10 ms·

Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

65 points by naveensundar 8y ago

PostOnce 8y ago
Again? Can this end with anything other than failure? It'd be nice if it could, but that seems outside the realm of possibility. Aside from this never having worked, and being, so far as we can all tell, incompatible with the level of fine-tuning to everything from the backend to the pixel positions of the UI that people want, there are very serious problems with the business model (or absence thereof) Some telling snippets from the article: "Everything you build on Dry.io right now is stuck there." “Later on, we’re going to be making on-premise stuff, so if you want to run it on a local server or something like that,” Cassimatis promises. “But for now, yeah, stuck on our platform.” "Dry.io also has no business model, yet."
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  Hello. I am the founder of this company. I understand your skepticism. It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. We're not claiming that. We're claiming that for a broad range of software (esp., social, messaging, and collaborative software), we can make the development process orders of magnitude faster. You do lose some customization though. There is precedent for something like this being possible and valuable. Mid-90s level web technology was very restrictive, but did make a whole class of online service much easier to build and deploy than what existed before that (CompuServe, etc.) You didn't have complete control over every aspect of display, networking, etc., but the loss in customization/control didn't prevent it from enabling a lot of very important and valuable projects.
  - PostOnce 8y ago
    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 learn your layer, which is at risk of disappearing in a bankruptcy? What will my investment of developer hours look like in 2 years on your platform, if it's still around? Is it basically only useful for web stuff?
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      Thanks. We can build more-complex-than-CRUD apps with literally only dozens of lines of code in many cases. You don't need to set up any servers, know any front-end frameworks, configure/index/structure a database, etc. We don't expect anyone to believe that now, just to take a look at it when we release, and perhaps to sign up to test before that. The reason someone would learn to develop on our platform is because they can build something orders of magnitude faster than they could otherwise.
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      Re the risk of us disappearing: if the app someone wants really only takes a few hours or days to build then they might decide (and they can't feasibly build it in any other way) that it's worth the risk. Also, we'll make it easy for users to export their data into a machine-readable format so they can preserve their data independently of us. At first it will be for web stuff, though we plan to add mobile app capabilities as soon as possible. Think of the space of apps that includes social networks, messengers, bug trackers, CRMs, task managers, etc. That's the kind of thing you'll be able to build at first fairly straightforwardly. Things like self-driving cars, high-frequency trading algorithms, will be beyond our scope for a very long while.
    - jmickey 8y ago
      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? :)
      - nickcassimatis 8y ago
        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.
        jmickey 8y ago
  - taneq 8y ago
    > It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. The thing is, 90%+ of the time spent developing software is spent figuring out precisely what you want everything to do. Once you actually know what you want, producing the code is pretty straightforward. Rapid application development systems are always a tradeoff between development time and "control at the pixel level". I'm absolutely not saying that a better RAD tool or a better AppWizard isn't worth having, mind you! Just that the two goals are diametrically opposed.
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      I agree that figuring out exactly what you want is a lot of work. Our platform only helps there in that it makes it faster to iterate through different guesses at what you might want to arrive at what you do want. However, once you do know exactly what you want, it is still often a lot of work to actually build it in many cases. Say you wanted to build an exact clone of Slack (even v1 of Slack) It would still take weeks of effort at at the very least to build and deploy that.
  - dwd 8y ago
    Hi Nick I've had some experience around Model Driven Design and code generation tools for building web apps using technology such as the Eclipse EMF and Ecore for modelling common components. How do you differentiate your software from that space?
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      Our approach is very model-driven. Three differences/innovations with respect to that work are that 1. the models we use have a few additional elements that lead to a much wider range of apps that can be created, 2. we have a way of overriding what's generated from the model by default and 3., the software behavior we generate from the model includes more elements of the conventional modern software stack (search, authentication, sharing, etc.)
  - bitL 8y ago
    Great! It's precisely how trivial stuff will be handled in the future, whether we like it or not and I am glad something like your company popped up. Could you please recommend any papers your approach is based on? Thank you! Future extension you are likely considering could be voice/gesture driven development, or "natural language" programming, where one can use this combination naturally like talking to another person, describing what kind of app one needs and how it should look like.
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      We'll probably be posting a technical whitepaper and/or more technically-oriented video to the website soon. I was the founder of SkyPhrase, a natural language processing startup that Yahoo acquired in 2013. Natural language was also a focus of my AI research. We have some ideas on how to apply that to this project, but they will probably have to wait at least a few months.
- omouse 8y ago
  "Dry.io also has no business model, yet." Well at least they're not taking VC funds and are funded by the previous exit of one of the founders (though I'm guessing their previous startup wasn't profitable or had no business model aside from "get acquired ASAP"). Aiming to get acquired is cool, but at the same time, it's not really a business model.
tluyben2 8y ago
