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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#41

Post by morpheuskafka »

This article hints at what I feel is one of the not-yet-realized transformations that LLM coding brings: can we finally drop Electron/React Native and just have LLMs automate the work of transforming Figma/wireframes and behavior specs into truly native apps for each platform?

For CRUD apps, the API spec and UI mockups -- or even a photo of how it looks on the already coded platform -- would go a long way. That's exactly the kind of well defined task work LLMs do well with. It should be possible to automate a lot of the equivalence testing too.

Is there still an excuse for "maybe we'll add Android someday" or "not enough Mac/Linux users"? And is there still a justification for not building those less-used flows like password reset into the iOS app instead of throwing up random WebViews?

For those apps that do have non-trivial logic on device, LLMs have shown a lot of promise at rewriting to cross-compiling-is-easy languages like Go or Rust.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#42

Post by tptacek »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #41

This article hints at what I feel is one of the not-yet-realized transformations that LLM coding brings: can we finally drop Electron/React Native and just have LLMs automate the work of transforming Figma/wireframes and behavior specs into truly native apps for each platform? For CRUD apps, the API spec and UI mockups -- or even a photo of how it looks on the already coded platform -- would go a long way. That's exa…

Yes. You can do that. It works right now. It works really well.

My original spicy take is: why learn SwiftUI at all at this point? It's a skill that, for most tasks, falls into the same kind of bucket as "learning Microsoft Word really, really well". I appreciate people who take the time to do that, but the outcomes are within millimeters of each other whether or not we do that.

I don't think that's true of programming generally. But I think there are languages now where the rationale in specializing in them has gotten, hrm, more complicated.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#43

Post by kanbankaren »

j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

Surprised that Monaspace hasn't been mentioned below.

https://monaspace.githubnext.com/

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#44

Post by alex_smart »

tuo-lei wrote: post #27

i've made maybe 20 personal LLM tools this year. 3 survived past the first week. not because the rest weren't useful, just wasn't willing to debug them when something broke.

Which is where the "emacsification" analogy breaks for me.

The reason people who like emacs write their one-off program in emacs is that it is an extraordinarily introspectable and debuggable programming environment. There is no "code, compile, run" loop - you just write code against the live running environment. Devoid of that fast feedback loop, writing code just isn't as much fun.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#45

Post by ogogmad »

aledem wrote: post #16

I remember how just 5 years ago the majority of speakers were saying how absolutely everyone should learn computer programming. Already many years ago VBA was built to bridge the gap between engineers and other professions. Well, the gap is completely closed now, everyone can do what has been talked about for decades: programming computers. And I suspect even markdown will become obsolete very soon, eliminating this…

Maybe it's a good idea for SWEs to consider using LLMs to train themselves into new careers -- just in case.

Most other "knowledge" professions -- by which I mean teaching, programming, some engineering, and the arts -- are even further along into obsolescence. That said, you can still use the knowledge gained in a knowledge profession to convert into a more hands-on profession. We might have a bit longer before humanoid robots destroy all hands-on job opportunities as well. Once that happens, every person will be equally poor and destitute.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#47

Post by kettlez »

Enjoyable article. I've had the same feeling about native software becoming more accessible with the help of llms. However, I tried the app and opened a large-ish markdown file and immediately had scroll hangs and then the app crashed. Making a small proof of concept is easy, but performance and reliability are still hard.

edit: typo

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#48

Post by QuercusMax »

TFNA wrote: post #38
munk-a wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are great for problem exploration. Especially with the decline of Google I think we're at a point where it's less difficult to get an LLM to spit out something that'll accomplish a task sorta compared to actually finding that on the internet. But if the task is going to be repeated or modified then I think LLMs are at a permanent disadvantage to prebuilt software. Even if that prebuilt software is just someone e…

> Especially with the decline of Google Oddly enough, Google’s LLM is the only one that has been answering my questions well on a research project these last weeks. I’m getting information from scanned text files that exist on the internet but were never adequately OCRed by other LLM companies (i.e. both OCRed at all, and moreover OCRed as the specific language in question that picks up all the diacritics). Google se…

I've found Gemini to be very helpful in figuring out all the fiddly linux problems that used to require reading endless forum posts and digging through docs.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#49

Post by richiebful1 »

j2kun wrote: post #9

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do. > monospaced and thus fatiguing to read. Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king

There's limited research on readability of monospaced font. But this study suggests monospace is weakly more readable than variable-width font:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2897736

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