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Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

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Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#121

Post by spaceman_2020 »

azemetre wrote: post #111
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you do know that there are other kinds of freelancing apart from coding, right?

I think the comment is fair. The poster came across as inexperienced with programming when in reality they have a decade plus experience. I trust experience people can make better use of these tools because ideally they should have a foundation of first principles to work off of whereas inexperienced people jumping straight into LLMs may not be fully understanding what is happening or what they are given.

I don’t have a decade of coding experience. I do have almost two decades of internet experience, especially marketing. I had an aborted attempt at learning to code back in 2013-14, but I never stuck around, mostly because I was freelancing as a content marketer (GrowthPub.com)

My first real coding experience was when I joined a bootcamp (Code.in bootcamp) in 2022. Only reason I could stick around this time was because I had a chunk of change after selling my agency and had nothing else to do

I’m a humanities grad for what its worth

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#122

Post by mvdtnz »

CtrlAltmanDel wrote: post #112

What a feat! There's at least 3 pages of google search results for the nearly same thing. The "prompt" I used in google.com is: site:github.com map comparison I guess the difference, is that my way uses dramatically less time and resources, but requires directly acknowledging the original coders instead of relying on the plagiarism-ish capabilities of reguritating something through an LLM.

But creating things for which there are many existing, documented examples is what LLMs do best. Without this use case it's almost like they don't provide any value at all.

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#123

Post by spaceman_2020 »

imiric wrote: post #116
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? I find it exhilarating I’m able to bring ideas to life that I could only think about before

Honestly? These were ideas that you put a lot of thought into? All your sites are essentially wrappers around LLMs. You don't disclose which models or APIs you use in the backend, so did you train your own models, or are you proxying to an existing service? Your T&C and Privacy Policy is generic nonsense. What happens to the data your users upload? ThumbnailGenius.com has an example thumbnail of a person with 4 finge…

These are not the things I wanted to create, but its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping. I did that with MetaHacker which, under the hood, is very capable. But because I spent so much time building it, I never got around to marketing it or monetizing it, so much of it is abandoned and only 1/10th of it is live for end users.

So for my future projects, I told myself I will only spend at most a month working on them. Learn to launch and get users before spending months just building

There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

I spent almost ten years as a b2b marketer. All the clients I worked with were established businesses that needed some scale and direction.

I quickly learned that growing a 10M ARR business with established pipelines is a whole lot different than building something from scratch. This is my attempt to go from 0 to 1 as fast as possible and learn as much as I can before diving into bigger things

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#124

Post by spaceman_2020 »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #63
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #25

I have about 6 months of coding experience. All I really knew was how to build a basic MERN app I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 to code and I’ve managed to build multiple full fledged apps, including paid ones Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work and I’ve had no complaints yet. They might not scale to become the next Facebook, but not everything has to scale

I'm not saying you're wrong at all or in disbelief -- but I've spent lots of time with Claude 3.5 trying to prototype React apps and not even full fledged prototypes -- and I can't get it to make anything bug free somehow. Maybe I'm "holding it wrong" -- I mean using it incorrectly. True it renders quite interesting mockups and has React code behind it -- but then try and get this into even a demoable state for your…

You have to temper your ambitions. Choose languages it understands well. Deploy on vercel. Specify exactly what you’re working with (“I’m using nextjs 14 with app router”)

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#125

Post by vunderba »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #61
njtransit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share some examples?

ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor) MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it) GoUnfaked.com PlaybookFM.com TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)

With the lower barrier to entry comes dozens of nearly "apps" that are nearly indistinguishable from each other.

ThumbnailGenius

There's already several sites that generate YT thumbnails with AI:

https://vidiq.com/ai-thumbnails-generator/

https://www.testmythumbnails.com/create-thumbnails-with-ai

PlaybookFM

AI Podcasts have been a thing for a while - though I can't imagine who finds listening to TTS voices with LLM content particularly engaging over a genuine person who puts time and effort into crafting an engaging personality.

GoUnfaked

I don't really understand the point of this one - it generates photorealistic AI pictures? Isn't that exactly what Getty Images AI, Freepik, etc. are all doing already?

Good luck - but this feels like a very "spray and pray" approach to development. It feels like it has the same probability to generate genuine income as people who try to start Patreon pages for their AI "artwork".

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#126

Post by spaceman_2020 »

kenjackson wrote: post #98
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as much as I would have if I was writing everything from scratch. But then again, my goal isn’t to be a coder or get a job as a coder - I’m primarily a marketer and got into coding simply because I had a stack of ideas I wanted to experiment with Most of the things I’ve built are fun things See: GoUnfaked.com and PlaybookFM.com as examples PlaybookFM.com is interesting because everything from the code to the podc…

I’ve had the same experience, except helping complement build components or scripts. Everyone on HN tells me how LLMs are horrible, yet I’ve saved literally hundreds of hours with them so far. I guess we’re just lucky.