Sounds somewhat like Meteorkitchen from reading that story. My feeling is that it will have very little to do with AI, but let’s see.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.
  - banachtarski 8y ago
    Can you speak to what "AI" means in this context?
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      AI is an element of this in a number of ways. First, though, this is not a platform for writing AI applications. It's a platform for making it faster to write messaging, social, collaborate, productivity, etc. apps much faster than. One way AI factors in involves finding a core set of primitives that can describe all software functionality. Programming languages and web frameworks are more granular than Dry and so they require you to write a lot more code. Dry has a higher level of abstraction than concepts like arrays, servers, divs, database tables, etc. On the other hand, Dry is not just a template system that gives you a predefined set of application types like messenger, social network, discussion group, etc. that you can just specify. That's a higher level of abstraction and can be fairly limiting and brittle. Dry's abstractions are in at a level that is between those two extremes; it lets your write a lot of apps without needing to be too granular. There is research in AI called "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" that identifies fundamental primitives that can express a wide variety of concepts and ideas. I've been a researcher in this field my whole career and was a professor in that area once. We've translated those results into software and have used them to develop a core set of primitives that let you describe the behavior of a lot of software. I know that is all vague, but we'll start to be more precise and concrete over the next few weeks.
ohiovr 8y ago
Is the generated code readable?
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  No. The point is to never have to look at, modify, or understand the underlying code. So, in this sense, it's not a typical code generation tool where if you want to tweak something you need to do a lot of work to find the right place in the code.
mbesto 8y ago
> Cassimatis believes that Dry.io doesn’t have any competitors. There is a huge category of providers that do this: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterprise-highproductivity-application https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterpris... https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-platforms https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-plat... I wish tech journalists would do their research.
- sbr464 8y ago
  There were definitely several broad claims made. Without seeing the platform though, within the context claimed, it’s difficult to include the entire low-code industry, especially 80%+ of the logos included in the link you mentioned, being related to an AI driven coding platform, including Salesforce.
neya 8y ago
Cool, regardless of other commenters' advice, I think you should go forward with this. I run a dev shop and I have done this with Rails and boy, does it save you a lot of time (and thus, money). But, you should ensure there isn't a learning curve for your platform. It should be in a UI that's familiar to someone who is familiar with building their apps manually. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose. As for worrying about pixel perfect designs, don't worry about those, they're the easy part. The difficult part will be the parts that contain the majority of value for a business - the backend. Frontend is as simple us throwing in a nice UI framework and mixing and matching color themes. It is good enough and works well for most clients. The ones that require pixel perfection probably aren't your target audience as it has a lot to do with the frontend than the backend. Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of money in this. I sincerely wish you luck and hope you succeed.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  Thanks. I think that's right. There are a lot of use cases where super-precise UI control is not necessary. The early web and many blogging platforms are an example where you can get very far despite some limits on UI customization.
  - puranjay 8y ago
    Slightly OT, but on my browser, dry.io is not on https. Big red flag for me. Chrome shows a 'Not Secure' tag for me, plus there is no favicon. Small things but important. You might want to fix that
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      It's a good point. Our actual platform is all https. Our home page is just a static page. But you're right that it's bad optics for a platform intended to be privacy friendly to not be using https.
kough 8y ago
In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with any sort of inference.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  There is a partial answer to this in another thread, but here is a response to your specific point: It depends what you mean by inference. In statistical machine learning and deep learning, inference means predicting things using large amounts of data. Philosophers call that inductive inference. But there is also deductive inference. Given some general knowledge (e.g., "All men are mortal") and some facts ("Socrates is a man"), you infer other facts ("Socrates is Mortal"). There is a huge amount of work in AI that has developed algorithms that do very complex and powerful versions of this kind of inference. You can use those to infer from a brief description of what you want a computer to do what the sequence of actions the computer can take to achieve that goal. You can use these kinds of methods to generate software behavior without explicitly programming the behavior in advance.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ That's a link to a widely-used AI textbook. The methods that most people today associate with AI (i.e., the learning-based inference methods), are only a fraction of the overall content.
TimTheTinker 8y ago
You have a lot of buzzwords in that headline. I’m not planning to read TA because the buzzwords made my eyes glaze over. No offense intended, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  So you wanted the headline to be more dry?
  - TimTheTinker 8y ago
    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.
    - mifreewil 8y ago
      Soooo tired of companies "democratizing" things.
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      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.
      - TimTheTinker 8y ago
