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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

#41

Post by nickcassimatis »

taneq wrote: post #39
nickcassimatis wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

> 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. The thing is, 90%+ of the time spent developing software is spent figuring out precisely what you want everything to do. Once you actually know what you want, producing the code is pretty straightforward. Rapid application development systems are always a tradeoff…

I agree that figuring out exactly what you want is a lot of work. Our platform only helps there in that it makes it faster to iterate through different guesses at what you might want to arrive at what you do want.

However, once you do know exactly what you want, it is still often a lot of work to actually build it in many cases. Say you wanted to build an exact clone of Slack (even v1 of Slack) It would still take weeks of effort at at the very least to build and deploy that.

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

#42

Post by nickcassimatis »

tluyben2 wrote: post #40
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.

Yes, I understand that point, but all you explain and all I read about Dry can be done with a bunch of handcoded rules and some constraints engine or solver. The scepticism comes from everyone calling everything AI just because it attracts press + investors. I would love to (beta) test your solution whenever you are ready anyway.

Even if you are correct about doing it with rules and a constraint solver, rule-based systems and constraint solving systems are all AI methods. Constraint solving especially is still a very active topic of AI research and something I myself researched once.

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

#43

Post by dwd »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #3
PostOnce wrote: post #2

Again? Can this end with anything other than failure? It'd be nice if it could, but that seems outside the realm of possibility. Aside from this never having worked, and being, so far as we can all tell, incompatible with the level of fine-tuning to everything from the backend to the pixel positions of the UI that people want, there are very serious problems with the business model (or absence thereof) Some telling s…

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…

Hi Nick

I've had some experience around Model Driven Design and code generation tools for building web apps using technology such as the Eclipse EMF and Ecore for modelling common components.

How do you differentiate your software from that space?

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

#44

Post by nickcassimatis »

tluyben2 wrote: post #40
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.

Yes, I understand that point, but all you explain and all I read about Dry can be done with a bunch of handcoded rules and some constraints engine or solver. The scepticism comes from everyone calling everything AI just because it attracts press + investors. I would love to (beta) test your solution whenever you are ready anyway.

But I understand your reaction. I personally love AI and started working on it during the "AI winter" when everyone told me it was career suicide. I've been to AI conference where the keynote was on ordinary A/B testing, which Sir Francis Bacon invented ~400 years ago. Web developers have been using that for almost two decades, but it was presented as a new kind of AI magic just last year at a conference.

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

#45

Post by nickcassimatis »

dwd wrote: post #43
nickcassimatis wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

Hi Nick I've had some experience around Model Driven Design and code generation tools for building web apps using technology such as the Eclipse EMF and Ecore for modelling common components. How do you differentiate your software from that space?

Our approach is very model-driven. Three differences/innovations with respect to that work are that 1. the models we use have a few additional elements that lead to a much wider range of apps that can be created, 2. we have a way of overriding what's generated from the model by default and 3., the software behavior we generate from the model includes more elements of the conventional modern software stack (search, authentication, sharing, etc.)

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

#46

Post by jmickey »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #29
jmickey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In our company, business analysts are relatively technical - they know their way around databases and understand SQL better than most developers. They do create complicated data workflows as ETL jobs, but they are not developers.

Is it a stretch to say that dry.io would enable these people to take on simple development tasks that would be currently done by programmers?

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

#47

Post by IshKebab »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #36
marcell wrote: post #35

I'm trying to understand how this would actually work. A lot of app development for a mid-size CRUD app is around encoding business logic and handling edge cases. Let's take a specific example. Say I'm writing a software to help manage weekly CSA (box of veggies) deliveries. Sometimes a driver will miss a delivery, and in that case, you want three options: (1) Fully refund the customer for that week (2) Let them anot…

Yes. We have an event language where you basically can say "IF X happens do Y".

Sounds like normal programming...

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

#48

Post by TimTheTinker »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #27
TimTheTinker wrote: post #21

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.

So you wanted the headline to be more dry?

I'm just saying I might have read the article if the headline explained using fewer buzzwords.

[pithy word].io, democratize (that doesn’t mean anything anymore), AI (everything is AI these days)

Without more descriptive words, it seems to mean simultaneously a whole lot and not very much.

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

#49

Post by dwd »

jmickey wrote: post #46
nickcassimatis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In our company, business analysts are relatively technical - they know their way around databases and understand SQL better than most developers. They do create complicated data workflows as ETL jobs, but they are not developers. Is it a stretch to say that dry.io would enable these people to take on simple development tasks that would be currently done by programmers?

Business analysts are generally good at writing system requirements using BDD style syntax.

From that you construct the required model, which is then generated as code.

Getting from a model to code is pretty well covered.

Parsing the business requirements into a model whether via decision trees, or a generative adversarial network is the tricky bit.

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

#50

Post by xapata »

ndnxhs wrote: post #22

I 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…

Artificial intelligence is a superset of, not equivalent to statistical machine learning.
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