Does this export to HTML/JS/CSS and if so, is the code on par with what a good dev would write?
Dreamweaver's output was terrible. Figma's is decent but still requires a good deal of cleanup to fall in line with best practices.
I think I need to go lie down
321–330 of 475 posts
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#322I 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!
And don't forget this stunt took some kilos of Co2 released in the atmosphere to run the AI.
I would like to see an actual report on this
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's also a shit document platform even though that is what it was designed for.
It's really a quick hack that got mass adopted and then became the center of gravity due to network effects.
... like DOS, Unix, BASIC, JavaScript, and loads of other things we got stuck with at various times.
Network effects are a force of nature that doesn't care about you. They are not your friend.
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#324Such 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…
I'm far from an AI booster, but I notice that the "AI-powered coding" goal posts keep moving as soon as something is accomplished. Ten years ago, if you showed someone a text box where you could type "Write me a C++ Hello World program" and it actually would do it, it would have been considered wizardry. Then, it became "Well, sure... it can only write Hello World--what good is that?" Now, it's "Well, sure... it can do basic slider controls, who needs such a toy app?" What's next? "Oh, the full first person shooter game it conjured up from a prompt is generic and uncreative. Who would want to play that?"
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
... and our opinions about how badly this is going to pan out are based on decades of experience with how badly that panned out.
Nobody that has ever had to maintain software is going to look at this and be impressed. Without a reproducible and predictable set of transforms from the source artifact to the product artifact(s), maintenance of software generated in this fashion will be impossible. The concept of a "localized" change doesn't exist; you have to assume that any and every change risks breaking the entire product.
This is, of course, just another version of folks looking at something that mimics a (structured, evolved) human activity and assuming that it is in fact reproducing that activity, rather than just copying some subset of the visible consequences of that activtiy.
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#326interesting content but this title was very clickbaity for hacker news
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#327Earlier 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 have enjoyed using windowbuilder and formdev when I need a desktop gui
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Where do you think it got the game logic from?
Recall that this is an LLM; it doesn't "think", it's just cutting and pasting "likely" scraps of things from its training set. At this point, the vast majority of those scraps were human-generated, so a) many of them work, and b) copying them in this fashion is plagiarism ("the offense of taking passages from another's compositions, and publishing them, either word for word or in substance, as one's own")
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Almost none of those get i18n, hotkeys, shortcuts, taborder, screenreaders and other accessibility right.
Most users don't care about any of that, either. And I would argue that i18n and l10n belong outside your language's framework (and obviously outside CSS).
You mean "I don't care about any of that".
We know this, you don't need to tell us (and it makes your argument weaker that you did...).
Re: I think I need to go lie down
#330Ugh Twitter / X. That site needs to die - it’s honestly so broken, none of the redirects seem to work today.
I installed this extension, it made me hate Twitter less by not having to use it. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
That's fine but why should it be on me? It should just be HN policy to not accept twitter as article links. They're effectively paywalled. If people must, they should be submitting nitter etc links.