        This is less about the title/headline and more about the overall approach. I think to gain any attention in today’s environment, you’re going to have to do more “showing” and less “telling”. Remember how Ruby On Rails got its amazing dev mindshare? I’d encourage you to hit archive.org and go back to like 2006 at rubyonrails.org. They had a compelling demo that was just a simple screen share, but it blew people’s minds. Their headlines and body copy were also excellent. EDIT: a couple of links: https://web.archive.org/web/20060609235209/http://www.rubyonrails.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060609235209/http://www.rubyon... https://web.archive.org/web/20060612063620/http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts https://web.archive.org/web/20060612063620/http://www.rubyon...
ndnxhs 8y ago
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 everything. Imagine trying to debug an issue when there is no documentation or any knowledge on what is going on.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  Re AI, check out the thread where I explain how we don't use training models or conventional machine learning. We use very deterministic.
- xapata 8y ago
  Artificial intelligence is a superset of, not equivalent to statistical machine learning.
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    You could label anything AI. Might as well call my if statement AI
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Ever since expert systems fizzled out and failed to deliver on their promise in the 80s, AI has been roughly equivalent to statistical machine learning and its applications. Everything else became just logic that needs statistical inference in order to work intelligently in a complex setting.
AlotOfReading 8y ago
An interesting difference between this and "traditional compilers" is that since it's targeted to user-facing applications and the output is intentionally hands-off, there are incentives for dry to subvert developers. Imagine inserting unrequested ads or silently reselling end-user analytics for extra money. The developer might never even know, let alone be able to fix it.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  Yes, any company that's serving a lot of web pages would be tempted to put ads on their pages. As the article and our website state, we are doing several things to preserve people's privacy. If we do ever serve ads, you and others can help us find a way to be super-transparent about it.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    That is, until the VCs take over or it goes to private equity, and the new stockholders say it's much easier to monetize if you're super-opaque about it.
marcell 8y ago
I'm trying to understand how this would actually work. A lot of app development for a mid-size CRUD app is around encoding business logic and handling edge cases. Let's take a specific example. Say I'm writing a software to help manage weekly CSA (box of veggies) deliveries. Sometimes a driver will miss a delivery, and in that case, you want three options: (1) Fully refund the customer for that week (2) Let them another receive another delivery the next day (3) Give them company credit If (2) happens, the driver component needs to receive a notification for the next day delivery. Is this in scope of dry.io? If it handles this kind of thing, how?
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  Yes. We have an event language where you basically can say "IF X happens do Y".
  - weego 8y ago
    Hey that's how Watson handles AI too
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    The idea is that in many cases how an edge case is handle is up to the person requesting the software. So unless you build an AI that can read minds there needs to be an easy way to express what their preferences are.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    Sounds like normal programming...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    Oh I remember that it ran on CBM 8096 back in 81 - I seem to recall it was called "The Last One"
JamesAdir 8y ago
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.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  Like Access, we do aim to make development much easier, and in-house tools are an obvious first market. However, there are a lot of aspects of Dry (involving access permission, data tagging, moderation, and more) that aren't all together in any other platform. These make it easier to build social, collaborative, and messaging apps much more easily than other approaches.
mountainofdeath 8y ago
Where is the AI here? This is yet another line-of-business app generator. Others include Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Access back in the day, etc.
- gamesbrainiac 8y ago
  My point exactly, and furthermore, the whole UI looks very cumbersome. You still have to understand the software underneath in order to actually build the application itself.
  - harrisreynolds 8y ago
    Yes. I am wondering the same thing. We are currently working on NimbleHQ [1] which is an app that lets you build apps. And it is pretty cool. But it doesn't use AI. Maybe we should say it does to get some press! :-) [1] https://www.nimblehq.com/ https://www.nimblehq.com/
    - TheLegace 8y ago
      Hi, I am trying to sign up but I can't get it working on Firefox and Chrome[1]. Captcha Error https://imgur.com/xMHx0xY https://imgur.com/xMHx0xY
      - harrisreynolds 8y ago
        Wow... that is embarrassing. Fixed. I recently change the domain from nimblapps.com to nimblehq.com which I think is much better (but didn't get Recaptcha updated. Would love any feedback you have. It is early but some cool ideas are in there.
        TheLegace 8y ago
        I really like the concept and design. Haven't used it fully to grasp how it works yet, but I did find a few bugs at first glance. I can send you info by email if you'd like.
mlboss 8y ago
Where is the AI ? I thought it would be some tool which uses program synthesis.
stevengraham 8y ago
Despite the (predictable) skepticism, there are some real enterprise use-cases for something like this being served by similar "self-serve" tools. I'd be willing to take a look.
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  I'd be happy to hear more about these use cases you have in mind, either here or over email.
htkibar 8y ago
There are a couple points to be made on this. 1. This is less of a "AI" issue, more of a UI/UX for specialized tools issue. Dreamweaver comes to mind especially; the moment you are trying to get something that can be flexible and accommodate different needs it is mostly about learning the tools. Often, the result is that learning the tool itself is almost harder than learning to code. 2. Any code that you generate via AI will most probably be crap. A huge part of coding is making it understandable and easy to touch later on; how can you do this without AI that has a proper understanding of the worlds (probably on the level of a AGI).

