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Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

medium.freecodecamp.org

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Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#81

Post by NathanCH »

Rexxar wrote: post #76
candu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really have to crap all over this person's work? It's clearly intended as a learning exercise / tutorial written by someone who's in the process of learning themselves, and not as "breaking news" or a production-ready system. IMHO we should be encouraging this sort of engaged learning.

If he just try to learn something it is unappropriate to start the article with this sentence : "Within three years, deep learning will change front-end development. It will increase prototyping speed and lower the barrier for building software."

In three years software like this would absolutely change front-end development. Already is front-end development constantly progressing every year.

PSD to HTML services were outsourced a decade ago for a reason.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#82

Post by sebringj »

m3kw9 wrote: post #79

What’s the point of the code isn’t human readable? You need to train the AI to write code that is easily modifiable with low dependencies. Otherwise the conversion isn’t very useful for anything unless your page is completely static

Right but what if we didn't have to code anymore? Who would be reading it? Meaning, we don't worry about compiler readability anymore, we used to when assembly was fine tweaked etc. Just a thought. I work on full stack including front end animations etc but frankly its tiring and time consuming work to do that. Imagine if code was just you talking to it or showing it some whiteboards, then you would just talk to it again or show it other whiteboards. Code doesn't matter in that case.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#84

Post by sebringj »

sebringj wrote: post #82
m3kw9 wrote: post #79

What’s the point of the code isn’t human readable? You need to train the AI to write code that is easily modifiable with low dependencies. Otherwise the conversion isn’t very useful for anything unless your page is completely static

Right but what if we didn't have to code anymore? Who would be reading it? Meaning, we don't worry about compiler readability anymore, we used to when assembly was fine tweaked etc. Just a thought. I work on full stack including front end animations etc but frankly its tiring and time consuming work to do that. Imagine if code was just you talking to it or showing it some whiteboards, then you would just talk to it a…

Sorry replying to my own thread... I was just thinking, it all comes down to your will. Who will have the greatest will and orchestration of all these AIs combining them together. That will be the next thing, well its already happening.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#85

Post by karmakaze »

Honest question: is anyone else sensing some defensiveness here? The timeframe is open to debate but what's more controversial is whether html/css is near the frontier of solvable problems. After AlphaGo, my worldview is changed forever. Glad to be still being valued for something I started out of joy but in no way feel it's not disruptable. Sometimes I even wonder why it hasn't advanced further since it's quite well defined, digital data in/out.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#86

Post by nightski »

This is really cool and I believe necessary work. We need to start thinking about how to automate programming and to free ourselves much further from the mundane. Trust me, there is still plenty of room for people to analyze requirements and come up with a high level solution to people's problems that doesn't require fiddling with float: right and various technical hacks.

That said I wonder if this is the right approach. At some point "AI" as used in this context is just a function mapping from an input domain to an output domain. The output domain in this case, "code" was designed for human readability (whether it succeeded is a whole different approach).

What would a programming language designed for output from an AI system look like? How could we optimize it to reduce the output domain size of the function the AI has to train to learn? How could we optimize it to make the problem more tractable for machines? I feel like there is an entire field of research here. Maybe it has already been studied and I am just late to the game.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#88

Post by vtange »

sebringj wrote: post #82
m3kw9 wrote: post #79

What’s the point of the code isn’t human readable? You need to train the AI to write code that is easily modifiable with low dependencies. Otherwise the conversion isn’t very useful for anything unless your page is completely static

Right but what if we didn't have to code anymore? Who would be reading it? Meaning, we don't worry about compiler readability anymore, we used to when assembly was fine tweaked etc. Just a thought. I work on full stack including front end animations etc but frankly its tiring and time consuming work to do that. Imagine if code was just you talking to it or showing it some whiteboards, then you would just talk to it a…

It's unlikely we will leapfrog from human-written code to relying on black-box generated code in one step. Everyone's been pointing to AI being used to augment existing jobs, as opposed to outright replacement.

In order to augment a front-end developer well, we'll need human-readable code, unless we like reading uglified code/make an AI for that too.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#89

Post by sly010 »

I agree with the need, my issue is with reproduceability and generally things that are not defined by the sketch (behavior, different screen sizes, etc). If everything were fully defined, we could just write a compiler from the high level definition to the low level. The real problem is that static 2D images are not good representations of dynamically sized interactive documents.

Re: Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

#90

Post by mattmanser »

vtange wrote: post #88
sebringj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but what if we didn't have to code anymore? Who would be reading it? Meaning, we don't worry about compiler readability anymore, we used to when assembly was fine tweaked etc. Just a thought. I work on full stack including front end animations etc but frankly its tiring and time consuming work to do that. Imagine if code was just you talking to it or showing it some whiteboards, then you would just talk to it a…

It's unlikely we will leapfrog from human-written code to relying on black-box generated code in one step. Everyone's been pointing to AI being used to augment existing jobs, as opposed to outright replacement. In order to augment a front-end developer well, we'll need human-readable code, unless we like reading uglified code/make an AI for that too.

We did with compilers, isn't this analogous?
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