Look at the replies on my comment

This place is far gone. Some of the most close minded, uncurious people in tech

I don’t think this place deserves to be called “Hacker” News anymore

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#127

Post by sails »

lucianbr wrote: post #67
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #25

I have about 6 months of coding experience. All I really knew was how to build a basic MERN app I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 to code and I’ve managed to build multiple full fledged apps, including paid ones Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work and I’ve had no complaints yet. They might not scale to become the next Facebook, but not everything has to scale

I learned to drive before in-car GPS was widely available, at least where I lived. Going to some new place meant getting a map, looking at it, making a plan, following the plan, keeping track on the map, that sort of thing. Then I traveled somewhere new, for the first time, with GPS and a navigation sofware. It was quite impressive, and rather easier. I got to my destination the first time, without any problems. And…

Wondering around a new city today I had a similar thought.

Prior to an iPhone I’d have the general lay of a city memorised within 10min of landing, using a paper tourist map, and probably never feel disoriented, let alone lost.

This morning I walked 2 blocks further than needed (of a 1 block walk) because I wasn’t at all oriented while following Google maps.

I won’t spell out the AI comparison, other than I think more “apps” will be created, and predictable “followed the GPS off a bridge” revelations.

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#128

Post by spaceman_2020 »

vunderba wrote: post #125
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor) MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it) GoUnfaked.com PlaybookFM.com TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)

With the lower barrier to entry comes dozens of nearly "apps" that are nearly indistinguishable from each other. ThumbnailGenius There's already several sites that generate YT thumbnails with AI: https://vidiq.com/ai-thumbnails-generator/ https://www.testmythumbnails.com/create-thumbnails-with-ai PlaybookFM AI Podcasts have been a thing for a while - though I can't imagine who finds listening to TTS voices with LLM c…

I have at least 10 people signing up for thumbnailgenius every day when I haven’t even started marketing it

So hey, maybe its not revolutionary, but some people find it useful enough

Which is fine by me. Maybe you can tackle changing the world. I’ll just focus on being useful enough to some people

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#129

Post by imiric »

lxgr wrote: post #100
thefourthchime wrote: post #93

For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. It's enabling me to use frameworks I barely know, like React Native, Swift, etc.. The first prompt (with o1) will get you 60% there, but then you have a different workflow. The prompts can get to a local minimum, where claude/gpt4/etc.. just can't do any be…

> For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. This is one fact that people seem to severely under-appreciate about LLMs. They're significantly worse at coding in many aspects than even a moderately skilled and motivated intern, but for my hobby projects, until now I haven't had any intern that would…

I'm curious: what do you do when the LLM starts hallucinating, or gets stuck in a loop of generating non-working code that it can't get out of? What do you do when you need to troubleshoot and fix an issue it introduced, but has no idea how to fix?

In my experience of these tools, including the flagship models discussed here, this is a deal-breaking problem. If I have to waste time re-prompting to make progress, and reviewing and fixing the generated code, it would be much faster if I wrote the code from scratch myself. The tricky thing is that unless you read and understand the generated code, you really have no idea whether you're progressing or regressing. You can ask the model to generate tests for you as well, but how can you be sure they're written correctly, or covering the right scenarios?

More power to you if you feel like you're being productive, but the difficult things in software development always come in later stages of the project[1]. The devil is always in the details, and modern AI tools are just incapable of getting us across that last 10%. I'm not trying to downplay their usefulness, or imply that they will never get better. I think current models do a reasonably good job of summarizing documentation and producing small snippets of example code I can reuse, but I wouldn't trust them for anything beyond that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule

Re: Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

#130

Post by 7thpower »

ipaddr wrote: post #51
caspg wrote: post #2

I wanted to develop a simple tool to compare maps. I thought about using this opportunity to try out Claude AI for coding a project from scratch. It worked surprisingly well! At least 95% of the code was generated by AI (I reached the limit so had to add final bits on my own).

I asked Claude AI to make me an app and it refused and called it dangerous. I asked what kind of apps they could build and they suggested social media or health. So I asked it to make one but it refused too dangerous. I asked it to make anything.. anything app and it refused. I told it it sucked and it said it didn't. Then I deleted my account. I can't think of a worse llm than Claude.

There have been rumors of the system prompt changing for some services if the user had strikes on their account from earlier conversations. I wonder if you were impacted by this because what you described has not been my experience nor have I seen it discussed previously.
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