65 points by naveensundar 8y ago

Again? Can this end with anything other than failure? It'd be nice if it could, but that seems outside the realm of possibility. Aside from this never having worked, and being, so far as we can all tell, incompatible with the level of fine-tuning to everything from the backend to the pixel positions of the UI that people want, there are very serious problems with the business model (or absence thereof) Some telling snippets from the article: "Everything you build on Dry.io right now is stuck there." “Later on, we’re going to be making on-premise stuff, so if you want to run it on a local server or something like that,” Cassimatis promises. “But for now, yeah, stuck on our platform.” "Dry.io also has no business model, yet."

nickcassimatis 8y ago
Hello. I am the founder of this company. I understand your skepticism. It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. We're not claiming that. We're claiming that for a broad range of software (esp., social, messaging, and collaborative software), we can make the development process orders of magnitude faster. You do lose some customization though. There is precedent for something like this being possible and valuable. Mid-90s level web technology was very restrictive, but did make a whole class of online service much easier to build and deploy than what existed before that (CompuServe, etc.) You didn't have complete control over every aspect of display, networking, etc., but the loss in customization/control didn't prevent it from enabling a lot of very important and valuable projects.
- PostOnce 8y ago
  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 learn your layer, which is at risk of disappearing in a bankruptcy? What will my investment of developer hours look like in 2 years on your platform, if it's still around? Is it basically only useful for web stuff?
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    Thanks. We can build more-complex-than-CRUD apps with literally only dozens of lines of code in many cases. You don't need to set up any servers, know any front-end frameworks, configure/index/structure a database, etc. We don't expect anyone to believe that now, just to take a look at it when we release, and perhaps to sign up to test before that. The reason someone would learn to develop on our platform is because they can build something orders of magnitude faster than they could otherwise.
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    Re the risk of us disappearing: if the app someone wants really only takes a few hours or days to build then they might decide (and they can't feasibly build it in any other way) that it's worth the risk. Also, we'll make it easy for users to export their data into a machine-readable format so they can preserve their data independently of us. At first it will be for web stuff, though we plan to add mobile app capabilities as soon as possible. Think of the space of apps that includes social networks, messengers, bug trackers, CRMs, task managers, etc. That's the kind of thing you'll be able to build at first fairly straightforwardly. Things like self-driving cars, high-frequency trading algorithms, will be beyond our scope for a very long while.
  - jmickey 8y ago
    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? :)
    - nickcassimatis 8y ago
      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.
      - jmickey 8y ago
- taneq 8y ago
  > It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. The thing is, 90%+ of the time spent developing software is spent figuring out precisely what you want everything to do. Once you actually know what you want, producing the code is pretty straightforward. Rapid application development systems are always a tradeoff between development time and "control at the pixel level". I'm absolutely not saying that a better RAD tool or a better AppWizard isn't worth having, mind you! Just that the two goals are diametrically opposed.
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    I agree that figuring out exactly what you want is a lot of work. Our platform only helps there in that it makes it faster to iterate through different guesses at what you might want to arrive at what you do want. However, once you do know exactly what you want, it is still often a lot of work to actually build it in many cases. Say you wanted to build an exact clone of Slack (even v1 of Slack) It would still take weeks of effort at at the very least to build and deploy that.
