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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

#351

Post by callalex »

andreygrehov wrote: post #258
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.

Downdetector is completely unscientific and based on user reports. It could also be that way fewer people use the website now, so nobody is making reports to downdetector.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#352

Post by dghlsakjg »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #264
gtirloni wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software world is much more flexible than the real world (yeah , I know, you're taking to Sherlock here). Go to a civil engineer and ask to create a building that tilts extremely on one side and requires concrete reinforcement with titanium whatever... they will laugh at you. Do the equivalent to a software engineer or product manager and they will hurry to invent yet another framework to satisfy your request, wi…

I don't think this is about flexibility. It's more about culture. Software engineering culture does not value simplicity, and actually seems to value complexity. Other engineering cultures place a lot more value on simplicity, and its associated values of reliability and risk mitigation. A civil engineer can build you that building, but they will think "what a ridiculous architect." With a software engineering mindse…

Clearly, you haven't worked on German automobiles.

There is no one so willing to do things the hard way as a German car engineer trying to implement something that has existed for decades, and functions perfectly in standardized form.

I'm only half kidding.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#353

Post by madhato »

paxys wrote: post #224

All the developers out there who make demos for scaling and rotating a box are about to lose their jobs!

Scale

Rotation

const transformSquare = () => square.style.transform = `scale(${scale.value}) rotate(${rotation.value}deg)`; transformSquare();

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#354

Post by roflyear »

rafaelmn wrote: post #335
ryandrake wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I agree - largely. ChatGPT cannot program for me (it fails on anything that is a bit more complicated than very-common problems). It cannot write a good algo for me (unless the algo is a very standard one, if so, why do I need it to write it?). It gives incorrect information, a lot of the time. The docs it is trained on are outdated, many times methods, etc.. it suggests no longer exist, or the API endpoint has been deprecated. It doesn't seem to have a "sense of time" meaning it seems just as likely to suggest data from 10 years ago as data from 1 year ago.

But there are some times, where something is behaving very strangely, and ChatGPT helps me work through it. Examples are complex SQL queries, quickly combining existing queries, oddities in CSS, etc..

It may not give super-accurate answers, but at least it gives something that I can work with or work on.

I think this makes it a valuable tool, but it's not going to replace developers. Well, sure. Some people will just use ChatGPT rather than hire a programmer - I've worked with business owners who learned to code rather than hire programmers. I don't expect different results in either of these cases, the code will be very flawed, have huge security issues, and not be maintainable.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#355

Post by roflyear »

ilaksh wrote: post #213
geraldwhen wrote: post #23

Squarespace, Wix etc have already taken the bottom of the market, and if they hadn’t, Indian outsourcing would have anyway. This is the logical progression of those same concepts. If I were a product manager at a website builder, I’d be all over integrating ai builders like this. It will never work for barely defined complex business tasks, but it might do fine to create a cost estimator for a photography business, f…

Why do you think it can only work for trivial tasks? That's just denial. Business process workflow software is quite popular. There are many applications where people do something similar with drag and drop/interactive widget editors and they can have complex forms, parent-child, state transitions, etc. Using something like GPT Vision means you can skip the widget drag and drop and use more freeform drawing tools or…

Because so far it has only worked on trivial tasks? That isn't denial: it's stating fact.

Business process workflow software is popular, but have massive downsides. These softwares consume massive amount of resources. One dev becomes one dev plus a business person plus another person plus overhead.

> Using something like GPT Vision means you can skip the widget drag and drop and use more freeform drawing tools or freehand sketching.

To do... what? Where does the UI go? Where does the data go? Where is it stored? How is it accessed? How is security? How are backups? Version control? Etc..

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#356

Post by roflyear »

spoiler wrote: post #61
croes wrote: post #38

That's the equivalent of a todo app. How about something more complicated?

I think the point isn't something for AI to do the hard complicated parts for us, but help us with the boring repetitive ones that pop up all the time. Making forms UI is one of those. The challenging part here is creating the design language or style guide) and I plementing the business logic once the form gets validated (which AI could generate code for, too).

Often it's really hard to integrate something like this vs. writing it yourself.

An example I recently had was, I was handed a UI kit from a product team. Ok, fine. We only wanted to use about 10% of the kit - basic interface elements. OK.

It took me a long time massaging that into what I wanted, because it was a bit of a mess, honestly. And I'm still dealing with random issues that pop up in their CSS.

It takes me a few minutes to create a form: but if what I get back is some insanity that I can't read, and each time I get a new form it gives me different flavors of that, well, it's going to add up and be a huge pain to maintain.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#357

Post by Chris2048 »

withinboredom wrote: post #176
lovasoa wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business. I usually see this in places/cultures that value code-beautification projects rather than delivering value to the customer. Sometimes, they even want to do the latter, but actually do the former. If you work somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever…

> somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever get fixed

Value, or short-term value? When the codebase gets hard to manage, the value is there.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#358

Post by maaaaattttt »

karaterobot wrote: post #261
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.

I used Dreamweaver significantly back in the day, and use Figma professionally today. I see what you're saying, but there's no question about them being equivalent in functionality, except insofar as I do not consider generated code from either of them particularly useful. In that respect they are the same, but in every other way Figma is 100 times better.

Completely agree. Was trying to find the current parallel of the design to code process. But there is no doubt dreamweaver is almost not comparable to Figma (at least the version I knew).

As others mentioned the closest descendant of dreamweaver today is most likely Webflow.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#359

Post by frenchyatwork »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #264
gtirloni wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software world is much more flexible than the real world (yeah , I know, you're taking to Sherlock here). Go to a civil engineer and ask to create a building that tilts extremely on one side and requires concrete reinforcement with titanium whatever... they will laugh at you. Do the equivalent to a software engineer or product manager and they will hurry to invent yet another framework to satisfy your request, wi…

I don't think this is about flexibility. It's more about culture. Software engineering culture does not value simplicity, and actually seems to value complexity. Other engineering cultures place a lot more value on simplicity, and its associated values of reliability and risk mitigation. A civil engineer can build you that building, but they will think "what a ridiculous architect." With a software engineering mindse…

The culture is derived from the economics though. Software engineers who value simplicity don't get promoted, or their software is not as successful, because the other engineers who produce complex software produce results that users are attracted to and the cost of that complexity is not so great as to completely ruin it (at least not at first).

On top of that, a little bit of software can be used by a lot of people, but a little bit of building usually can't, so unless you're Gaudí building the Sagrada Família, nobody really wants to spend a couple centuries building a complex building.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#360

Post by bluefirebrand »

ilaksh wrote: post #290
bluefirebrand wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you hire an architect to design a house, then make some adjustments to the blueprint before it gets built, it doesn't make you an architect. In fact if you give your adjusted design to builders and have it made without consulting an architect first, you have a good chance of unknowingly violating some building code somewhere.

Similarly if you use a code generating tool written by a software engineer and then adjust the code output, it doesn't make you a software engineer.

Yes, software engineers can use those tools, but they're limiting their growth as engineers if they rely too heavily on those tools.

If that's peer pressure, then I am unapologetic about it. I'm not hiring people who can't build their own code to work as software engineers.

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