Post by Lucie / minute

i'm asking this because this might be an important avenue if you want to offer an alternative for folks that are using LLM/chat bot coding services now but rather wouldn't, but traditional programming languages have relatively high hurdles

@mntmn

maybe debugging and small tools? i remember someone lost their bluetooth device and used claude to make a small app that would show bluetooth strength in a way what they could use it find the device. pretty handy and i don't think they would have done it without ai. BUT i feel like this is a thing we should be able to do with computers without ai even as non-programmers anyways.

but yeah. i think i would be interested to hear what kind of stuff these ai-people are making that you are

@mntmn

asking for the alternative to.

edit: asking for alternative workflow for MAKING. i know you are not asking for the ai-created apps themself.

@cararemixed i remember learning C as a kid and i was bewildered about having to write #include <stdio.h> and having no idea what that meant or how to memorize it

@mntmn in the tradition of the good old hypercard this young and fragile plant comes to my mind: https://www.hyperxtalk.com

@stoltenberg ah, that looks like applescript

@mntmn There's a whole genre of tools called "low-code" or "no-code" the predate LLMs. Though they are still probably an order of magnitude more complicated for non-programmers than LLM coding. Examples: Budibase, Appsmith, Tooljet, Retool. (I would bet that many of these pivoted to being AI-driven.)

@sarahstreza right. i checked some of these out a while ago and indeed there are many ai pivots. i was wondering if someone already did something post-ai in that area, so to speak.

@mntmn
If you mean low-code or now-code tools I really like Rei3. https://rei3.de/home_en
I really like their app signing an versioning workflow.

@Ekpu thanks, that seems very interesting, although the UI looks a bit long in the tooth. gonna check it out

@mntmn

i guess this is not what you are asking for, but i regurarly use max / puredata / plugdata for sort of these tasks. like automatic control over a video switcher for example.

and very simple bash scripts using things like pandoc etc. i use a lot. but still sometimes a bit of a sudoku for my brain tbh.

@lislegaard right, i think the whole music and performance software landscape maybe doesn't have this accessibility problem in the first place (cool) because there have been so many creative UI approaches and modular systems for audio.

@mntmn

yes i think you are right. which kinda prompts the questions, what are the different use-cases where people use llm's because things are not as good as in music / performance?

if i REALLY think about what i see around, there are not many ai-coded products i care for. i guess many people augment and automate with ai, but it is not like they wouldn't have made it without ai.

so.. most ai is back to slop? or what?

@lislegaard what i've heard so far are things like:
- website and booking system for some small business/group/event
- agent that runs ghidra to modernize some old software (more advanced case)
- agent that reverse engineers/figures out how to drive some piece of hardware

@mntmn non-developers become developers when they code though? I find this line a bit to fuzzy to make a recommendation. If you look back at what "non-developers" did with VB6 it was impressive. I think we lost that with the web. It doesn't have to be Basic but it's been there since early personal computing and it's not ideal but its approachable.

@cararemixed yes, i agree, and trying to think of ways to very gently introduce programming syntax in something that i.e. just text/images first. for example, if you just write the word "hello" and run it, it would just show that word in the middle of the screen. and then you can gradually add stuff to refine it. html kind of works like that, it just has not-good-looking defaults and too much boilerplate. i guess that's why we ended up with markdown. but markdown lacks interactivity and forms.

@mntmn The right bit of extensions around HTML could do some of this. Avoiding JavaScript would probably be required as it'd be a very leaky abstraction. HTMX style decorations could go some distance. Maybe wrap it around CouchDB so apps can be served, data held locally, and application installed as replicated data. I personally feel like the web has great ideas but the temptation to break out of a restricted subset ends up ruining most of these.

@cararemixed yeah, i mean with normal HTML i think it already loses at <!DOCTYPE html> and <meta charset="UTF-8">. that's just an example of bizarre things we take for granted but that don't need to be there

@mntmn
Weirdly, I’ve seen people use Godot game engine to make apps. Build you own UI. Export to Linux, Apple, windows, android, etc etc etc

@BOOKHOUSE oh that makes some sense, because the engine/tooling is very good