You have a lot of buzzwords in that headline. I’m not planning to read TA because the buzzwords made my eyes glaze over.
No offense intended, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing.
Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
21–30 of 85 posts
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#22I read the article but didn't watch the video but isn't this essentially code generation/metaprogramming that we already have? In rails you don't have to write a fraction of the code that actually runs because its generated for you.
Also the AI part is very worrying. To me this sounds like a programming language where no one exactly knows what the rules are and every update to the training model could break everything. Imagine trying to debug an issue when there is no documentation or any knowledge on what is going on.
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#23In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with any sort of inference.
There is a partial answer to this in another thread, but here is a response to your specific point:
It depends what you mean by inference. In statistical machine learning and deep learning, inference means predicting things using large amounts of data. Philosophers call that inductive inference.
But there is also deductive inference. Given some general knowledge (e.g., "All men are mortal") and some facts ("Socrates is a man"), you infer other facts ("Socrates is Mortal"). There is a huge amount of work in AI that has developed algorithms that do very complex and powerful versions of this kind of inference. You can use those to infer from a brief description of what you want a computer to do what the sequence of actions the computer can take to achieve that goal. You can use these kinds of methods to generate software behavior without explicitly programming the behavior in advance.
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#24An interesting difference between this and "traditional compilers" is that since it's targeted to user-facing applications and the output is intentionally hands-off, there are incentives for dry to subvert developers. Imagine inserting unrequested ads or silently reselling end-user analytics for extra money. The developer might never even know, let alone be able to fix it.
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#25In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with any sort of inference.
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
That's a link to a widely-used AI textbook. The methods that most people today associate with AI (i.e., the learning-based inference methods), are only a fraction of the overall content.
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello. I am the founder of this company. I understand your skepticism. It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. We're not claiming that. We're claiming that for a broad range of software (esp., social, messaging, and collaborative software), we can make the development process orders of magnitude faster. Yo…
I appreciate the reply and genuinely hope you succeed, but it seems like an uphill battle and a hard sell. For a trivial CRUD app, the dev can just re-use one they already wrote, no need to learn this layer you've created ... and for a complex CRUD app or something more complicated than that, you're going to need to write real code anyway, so who is the customer? Why would I as a Python, JavaScript, or Ruby webdev le…
I believe that you are not the target audience here.
Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#27You have a lot of buzzwords in that headline. I’m not planning to read TA because the buzzwords made my eyes glaze over. No offense intended, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing.
So you wanted the headline to be more dry?
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#28Cool, 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.
Slightly OT, but on my browser, dry.io is not on https. Big red flag for me. Chrome shows a 'Not Secure' tag for me, plus there is no favicon.
Small things but important. You might want to fix that
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate the reply and genuinely hope you succeed, but it seems like an uphill battle and a hard sell. For a trivial CRUD app, the dev can just re-use one they already wrote, no need to learn this layer you've created ... and for a complex CRUD app or something more complicated than that, you're going to need to write real code anyway, so who is the customer? Why would I as a Python, JavaScript, or Ruby webdev le…
I believe that you are not the target audience here. Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)
Every developer I know has a friend or family member who wants them to write some software for them. The friends and family think it will take a few hours, but it really takes us weeks and skills we often don't have. So the software never gets written. Dry is intended to fix that, and so therefore to help developers be more productive.
Re: Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI
#30I read the article but didn't watch the video but isn't this essentially code generation/metaprogramming that we already have? In rails you don't have to write a fraction of the code that actually runs because its generated for you. Also the AI part is very worrying. To me this sounds like a programming language where no one exactly knows what the rules are and every update to the training model could break everythin…
Re AI, check out the thread where I explain how we don't use training models or conventional machine learning. We use very deterministic.