give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls.
Aligning buttons and agonizing over 18px vs 20px padding is a monumental waste of human capital. 99.999% of coding is basically an interface to a DB (fetch some data, display it, maybe do some basic arithmetic and then save the data).
A machine will do all that drudgery better and quicker. We're not there yet, but the writing is on the wall.
>and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again
you must be new to the job.
I think that says a lot more about the code you perceive than it does about what coding happens in the world.
let's not pretend it's otherwise.
However, that doesn't mean it isn't interesting for data modelling.
I'm very excited to have most of the generic parts automated away
... which involves fetching some data, displaying it, maybe doing some basic arithmetic and then shuffling it off to a DB?
drudgery.
bring the machines on so we don;t have to deal with this nonsense any more.
often in life i find myself reminding myself that everything is just something to do.
serious question, what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits vs not, for lack of a better word.
edit to add: i painted my family's garage in my teens, manually. and i'm thirties now and when i go to my family home i see the painted garage. it never leaves me, the value.
whatever it is, it ain't making websites.
>what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits
painting your garage is getting pretty close to it I think.
I'm disappointed with how unsophisticated modern web development is. Our tools and processes are extremely fragile and error prone, and frequently produce bug ridden junk. So much so that we feel the need to rewrite entire apps every n years if it hasn't already died under it's own weight by then.
The output we produce is 99% predestined by the tooling/framework we are placed in front of. And then we claim to be craftsmen.
Garden, tend land, and do arts.
Can't websites be art too? A mindless CRUD app is framed as such if BigCo tells us to do it for the billionth time.
But if it's our agency that compels us, even tho it's still just glue and CRUD, our pov makes it different for us, and we still have a potential to express ourselves in some way, some tiny way.
So it's not that websites as a thing is somehow un-enlightened. Lowly for the robots.
No, it seems there's Art in anything, art is an expressed point of view. I do agree that human value comes down to Art.
It depends on what you value. If you value efficiency, automation, thinking deeply about new problems, then gen AI will likely free you from what you consider tedium. However, that’s not to say that those are the only valuable characteristics. Painting your family home is a noble, rewarding thing. If you enjoy the work, then it’s worthy.
I guess I still don't see your main point though. There are plenty of tested and compliant style frameworks out there that have figured this stuff out, and they will do it better than whatever Stackoverflow example the AI gives you. If you dont have time to really think about and learn deep or even basic web design, such that you don't spend so much time on your padding, there are a wealth of frameworks and products and tools and templates that solve that problem with intentionality and some basic assurances. From the highest level of squarespace to free coding courses, there is an entire spectrum to meet you halfway.
It just sounds to me like maybe you are burnt out, or maybe you don't like coding stuff as much as others. Which is fine! And if this stuff helps you do your drudgery, that's fine too. But I would just say that you could work even smarter than this (presumably you are using it ).
I would wager using the right dumb tools will in the long run save you more time and enthusiasm than all this, and you will make better stuff, even its "boring" or bad to you. It's a wager I could see losing, at least with the time part, but I'd still make it.
I fully agree that something like this will help keep the bullshit glue we make for our bosses pumping, but is that really something to be so excited for as people are?
. . .
>You are definitely right that most code is banal and glue
looks like you did see my main point.
I was cynical of everything - smartphone incrementalism, slow pace of biology developments, social media. It didn't look like the hope and promise of the 1950's and 60's jet packs and robots would ever pan out. You'll probably find historical comments I've made on HN criticizing Ray Kurzweil and his like for their "bullshit Singularity" (as I used to call it). I firmly believed we had plateaued as a society.
With everything going on in AI/ML, I feel wrong about my assessment and finally have hope for the future. This is the automation of automation. Second order.
Please imagine what this means in the fullness of time. You might think HTML / CSS generation is a toy - it is. But what's coming will wash away everything you know. And it'll happen fast. People are plugging themselves into this tech and starting to dig away at existing problems and markets. It'll happen more quickly than with tech and the internet because there are more of us now.
> these demos have really quickly become so boring.
I'm about to put CNN/NBC/etc. out of business, and I'm just getting started: https://fakeyou.com/news
I can think of an AI/ML way to destroy almost every incumbent business out there. You should be applying yourself to that right now.
These are just the cards I'm willing to show now.
> It just sounds to me like maybe you are burnt out, or maybe you don't like coding stuff as much as others.
Maybe they don't like churning butter. The point isn't to write code, it's to create and solve problems.
This is the biggest opportunity of our lifetimes staring us in the face. Don't sleep on this.
AI can give anyone the power to make music, art, film, and media without the time, talent, and institutional capital investments.
AI can automate people's jobs and reduce cost structures to accomplishing work and business objectives.
That's the difference, and the evaluation criteria is easily decided by the free market. Did it do a good job? Will it get hired again to repeat similar work? Are more customers adopting it? That's all you need to judge its success or relevancy.
It's just more of the same, just faster and bigger. Sure, that's something, but it doesn't give me much hope by anything it has proven so far.
When you're showing me one flush card, the other one is a rag and you're trying to get me to fold. If you had the flush, you could show me both cards and get me to fold for sure.
> I feel wrong about my assessment and finally have hope for the future
Maybe it should make you scared for the future. Read https://musingsandroughdrafts.com/2023/02/17/my-current-summ...
I don’t know if your tech is going to wash away anything, and I do wish you good luck, but CNN has been digging their own grave for the best part of a decade and you claiming the credit for taking them down is some of the worst hubris I’ve read on HN.
As for the applications of LLM I’ll take François Chollet’s view that they may be more limited than many people are claiming.
Steps to reproduce: 1. Generate a face 2. Pass face to animator API 3. Feed text to voice api
As an anecdote our technical blogs covering vital industry techniques and news get like 10% of the readers of our introduction blogs do. I'd imagine the best selling progamming books are the ones aimed at beginners too.
* 42 scripts/programs.
* 3694 lines of code.
* Several languages.
* Process raw fastq data up to germline variant calling.
* Using high-performance computing cluster.
* Process vcf data into clinical variant interpretation.
* Options for custom filtering strategies.
* Statistical analysis and logs.
* Replaced several mainstream tools that are difficult to manage.
Final results:
1. This work was ~6-10x times faster.
2. I probably would not have rewritten this better version as it would have taken too long.
3. Instead of getting stuck at any difficult impasse I can get context-specific alternatives and testable example code.
It's an amazing achievement of AI research, but we're not anywhere close to AI replacing humans in any kind of engineering discipline.
A giant leap for AI but a step backward for man. We're gonna see code quality decline due to people thinking they can let the AI do it. Most importantly, we'll probably see an uptick in vulnerabilities.
Like, we should maybe give pause to the fact that this is at least the 20th demo specifically about "making a website." If this technology is so powerful, saves so much time, democratizes the profession so much, etc why are the demos all the same? Either people are unimaginative, which they are not, or perhaps this is pretty much what we can get from this in general.
Coding involve care and inspiration, and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again, even if youre getting the AI to do the reinvention for you.
But beyond any principled thoughts, just not seeing the returns here that people are trying to get me to see. Lots of laymen have been making wonderful websites for 30 years. Its cool the computer knows what css people have been using for those decades, but it only makes brittle uninspired things that only incidentally work.
I'd really like to know, beyond the hype, if any serious engineers have actually used this stuff for an extended amount of time. Ive tried and tried to use it and convince myself its helping me, but it just leads to so much frustration with the hallucinations and misunderstandings and schizophrenic comprehension of its own context..