- dwd 8y ago
  Hi Nick I've had some experience around Model Driven Design and code generation tools for building web apps using technology such as the Eclipse EMF and Ecore for modelling common components. How do you differentiate your software from that space?
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    Our approach is very model-driven. Three differences/innovations with respect to that work are that 1. the models we use have a few additional elements that lead to a much wider range of apps that can be created, 2. we have a way of overriding what's generated from the model by default and 3., the software behavior we generate from the model includes more elements of the conventional modern software stack (search, authentication, sharing, etc.)
- bitL 8y ago
  Great! It's precisely how trivial stuff will be handled in the future, whether we like it or not and I am glad something like your company popped up. Could you please recommend any papers your approach is based on? Thank you! Future extension you are likely considering could be voice/gesture driven development, or "natural language" programming, where one can use this combination naturally like talking to another person, describing what kind of app one needs and how it should look like.
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    We'll probably be posting a technical whitepaper and/or more technically-oriented video to the website soon. I was the founder of SkyPhrase, a natural language processing startup that Yahoo acquired in 2013. Natural language was also a focus of my AI research. We have some ideas on how to apply that to this project, but they will probably have to wait at least a few months.
omouse 8y ago
"Dry.io also has no business model, yet." Well at least they're not taking VC funds and are funded by the previous exit of one of the founders (though I'm guessing their previous startup wasn't profitable or had no business model aside from "get acquired ASAP"). Aiming to get acquired is cool, but at the same time, it's not really a business model.

tluyben2 8y ago

Sounds somewhat like Meteorkitchen from reading that story. My feeling is that it will have very little to do with AI, but let’s see.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.
- banachtarski 8y ago
  Can you speak to what "AI" means in this context?
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    AI is an element of this in a number of ways. First, though, this is not a platform for writing AI applications. It's a platform for making it faster to write messaging, social, collaborate, productivity, etc. apps much faster than. One way AI factors in involves finding a core set of primitives that can describe all software functionality. Programming languages and web frameworks are more granular than Dry and so they require you to write a lot more code. Dry has a higher level of abstraction than concepts like arrays, servers, divs, database tables, etc. On the other hand, Dry is not just a template system that gives you a predefined set of application types like messenger, social network, discussion group, etc. that you can just specify. That's a higher level of abstraction and can be fairly limiting and brittle. Dry's abstractions are in at a level that is between those two extremes; it lets your write a lot of apps without needing to be too granular. There is research in AI called "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" that identifies fundamental primitives that can express a wide variety of concepts and ideas. I've been a researcher in this field my whole career and was a professor in that area once. We've translated those results into software and have used them to develop a core set of primitives that let you describe the behavior of a lot of software. I know that is all vague, but we'll start to be more precise and concrete over the next few weeks.

ohiovr 8y ago

Is the generated code readable?

nickcassimatis 8y ago
No. The point is to never have to look at, modify, or understand the underlying code. So, in this sense, it's not a typical code generation tool where if you want to tweak something you need to do a lot of work to find the right place in the code.

