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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

#51

Post by tluyben2 »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #44
tluyben2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I majored AI as well in the AI winter, but now that it is hot again I still cannot see how it helps here, but I, as I too love AI, hope you show us something!

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

#52

Post by tluyben2 »

nickcassimatis wrote: post #42
tluyben2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I guess there is the sliding scale; I really find the term AI and now ML overused. For a subset of all these topics they are active research but for practical uses there are enough methods that have not been research for decade(s). Those I am referring to. As in the broad definition our MySQL auto optimizer is AI but they are just run of the mill algos everyone knows. Anyway; I am curious!

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

#53

Post by _9vpl »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #48
nickcassimatis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Soooo tired of companies "democratizing" things.

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

#54

Post by ndnxhs »

xapata wrote: post #50
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.

You could label anything AI. Might as well call my if statement AI

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

#55

Post by nickcassimatis »

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?

To do some advanced customization of how an app looks would require some javascript, but if they are happy with the UI we provide by default, then they could build some nontrivial stuff.

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

#57

Post by nickcassimatis »

tluyben2 wrote: post #52
nickcassimatis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I guess there is the sliding scale; I really find the term AI and now ML overused. For a subset of all these topics they are active research but for practical uses there are enough methods that have not been research for decade(s). Those I am referring to. As in the broad definition our MySQL auto optimizer is AI but they are just run of the mill algos everyone knows. Anyway; I am curious!

Yes, in a sense, all computing is AI. Alan Turing was explicit in his writings that he was trying to create machine intelligence and that he saw Turing Machines as a formalization of behavior he attributed to intelligence.

Thanks for the curiosity.

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

#58

Post by nickcassimatis »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #48
nickcassimatis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't a snarky response, but a sincere question: how would you have titled the article or expressed our mission? It's difficult to come up with something that's clear and captures our intent while also fitting into a single sentence. We'll take any help on that we can get.

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

#59

Post by JamesAdir »

I understand the use of AI is mandatory this days for any startups, but basically this is Microsoft Access 2019 if it was online. Access once solved the problem of creating small inhouse applications for departmental use. Since then a magnitude of online services offered the same solutions, so you don't need to create anything from scratch now.

I'm sure there is a market for Dry.io solution, just can't estimate how big it really is.

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

#60

Post by onion2k »

jmickey wrote: post #26
PostOnce wrote: post #5

Earlier 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? :)

Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)

Only within the set of predefined functionality that can be specified in the dry.io JSON config file. If you want anything outside of that you'll still need a developer. I guess it's possible dry.io will have thousands of components that covers 90% of what each and every app does eventually, but until then most people who try it will bump up against it's limitations very quickly. The hard part will be keeping them on the platform.

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