If we look in another direction we see LLMs which (will one day) generate code from design.
If I look back those years in my career, I was always paid to write the same code all over again (lists, trees, tables, menus, user profiles, shopping carts, dashboards, heroes, apis, databases...), each time in a different context (given by the company) ... Such a waste of my time, and my employers money.
Today at least in the MVP / startup scene coding is debt / obsolete. Startups all should go no-code.
Later, after the startup phase, companies should focus _only_ on provably-correct, likely-correct understanding of their problem domain, on a design specific to their audience, and rapid iteration. The rest, coding, should be not no-code, but fully automatic yet provably correct (in the sense of total and partial correctness)
I hope, and I wish coding will be eliminated. It's a big fun writing machine code in Assembly, algorithms in C/C++, full-stack web apps in Ruby on Rails, and user interfaces in React.
But after a while it's not sustainable neither emotionally nor economically.
Do you really believe no-code applications mean there’s 0 code? You’re just relying on someone else’s code at that point, and have no ability to customize business logic.
> Instead of data going to models, we need models come to our data which is stored locally and stay locally.
That's the most important idea I've read since ChatGPT / last year.
I'll wait for this. Then build my own private AI. And share it / pair it for learning with other private AIs, like a blogroll.
As always, there will be two 'different' AIs: a.) the mainstream, centralized, ad/revenue-driven, capitalist, political, controlling / exploiting etc. b.) personal, trustworthy, polished on peer networks, fun, profitable for one / a small community.
If by chance, commercial models will be better than open source models, due to better access to computing power / data, please let me know. We can go back to SETI and share our idle computing power / existing knowledge
Big fan of Lem! I've read all his books translated to Hungarian (around 7-8 at that time). And collected some insights, quotes not just about AI but politics, culture, society, (bio)engineering, etc. : http://metamn.io/gust/whats-next/
Still fascinated how many of his predictions ~50 years ago came true today.
And still fascinated by his method for predictions: Don't predict, but sense / record the visible horizon.
I've created my first website in 1999 with plain HTML, CSS, vanilla JS, hosted on Geocities.
Since then I've been using PHP/WordPress/Yii/Laravel, Ruby/Rails/Sinatra/Jekyll, React/Typescript, ClojureScript to create both sites and apps.
With React / TSX components / CSS-in-TS / Effects / Context I'm home. Finally a fully fledged programming language for the web / front-end. A language made explicitly for the front-end, built om modern principles like functional, reactive programming.
Now I can do software development. Before that, with HTML, CSS, plain JS, PHP it was ... just hacking, nothing else. (Rails was good for full-stack, was not shining on the front-end)
I'll skip frameworks when the web stack will be ready for the apps, too. Now it's (perhaps) good enough for sites, I should admit.
It's worth mentioning that the friction to deploy a web app is nearly zero these days, depending on how complex it is.
As an example, shipping a macOS or iOS app, via official means, requires a lengthy review & approval process, upfront costs, buy-in into native languages with little to no use outside of these platforms, a limited selection of tools, and hard decisions about which version of the OS to support based on the features you need vs. the market share of older versions.
People (and teams) choose web development for the lower barrier to entry, and as a platform, browsers get products most of the way to their goals, and fast.
My preference is local first desktop applications. Sometimes it’s because I prefer files, sometimes it’s because native apps are more fluid and more egonomic.
What about for getting quotes on insurance? Or booking a restaurant? Or a flight or hotel? Submitting your taxes? Getting printable directions to a trailhead? Proving feedback on someone’s Figma document? Previewing a 3D model before getting it printed…
Is it your preference to install a new local first desktop application any time you wish to do any of these things?
That depends where the data and the logic all. If they only store the data, but I’m doing all the computation, it may as well be a local app (figma, the 3d viewer..) or at least have an API so I can build my own interface.
I’m not against Web Apps, but many take my browser as free real estate.
The line is very blurry, and the moment you'd like dynamic, interactive content embedded within that static content is when it's time to reach for a view library like React.
At that point, I'm just going to start the project with React / Vue / Svelte every time because almost 100% of the time, I realize I need to support the features they offer that raw HTML/CSS cannot, or if they do, are very poorly implemented by browsers, hitting limitations with them that become frustrating and prevent you from achieving the scope you're aiming for.
Using any of those three libraries/frameworks is painless, and I can get a project going rapidly and with high confidence that I can support any functionality, interaction, animation, content, routing, and other common web problems, with great ease.
All of the technologies you used previously were considered "finally fully fledged" until they weren't!
We will be doing something different in a couple of years and saying that the stuff we do now is out of date and the new stuff is home. It's always been this way. We are tech nomads finding ourselves new homes as and when we move on.
Using PHP and other tools/frameworks that tightly coupled the frontend to the backend codebase made life miserable. While I was excited to get into web development back when these technologies were popular, they were anything but pleasant to use.
With the introduction of Angular 1.x and eventually React, Vue, and Svelte -- creating web apps finally felt productive, easy to debug, and easy to ship. Wiring up interactions finally felt intuitive. No more jQuery code colliding with itself as you struggle to organize your project and cobble together a bunch of poorly maintained "component" libraries and pray they work together without obvious user-facing bugs on your site or app.
Or worse: on a team of engineers.
I won't lie, learning how early build systems worked was a pain, but the curve was completely worth it, and I wouldn't change a thing. Today, using tools like Vite with their default project templates is almost too easy, and you can hit the ground running in no time.
Publishing to Vercel, Netlify, and other modern hosting stacks is a breeze, and they all support direct tie-ins with every popular package & build system.
This is quite interesting, the recent launches of AI API wrapper companies posted on HN draw my attention. I like the innovation and use of the latest AI technology, but at the same time, I see a wrapper around an external API. Yes there can be more services providing LLMs, but those services are part of huge tech cos with established software and customer/user bases. The GPT-effect on the market is good, maybe internal reorgs will focus on UX improvements to integrate AI more into existing products (at what speed/pace...can a startup steal the thunder or just show what UX is needed...)
Genuinely curious how this all pans out, it is an exciting time!
If we look at math / category theory we have functorial semantics, which means semantics (code) is auto-generated from syntax (design): https://www.algebraicjulia.org/assets/slides/nist-workshop-2...
If we look in another direction we see LLMs which (will one day) generate code from design.
If I look back those years in my career, I was always paid to write the same code all over again (lists, trees, tables, menus, user profiles, shopping carts, dashboards, heroes, apis, databases...), each time in a different context (given by the company) ... Such a waste of my time, and my employers money.
Today at least in the MVP / startup scene coding is debt / obsolete. Startups all should go no-code.
Later, after the startup phase, companies should focus _only_ on provably-correct, likely-correct understanding of their problem domain, on a design specific to their audience, and rapid iteration. The rest, coding, should be not no-code, but fully automatic yet provably correct (in the sense of total and partial correctness)
I hope, and I wish coding will be eliminated. It's a big fun writing machine code in Assembly, algorithms in C/C++, full-stack web apps in Ruby on Rails, and user interfaces in React.
But after a while it's not sustainable neither emotionally nor economically.