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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

#281

Post by api »

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!

You're absolutely correct.

When we went to the browser we took 30 years of UI development knowledge and UI/UX principle and flushed it down the toilet.

Only very recently have we started to gain composability in browser UIs through things like React, and it's a sad facsimile of the widget composability we had in WYSIWYG UI development on PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The web is a shit UI platform, but that's because it wasn't designed to be one. UIs were shoehorned into a hypertext system designed for viewing documents.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#282

Post by meheleventyone »

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!

Also old(ish) and agree, everything in here could just be a drag-and-drop component.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#283

Post by bluefirebrand »

ilaksh wrote: post #277
Guvante wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

That's a good rationalization for doing everything manually, but I don't believe it really holds up. I think it comes down to some social psychological effects that as I said are subconscious. So people don't realize it's effecting their decision making. When they decide not to use those tools they will use rationales like you said rather than admitting that they felt peer pressure.

Some people want to be good software developers, not just good website builders.

If you want to use low code website builders, feel free. If that suits your work style and the projects you're building, great.

But you will never develop the skills you need to actually build software. A person who spends their life using website builders instead of writing software will never be able to build their own website builder, for example.

Some of us actually like to have the skills to build the tools ourselves.

If you want to call that peer pressure, then sure. It's peer pressure to elevate your own experience and attain mastery, instead of settling for only ever using tools that other people built for you.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#284

Post by jonnycoder »

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…

This reminds me of what I’ve been saying to friends… we will either see al lot more layoffs of us software engineers or another big boom because the technology is moving way faster than normal humans can learn. Non tech people will just hire software engineers to do it for them.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#285

Post by NoGravitas »

demondemidi wrote: post #193

So does this mean in the future GUIs will be custom and on demand depending on the situational context or personal preference? Did we get every spaceship control room wrong? Where the Star Trek bridge would simply morph into whatever gui objects were necessary? (I can’t imagine them going away entirely and EVERYONE talking to the ships computer as it would be audio chaos and annoying a/f so I guess we’ll always need…

LCARS, the control panel UI in TNG/DS9/VOY/LD was always supposed to be quickly reconfigurable to the task at hand. But the prop implementation was usually sheets of translucent acrylic under glass, which isn't that easy to update.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#286

Post by MattRix »

lolinder wrote: post #228
MattRix wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Human beings build stuff non deterministically too. The key is just to give the tool more information along with the screenshot, for example showing it your current codebase so it writes code using the same conventions.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#287

Post by meheleventyone »

NoGravitas wrote: post #274
mfbx9da4 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I, for one, love to have my code generated non-deterministically. Makes debugging so easy.

I’d just ship drawings and have it generate the code at runtime.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#288

Post by MattRix »

NoGravitas wrote: post #265
MattRix wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

The tic-tac-toe example really makes it clear that oh — this works by plagiarism. Until you see that one, it's kind of easy to forget.

What about that example makes it clear?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#289

Post by eloisant »

hliyan wrote: post #252
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.

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.

That's because things that were made with Frontpage back in the day are not made in HTML/React/GraphQL today.

They're made with Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#290

Post by ilaksh »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #283
ilaksh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good rationalization for doing everything manually, but I don't believe it really holds up. I think it comes down to some social psychological effects that as I said are subconscious. So people don't realize it's effecting their decision making. When they decide not to use those tools they will use rationales like you said rather than admitting that they felt peer pressure.

Some people want to be good software developers, not just good website builders. If you want to use low code website builders, feel free. If that suits your work style and the projects you're building, great. But you will never develop the skills you need to actually build software. A person who spends their life using website builders instead of writing software will never be able to build their own website builder,…

You have perfectly illustrated the peer pressure I am talking about.

By the way, I have been programming for 38 years on many platforms and have built my own drag and drop UI editors and frameworks. I don't use these types of tools today because they are not popular and because of psychological factors as I said. But I still think that it would be more logical if programmers used them more often. And the times that I used them in the past they did increase my productivity.

The types of tools I am talking about often require editing code to customize functionality. They are not no-code tools.

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