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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

#381

Post by danenania »

benatkin wrote: post #377
danenania wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree at a high level, it's also important to understand that most of these demos are being carefully cherry-picked. If you are just seeing the viral demos on social media, you're going to think AI is further along than it actually is for more complex tasks. People who are non-technical and not using AI in anger to get real work done are going to be the most susceptible to this. Those in the weeds are general…

I think the examples by naysayers of what AI can’t do are often cherry-picked. The way has been shown with the web. Now many people who would have been paying a designer are using things similar to Wix. A lot of people don’t need top of the line custom work, and most custom work isn’t top of the line. I’ve seen AI frequently, but a bit unpredictably, hit the high notes. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitti…

You know, that’s a great point! Both the negative and positive outliers can be cherry-picked to misrepresent what working with AI is really like in practice. Some want to pretend it’s much further along than it actually is, while some want to pretend it’s all just a flash-in-the-pan. The truth lies, predictably, in between: it’s useful and it’s real, but it’s not consistent or reliable… yet.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#382

Post by solomonb »

ryandrake wrote: post #324
rchaud wrote: 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 think its totally reasonable to move the goalpost when it turns out the original goalpost didn't actually get you anything more then a 'gee-whiz' demo.

If those old goalposts actually helped solve engineering and product needs then there would be huge praise for the achievements.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#383

Post by jfhufl »

renegade-otter wrote: post #347

Anyone remember IBM's Rational Rose? You fed it a UML diagram of what you wanted to do, and it generated C++ stubs. That was two decades ago or more. I tried it once, and that was it. You still had to do the "last 10%" which is the most important 10% in software. These tools are definitely more "magical", but these are essentially an iteration of what we've already had. Code generation from UML was all the rage for a…

Wow, I did something like that for my senior project back in '94 using Inventor on an SGI workstation.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#385

Post by zagrebian »

chatmasta wrote: post #69

I gave it a mockup from a FB interview question (two lists of checkboxes with two buttons to swap checked items between them) and it nailed it: https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/2a2f77d4bfb19c3b28dc...

I checked in a screen reader. Nothing is announced when pressing the buttons. This is a problem. It should say something like “Checkbox B moved to the left”. Without any sort of announcement, the user has no idea if pressing the button did anything.

Test page: https://output.jsbin.com/jixoqur/quiet

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#386

Post by brundolf »

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…

Your company is doing something very wrong, but so are the vast majority of software orgs, including mine. Which maybe casts new light on the OP

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#387

Post by TapWaterBandit »

nilslindemann wrote: post #378

I wonder if it makes sense to learn web development. When I am done in two years, how to find a job which is not already done by an AI? :-(

I think it would make sense to learn web development and use AI alongside it. Seems like no matter what you end up doing working alongside AI tools will be a part of the job so the experience with it will be useful.

If AI advances to the point where large swathes of workers even amongst developers are put out of work, then worrying about your own job is a little beside the point. Will be a large and apparent social issue then. I am still skeptical this will happen but if you had asked me 3 years ago could AI do what it is capable of already by today I would have said with 100% certainty there is not chance so I'm holding back my opinion at this point.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#388

Post by TapWaterBandit »

rchaud wrote: post #196
random_cynic wrote: post #139

ITT: people in denial while the writing on the wall is literally shoved into their face.

Alternatively, ITT: people who have been through the design-to-dev handoff process and understand the comparative advantages of both teams. Tools like this can be good for indie developers, the ones who in the past may have had to learn a bit of dev/design to release something. The division of labour is larger teams is different. The product manager may have a user research background instead of a software one. The d…

I am still erring on the side of skepticism around AI "taking all jobs with computers" but have to admit that seeing the progress has made me doubt my position a bit. Even if it doesn't take ALL jobs and only relatively low level ones that is still an enormous amount of work that will at the very least change drastically.

What really shook me is that GPT-4 can spit out quite solid code for various things. I know there is a lot more to software development than just writing code but if you had asked me 3 years ago if AI would be able to code AT ALL within 10 years I would have said "no chance" with 100% certainty. Had to accept I was very wrong about that and don't have the technical background to really assess how far/fast this stuff can go.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#389

Post by karaterobot »

maaaaattttt wrote: post #358
karaterobot wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hadn't seen that comparison, but Webflow is really cool! I had to make a company website using it a few years ago, because it needed to be maintained by people with no coding skill at all. I found it really awesome. Also, their Youtube tutorials were about the most impressive tutorials I've ever seen, so well produced and fun that I would recommend just watching them as entertainment.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#390

Post by qup »

brundolf wrote: post #320
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!

It has nothing to do with the browser, it has to do with how opinionated your framework is. VB was highly opinionated; it made native windows-style UIs and nothing else. Nobody was taking arbitrary mockups from designers, with a wildly custom look-and-feel, and replicating them down to the pixel in VB. Today, most product GUIs are part of the brand . For better or worse, every company wants a distinctive look and fee…

VB6 allowed you to use bmp files as guis. I built an mp3 player that looked like an artist's pallette, completely curved.

I'm sure it was some monstrosity of a hack. I didn't understand it at the time.

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