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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

#251

Post by lanstin »

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…

My email signature sometimes says "software done right is always solving novel problems." I wish people always had the time and mandate to find the simple generization of their sequence of one offs.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#252

Post by hliyan »

maaaaattttt wrote: post #229
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 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.

Not sure about Dreamweaver, but the fact that no Frontpage equivalent exists this day and age, and armies of developers are grappling with HTML, React and GraphQL (e.g. Gatsby) to generate what are essentially websites, is very surprising.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#253

Post by mfbx9da4 »

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 this is kind of missing the point. The fact that the underlying implementation is not a hand-coded-deterministic one is the interesting thing about this demo. This is clearly going to be useful by making people more efficient and only going to get better with time.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#254

Post by lanstin »

fidotron wrote: post #216
pc86 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I swear the art form here is to provide the product people and designers with a tool/framework where they make the choices and they suffer the constraints, then they have to blame themselves when they can't do it. There is the old story about Steve Jobs and the Mac calculator app, where they made a calculator toolbox to build one in order to prevent him demanding seemingly arbitrary changes all the time. https://www.…

Exactly. Look not at the requirements but at the likely space for requirements over time and build an engine that can be tuned/tweaked/configed to meet all the likely requirements. Makes testing a little harder but makes dev and product happy.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#255

Post by resiros »

The code for the demo is open-source (https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui/blob/main/app/api/toHtml...). The prompt they use interesting:

You are an expert web developer who specializes in tailwind css. A user will provide you with a low-fidelity wireframe of an application. You will return a single html file that uses HTML, tailwind css, and JavaScript to create a high fidelity website. Include any extra CSS and JavaScript in the html file. If you have any images, load them from Unsplash or use solid colored retangles. The user will provide you with notes in blue or red text, arrows, or drawings. The user may also include images of other websites as style references. Transfer the styles as best as you can, matching fonts / colors / layouts. They may also provide you with the html of a previous design that they want you to iterate from. Carry out any changes they request from you. In the wireframe, the previous design's html will appear as a white rectangle. Use creative license to make the application more fleshed out. Use JavaScript modules and unkpkg to import any necessary dependencies

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#256

Post by code_runner »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #129
code_runner wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so that you never have to set realistic expectations" is a great way to do business. Being worse at your job on purpose isn't typically a great strategy. It sounds to me like the commenter has found a subset of his work which can be sped up significantly with chatGPT and is using that to continue conversations with a potential client. Pretty cool if you ask me.

> I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so that you never have to set realistic expectations" is a great way to do business. It’s called Expectation Management. It’s how successful business is done. Marketing 101: Under promise, over deliver. P.S. Apple is quite good at this IMHO. I notice they often very quickly go from product announcement to product availability. My theory for why this is good is that…

i'm not replying about the concept of under promise, over deliver, but more like.... why would you avoid a tool that helps you do something quickly because you don't want to explain to your client that some steps aren't as fast to do as others.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#257

Post by pclmulqdq »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #239
maaaaattttt wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure? I remember one of Dreamweaver competitive advantages was that it produced much cleaner HTML than it's competitors. FrontPage was the big offender with awful code.

Toward the end of its life, Dreamweaver's code was quite readable. Webflow today is kind of an equivalent, and also puts out relatively readable HTML. I think most of the reputation comes from people looking at its early output.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#258

Post by andreygrehov »

smcleod wrote: post #10

Ugh Twitter / X. That site needs to die - it’s honestly so broken, none of the redirects seem to work today.

What redirects? Everything works fine. Not a single time I experienced any issue with Twitter since the acquisition.

Interesting fact is that according to the statistics of DownDetector, Twitter is more stable now. It was down more often prior to the acquisition.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#259

Post by code_runner »

znpy wrote: post #144
toyg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the customer will be impressed by your speed the first time. The second time, he will expect it. The third time, when requirements have grown enough to be beyond what ChatGPT can deal with, he'll be angry that timescales have exploded.

> The third time, when requirements have grown enough to be beyond what ChatGPT can deal with, he'll be angry that timescales have exploded. Or worse, they'll feel they've been scammed, and that you're a fraud. AI or not it's not a good strategy, in life and in business, to lie regarding on what you can actually do/deliver.

its a tool. use the tool. I don't care if the house is built using an old fashioned hammer or a nail gun. I do care if you used nails when you should've used something else, or used the wrong nails.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#260

Post by Biganon »

I don't get what's so amazing in the demo

It takes seconds to pick a button and place it somewhere. Is it really so much better to let an AI guess that a green rectangle is supposed to be a button?

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