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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

#241

Post by steveruizok »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #172
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?

Yes! If you have a previously generated shape selected, it incorporates the code from that file into the prompt for the next one. i.e. "here's what we had before, here are the notes that came back"

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#242

Post by ben_w »

easeout wrote: post #220
JanneVee wrote: post #184

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 think we'd all be gladly sitting atop high abstractions like that if not for the fact that brands pay the bills, and brands want custom experiences. Website and app design often begins with "what does a button look like," and design tools focus not on prebuilt widgets but on paths and fills, because the last thing a brand wants is to speak with different tones in different media. Their software has to feel like the…

> Website and app design often begins with "what does a button look like,"

Yup. Been a long time since I've used an un-customised standard button outside my personal projects, no matter how much R&D has been spent by Apple on working out what it means for a UI to be good.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#243

Post by brlewis »

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

"Entirely new genres" of anything is unlikely from ML models trained on existing work. Someone using AI to implement an entirely new idea will be frustrated as the AI keeps gravitating toward convention.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#245

Post by protomolecule »

gchamonlive wrote: post #215
JanneVee wrote: post #184

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…

That's not how VB6 or Delphi work.

Delphi's visual editor allows you to position, link together and configure visual and non-visual components in design time, automatically serializes all the components into text file and in runtime your program deserializes these components from the resource embedded in the program's binary file. It also allows you to create handlers for events like OnButtonClicked or OnDBConnectionOpened where the usual arbitrarily complex programming happens.

The first result from google showing what this looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyWm24ekSVM

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#248

Post by Guvante »

ilaksh wrote: post #190
JanneVee wrote: post #184

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 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".

You are missing a huge caveat of those tools. They tend to have limits in functionality.

It isn't uncommon that you prototype with a tool and it is super fast but before you can launch for real you need to rewrite everything.

At that point it is difficult to know if the prototype was valuable. Certainly quickly visualizing is good but a prototype tool that is non functional is even faster to use.

Having a tool that allows easy drag and drop without any friction on the generated code (including difficulty of using that code) while also having all the powers of HTML would be really cool.

Such a tool wouldn't be a beginner tool but any that fail this and can't really go all the way to final product gets discarded as "I am going to have to rewrite anyway".

Less of a "I am too good for that" more a "not a useful abstractions level" when considered holistically.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#249

Post by evntdrvn »

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…

Hopefully this sounds like helpful feedback instead of annoying nitpicking: I found that the substantial "flash of unstyled content" when the page first loads to be very jarring/unappetizing. I think it would be worthwhile to investigate one of the approaches that can mitigate this FOUC effect.

Cheers and good luck!!!

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#250

Post by jjkaczor »

golergka wrote: post #231
JanneVee wrote: post #184

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!

HN has this weird nostalgic thing for VB and Delphi, but I feel that most people who express it either haven't actually used these tools or don't remember it well. There's no way to do responsive interfaces with it. If you want anything but your OSes native controls, you're in the world of hell too. Even localisation is a problem. No unit, no integration tests. WYSIWYG editors mean that form files are changed automat…

No way to do responsive interfaces?

Oh sweet summer child. (if you are going to call us weirdly nostalgic)

There were ton's of methods - from extremely manual code-based detection of window resizing events, then subsequent calculating and scaling contained controls, to a myriad of third-party libraries/components that would provide an automatic resizable host container for other controls.

Localization was not a problem - VB6 supported 'resource files' like every other Win32 app. Unit and integration tests were possible - but uglier with visual forms - typically requiring third-party products, and/or low-level Win32-API integrations. But in reality - you would abstract all of your business logic into classes/modules/units with very little within the UI, so that those would be unit-tested, instead of the UI.

Now - don't get me wrong, VB was limited in many many ways, and I am not nostalgic for it - but, it was more capable than the picture you are painting. Delphi even moreso, as it had easy and direct access to the entire Win32 API and could handle threading and pointers as well.

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