" or graphical component based development may get quite a lot.

I think that there are several plugins for WordPress that have similar functionality, although less code integration.

Maybe search for "drag and drop React editor".

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#227

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

You still see this using just about any major native UI toolkit. They may not be RAD-fast, but all kinds of elements and interactions that require custom and usually-janky JavaScript to implement on the Web are available “for free”. And actually work correctly, interact with the rest of the toolkit the way you’d expect, and i18n and a11y and all that work correctly and consistently.

There’s no reason HTML can’t do a lot more than it does out-of-the-box, saving crazy numbers of developer-hours and piles of user frustration every year. It just doesn’t.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#228

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

I get your point, but it only applies to the most simple of these examples. This can do all kinds of stuff, for example look further into that thread and you’ll see it implementing tic tac toe. The tool works by basically sending a screenshot of your diagram to GPT4 and saying “implement this”.

Which in turn only works for simple stuff that GPT-4 can implement from a single screenshot, and is, as OP pointed out, non-deterministic. The code OP is referring to would have been written to integrate with the rest of the project, to connect to data stores and services that the screenshot has no way of knowing about. People built huge applications in VB and similar tools.

Don't get me wrong, these new tools are cool, and I imagine they'll be great for prototyping small things quickly!

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#229

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

I have kind of the same opinion. Maybe more provocative. When people show me figma to HTML with AI I tell them “have you ever heard of Dreamweaver?”

Ok, dreamweaver code was ugly and unusable when AI generated code is not too bad (sometimes). But still, I also feel we kinda were already close to where we’re at today.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#230

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

Once upon a time, there was a fresh new operating system, the next step, being demo'ed in the Graphics pavillion of Comdex. Some huge nerd stood there, dragging things around with a mouse, 'proving' that you didn't have to be a programmer to build applications.

A decade after that, something floated around for a year or two called Visix Vibe, which gave the same thing, but for this relatively new language (at the time), Java.

Every few years, maybe 4-5 or a decade or so, someone gets the itch to make all the complexity fade away. Eventually though, they build an OS.

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