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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

#331
post #4

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

Don't worry, in 5 years it will just be another layer in the JS dev stack, so then not only the version of npm, dependencies, docker, and 3 API keys have to match but you'll also need the correct commit of the 20GB LLM so the build doesn't fail. All for the sake of simplicity and increased productivity, of course.

required dependency: leftpad-ai-gpt4

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't use these tools (I do backend dev), so perhaps I'm mistaken, but the benefits here are, I assume, a) For UX people who have minimal programming knowledge but need to produce mockups. b) For people like me who might want a basic UX to start with for demo purposes.

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Re: I think I need to go lie down

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You made me chuckle but that could realistically be some form of art in the near future.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#334
post #277

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.

Disagree, it's a very conscious choice from having been burned repeatedly by being asked to do something leftfield.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#335
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean who cares about hypothetical benchmarks - when I try to apply these tools they fail more often than not.

The only tool I can say I'm reliably using is Copilot context aware completions work very nicely and it's easy to get used to when it will be usefull and when it wont so it improves productivity.

Copilot chat interface is terrible - I gues it tries to be stingy about the context tokens it's always so much hassle to get it to do anything useful - takes more explaining than doing a google search and read.

ChatGPT is hallucinating so much, mostly in times you want it to hallucinate the least.

I've tried using Midjurney and DALLE to generate placeholder art and memes - it's worse than ChatGPT.

I've built stuff on top of the API and it's very inconsistent and falls apart at totally random unexpected places (not to mention undeterministic).

I want these tools to work, but they are just so inconsistent and introduce so strange failure cases I'm not used to that it's just more trouble than worth over existing workflows.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#336

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.

You're right, chatGPT and AIs will go nowhere.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#337
post #291

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.

We're so close! Now we just need to reinvent Flash and life will be complete again.

Inb4 wasm with native extensions

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#338
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the goalposts have changed. Websites (not webapps) are one of the easiest things to automate because the patterns used are ultra-predictable. All the way back in 2017, there was a semi-vaporware startup called theGrid.io that was going to automate that using prompts. It went dark in 2020:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399357

GPT 3.5 should be able to handle this functionality easily on the basis of these demos yet a full-fledged product that does this has yet to make an appearance. Squarespace, Wordpress page builders should be all over this, yet they're not. Neither are any "disruptors" like Webflow. Maybe they know something that Hello World prototyper does not?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#339
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing I tell my toddler any time he gains a new skill and people try to act impressed. Like bro come on I've been doing that for literal decades.

Did your toddler get billions of dollar from MS?

Do you think he'd be further along if he did? He'd likely spend it all on cars.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#340

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…

That is pretty compelling. Probably another layer you use by default but can swipe to the gui search layer or full control. As usual, nerds will default to full control.
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