mbesto 8y ago

> Cassimatis believes that Dry.io doesn’t have any competitors. There is a huge category of providers that do this: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterprise-highproductivity-application https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterpris... https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-platforms https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-plat... I wish tech journalists would do their research.

sbr464 8y ago
There were definitely several broad claims made. Without seeing the platform though, within the context claimed, it’s difficult to include the entire low-code industry, especially 80%+ of the logos included in the link you mentioned, being related to an AI driven coding platform, including Salesforce.

neya 8y ago

Cool, regardless of other commenters' advice, I think you should go forward with this. I run a dev shop and I have done this with Rails and boy, does it save you a lot of time (and thus, money). But, you should ensure there isn't a learning curve for your platform. It should be in a UI that's familiar to someone who is familiar with building their apps manually. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose. As for worrying about pixel perfect designs, don't worry about those, they're the easy part. The difficult part will be the parts that contain the majority of value for a business - the backend. Frontend is as simple us throwing in a nice UI framework and mixing and matching color themes. It is good enough and works well for most clients. The ones that require pixel perfection probably aren't your target audience as it has a lot to do with the frontend than the backend. Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of money in this. I sincerely wish you luck and hope you succeed.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
Thanks. I think that's right. There are a lot of use cases where super-precise UI control is not necessary. The early web and many blogging platforms are an example where you can get very far despite some limits on UI customization.
- puranjay 8y ago
  Slightly OT, but on my browser, dry.io is not on https. Big red flag for me. Chrome shows a 'Not Secure' tag for me, plus there is no favicon. Small things but important. You might want to fix that
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    It's a good point. Our actual platform is all https. Our home page is just a static page. But you're right that it's bad optics for a platform intended to be privacy friendly to not be using https.

kough 8y ago

In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with any sort of inference.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
There is a partial answer to this in another thread, but here is a response to your specific point: It depends what you mean by inference. In statistical machine learning and deep learning, inference means predicting things using large amounts of data. Philosophers call that inductive inference. But there is also deductive inference. Given some general knowledge (e.g., "All men are mortal") and some facts ("Socrates is a man"), you infer other facts ("Socrates is Mortal"). There is a huge amount of work in AI that has developed algorithms that do very complex and powerful versions of this kind of inference. You can use those to infer from a brief description of what you want a computer to do what the sequence of actions the computer can take to achieve that goal. You can use these kinds of methods to generate software behavior without explicitly programming the behavior in advance.
nickcassimatis 8y ago
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ That's a link to a widely-used AI textbook. The methods that most people today associate with AI (i.e., the learning-based inference methods), are only a fraction of the overall content.

TimTheTinker 8y ago

You have a lot of buzzwords in that headline. I’m not planning to read TA because the buzzwords made my eyes glaze over. No offense intended, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
So you wanted the headline to be more dry?
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  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.
  - mifreewil 8y ago
    Soooo tired of companies "democratizing" things.
  - nickcassimatis 8y ago
    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.
    - TimTheTinker 8y ago
      This is less about the title/headline and more about the overall approach. I think to gain any attention in today’s environment, you’re going to have to do more “showing” and less “telling”. Remember how Ruby On Rails got its amazing dev mindshare? I’d encourage you to hit archive.org and go back to like 2006 at rubyonrails.org. They had a compelling demo that was just a simple screen share, but it blew people’s minds. Their headlines and body copy were also excellent. EDIT: a couple of links: https://web.archive.org/web/20060609235209/http://www.rubyonrails.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060609235209/http://www.rubyon... https://web.archive.org/web/20060612063620/http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts https://web.archive.org/web/20060612063620/http://www.rubyon...

ndnxhs 8y ago

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 everything. Imagine trying to debug an issue when there is no documentation or any knowledge on what is going on.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
Re AI, check out the thread where I explain how we don't use training models or conventional machine learning. We use very deterministic.
xapata 8y ago
Artificial intelligence is a superset of, not equivalent to statistical machine learning.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  You could label anything AI. Might as well call my if statement AI
- bitwize 8y ago
  Ever since expert systems fizzled out and failed to deliver on their promise in the 80s, AI has been roughly equivalent to statistical machine learning and its applications. Everything else became just logic that needs statistical inference in order to work intelligently in a complex setting.

