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Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

venturebeat.com

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Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#11

Post by sbr464 »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #8
tluyben2 wrote: post #4

Sounds somewhat like Meteorkitchen from reading that story. My feeling is that it will have very little to do with AI, but let’s see.

From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.

Interesting work Nick. I’d love to chat with you directly at some point, since our work overlaps in a few ways.

Best of luck with the launch, definitely interested in helping out with beta testing.

User@gmail

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#12

Post by mbesto »

> Cassimatis believes that Dry.io doesn’t have any competitors.

There is a huge category of providers that do this:

https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterpris...

https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-plat...

I wish tech journalists would do their research.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#13

Post by neya »

Cool, regardless of other commenters' advice, I think you should go forward with this. I run a dev shop and I have done this with Rails and boy, does it save you a lot of time (and thus, money). But, you should ensure there isn't a learning curve for your platform. It should be in a UI that's familiar to someone who is familiar with building their apps manually. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose. As for worrying about pixel perfect designs, don't worry about those, they're the easy part. The difficult part will be the parts that contain the majority of value for a business - the backend. Frontend is as simple us throwing in a nice UI framework and mixing and matching color themes. It is good enough and works well for most clients. The ones that require pixel perfection probably aren't your target audience as it has a lot to do with the frontend than the backend.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of money in this. I sincerely wish you luck and hope you succeed.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#14

Post by sbr464 »

mbesto wrote: post #12

> Cassimatis believes that Dry.io doesn’t have any competitors. There is a huge category of providers that do this: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterpris... https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-plat... I wish tech journalists would do their research.

There were definitely several broad claims made. Without seeing the platform though, within the context claimed, it’s difficult to include the entire low-code industry, especially 80%+ of the logos included in the link you mentioned, being related to an AI driven coding platform, including Salesforce.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#15

Post by nickcassimatis »

ohiovr wrote: post #10

Is the generated code readable?

No. The point is to never have to look at, modify, or understand the underlying code. So, in this sense, it's not a typical code generation tool where if you want to tweak something you need to do a lot of work to find the right place in the code.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#16

Post by nickcassimatis »

neya wrote: post #13

Cool, regardless of other commenters' advice, I think you should go forward with this. I run a dev shop and I have done this with Rails and boy, does it save you a lot of time (and thus, money). But, you should ensure there isn't a learning curve for your platform. It should be in a UI that's familiar to someone who is familiar with building their apps manually. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose. As for worrying abou…

Thanks. I think that's right. There are a lot of use cases where super-precise UI control is not necessary. The early web and many blogging platforms are an example where you can get very far despite some limits on UI customization.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#17

Post by nickcassimatis »

sbr464 wrote: post #11
nickcassimatis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.

Interesting work Nick. I’d love to chat with you directly at some point, since our work overlaps in a few ways. Best of luck with the launch, definitely interested in helping out with beta testing. User@gmail

Thanks. I'll reach out to you offline.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#19

Post by nickcassimatis »

banachtarski wrote: post #9
nickcassimatis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.

Can you speak to what "AI" means in this context?

AI is an element of this in a number of ways. First, though, this is not a platform for writing AI applications. It's a platform for making it faster to write messaging, social, collaborate, productivity, etc. apps much faster than.

One way AI factors in involves finding a core set of primitives that can describe all software functionality. Programming languages and web frameworks are more granular than Dry and so they require you to write a lot more code. Dry has a higher level of abstraction than concepts like arrays, servers, divs, database tables, etc.

On the other hand, Dry is not just a template system that gives you a predefined set of application types like messenger, social network, discussion group, etc. that you can just specify. That's a higher level of abstraction and can be fairly limiting and brittle.

Dry's abstractions are in at a level that is between those two extremes; it lets your write a lot of apps without needing to be too granular.

There is research in AI called "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" that identifies fundamental primitives that can express a wide variety of concepts and ideas. I've been a researcher in this field my whole career and was a professor in that area once. We've translated those results into software and have used them to develop a core set of primitives that let you describe the behavior of a lot of software.

I know that is all vague, but we'll start to be more precise and concrete over the next few weeks.

Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

#20

Post by nickcassimatis »

banachtarski wrote: post #9
nickcassimatis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.

Can you speak to what "AI" means in this context?

Another connection is this:

Part of how Dry works is that you give it a data model for your application (which can be quite complex) and we automatically generate the code for storing, retrieving, sharing, etc. that data. Normally for any cloud app that scales, this takes a fair amount of thought and expertise. We automate a lot of that without the programmer even needing to know it's happening.

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