AlotOfReading 8y ago

An interesting difference between this and "traditional compilers" is that since it's targeted to user-facing applications and the output is intentionally hands-off, there are incentives for dry to subvert developers. Imagine inserting unrequested ads or silently reselling end-user analytics for extra money. The developer might never even know, let alone be able to fix it.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
Yes, any company that's serving a lot of web pages would be tempted to put ads on their pages. As the article and our website state, we are doing several things to preserve people's privacy. If we do ever serve ads, you and others can help us find a way to be super-transparent about it.
- bitwize 8y ago
  That is, until the VCs take over or it goes to private equity, and the new stockholders say it's much easier to monetize if you're super-opaque about it.

marcell 8y ago

I'm trying to understand how this would actually work. A lot of app development for a mid-size CRUD app is around encoding business logic and handling edge cases. Let's take a specific example. Say I'm writing a software to help manage weekly CSA (box of veggies) deliveries. Sometimes a driver will miss a delivery, and in that case, you want three options: (1) Fully refund the customer for that week (2) Let them another receive another delivery the next day (3) Give them company credit If (2) happens, the driver component needs to receive a notification for the next day delivery. Is this in scope of dry.io? If it handles this kind of thing, how?

nickcassimatis 8y ago
Yes. We have an event language where you basically can say "IF X happens do Y".
- weego 8y ago
  Hey that's how Watson handles AI too
- nickcassimatis 8y ago
  The idea is that in many cases how an edge case is handle is up to the person requesting the software. So unless you build an AI that can read minds there needs to be an easy way to express what their preferences are.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Sounds like normal programming...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  Oh I remember that it ran on CBM 8096 back in 81 - I seem to recall it was called "The Last One"

JamesAdir 8y ago

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.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
Like Access, we do aim to make development much easier, and in-house tools are an obvious first market. However, there are a lot of aspects of Dry (involving access permission, data tagging, moderation, and more) that aren't all together in any other platform. These make it easier to build social, collaborative, and messaging apps much more easily than other approaches.

mountainofdeath 8y ago

Where is the AI here? This is yet another line-of-business app generator. Others include Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Access back in the day, etc.

gamesbrainiac 8y ago
My point exactly, and furthermore, the whole UI looks very cumbersome. You still have to understand the software underneath in order to actually build the application itself.
- harrisreynolds 8y ago
  Yes. I am wondering the same thing. We are currently working on NimbleHQ [1] which is an app that lets you build apps. And it is pretty cool. But it doesn't use AI. Maybe we should say it does to get some press! :-) [1] https://www.nimblehq.com/ https://www.nimblehq.com/
  - TheLegace 8y ago
    Hi, I am trying to sign up but I can't get it working on Firefox and Chrome[1]. Captcha Error https://imgur.com/xMHx0xY https://imgur.com/xMHx0xY
    - harrisreynolds 8y ago
      Wow... that is embarrassing. Fixed. I recently change the domain from nimblapps.com to nimblehq.com which I think is much better (but didn't get Recaptcha updated. Would love any feedback you have. It is early but some cool ideas are in there.
      - TheLegace 8y ago
        I really like the concept and design. Haven't used it fully to grasp how it works yet, but I did find a few bugs at first glance. I can send you info by email if you'd like.

mlboss 8y ago

Where is the AI ? I thought it would be some tool which uses program synthesis.

stevengraham 8y ago

Despite the (predictable) skepticism, there are some real enterprise use-cases for something like this being served by similar "self-serve" tools. I'd be willing to take a look.

nickcassimatis 8y ago
I'd be happy to hear more about these use cases you have in mind, either here or over email.

htkibar 8y ago

There are a couple points to be made on this. 1. This is less of a "AI" issue, more of a UI/UX for specialized tools issue. Dreamweaver comes to mind especially; the moment you are trying to get something that can be flexible and accommodate different needs it is mostly about learning the tools. Often, the result is that learning the tool itself is almost harder than learning to code. 2. Any code that you generate via AI will most probably be crap. A huge part of coding is making it understandable and easy to touch later on; how can you do this without AI that has a proper understanding of the worlds (probably on the level of a AGI).