10 ms·

Claude AI built me a React app to compare maps side by side

222 points by caspg 2y ago

caspg 2y ago
I wanted to develop a simple tool to compare maps. I thought about using this opportunity to try out Claude AI for coding a project from scratch. It worked surprisingly well! At least 95% of the code was generated by AI (I reached the limit so had to add final bits on my own).
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  The problem is that you must understand that 95% in order to complete the last 5%.
  - negoutputeng 2y ago
    exactly right. POCs and demos are easy to build by anyone these days. The last 10% is what separates student projects from real products. any engineer who has spent time in the trenches understands that fixing corner cases in code produced by inexperienced engineers consumes a lot of time. in fact, poor overall design and lack of diligence tanks entire projects.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Sometimes it's not even inexperienced coders -- it's our own dang selves ;-)
      - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        Well, in my mind, the SketchySeaBeast of last week is inexperienced compared to the SketchySeaBeast of this one.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ericskiff 2y ago
    Interestingly, I’m pretty sure they mean they hit the limit with tokens on Claude. There’s a daily 2.5 million token limit that you can use up fairly quickly with 100K context So they may very well have completed the whole program with Claude. It’s just the machine literally stopped and the human had to do the final grunt work.
    - ericskiff 2y ago
      We’ve been hitting this in our work and in experimentation, and I can confirm that Claude sonnet 3.5 has gotten 100% of the way there, including working through errors and tricky problems as we tested the apps it built.
  - trash_cat 2y ago
    >> The problem is that you must understand that 95% in order to complete the last 5%. What stops you from using AI to explain the code base?
- ipaddr 2y ago
  I asked Claude AI to make me an app and it refused and called it dangerous. I asked what kind of apps they could build and they suggested social media or health. So I asked it to make one but it refused too dangerous. I asked it to make anything.. anything app and it refused. I told it it sucked and it said it didn't. Then I deleted my account. I can't think of a worse llm than Claude.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Tbh this sounds like a skill issue.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      I'm having great success with OpenAI, local llms. I've created semi popular open source project that uses complex prompts to create specialized crms from just a few words. If ClaudeAI can't create something from my prompts or their own suggestions that's on Claude. Maybe it was my new account on that day at that time. There was a 10 response limit too which made it unworth it to even bother with. First account I ever actually deleted instead of just never going back. It was that bad.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Oh I didn't realize ChatGPT was working for you while Claude was not. It's just interesting because my experience is that claude is better at coding than ChatGPT-4o.
  - 7thpower 2y ago
    There have been rumors of the system prompt changing for some services if the user had strikes on their account from earlier conversations. I wonder if you were impacted by this because what you described has not been my experience nor have I seen it discussed previously.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      I signed up two weeks ago after a hackernews story. I wanted to see quality vs OpenAI. Completely new users first prompt.
truckerbill 2y ago
Cool! Did you just prompt -> copy -> paste or did you come up with some specific workflow?
- caspg 2y ago
  I used Claude AI project to attach requirement for the project. Then I just went with single conversation. I specified that I want to do it in small steps and then was just doing copy -> paste until I reached the limit. I think it was because I was doing one big convo instead attaching code to the project. So pretty simple flow, totally not scalable for bigger projects. I need to read and check Cursor AI which can also use Claude models.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    I wish I could try out Cursor, but I cannot due to this bug: https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/598 https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/598
    - ianhawes 2y ago
      Have you tried a different IP address?
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        I have not, I am using my residential/home IP address though and I can access https://api2.cursor.sh/ https://api2.cursor.sh/.
  - Omnipresent 2y ago
    are you able to share the link to your prompts / conversation?
- hijinks 2y ago
  you can use the vscode cline to give a task and it uses a LLM to go out and create the app for you. In django i had it create a backend, set admin user, create requirements.txt and then do a whole frontend in vue as a test. It even can do screen testing and tested what happens if it puts a wrong login in.
2024user 2y ago
Claude built me a simple react app AND rendered it in it's own UI - including using imports and stuff. I am looking forward to this type of real time app creation being added into our OSs, browsers, phones and glasses.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  > I am looking forward to this type of real time app creation being added into our OSs, browsers, phones and glasses. What do you see that being used for? Surely, polished apps written for others are going to be best built in professional tools that live independently of whatever the OS might offer. So I assume you're talking about quick little scratch apps for personal use? Like an AI-enriched version of Apple's Automator or Shortcuts, or of shell scripts, where you spend a while coahcing an AI to write the little one-off program you need instead of visually building a worrkflow or writing a simple script? Is that something you believe there's a high unmet need for? This is an earnest question. I'm sincerely curious what you're envisioning and how it might supercede the rich variety of existing tools that seem to only see niche use today.
  - cj 2y ago
    When I was in college (10+ years ago) there was a system that allowed you to select your classes. During the selection period, certain people had priority (people a year above you got to select first). Once a class was full, you could still get in if someone who was selected for the classes changed their mind, which (at an unpredictable time) would result in a seat becoming available in that class until another student noticed the availability and signed up. So I wrote a simple PHP script that loaded the page every 60 seconds checking, and the script would send me a text message if any of the classes I wanted suddenly had an opening. I would then run to a computer and try to sign up. These are the kind of bespoke, single-purpose things that I presume AI coding could help the average person with. “Send me a push notification when the text on this webpage says the class isn’t full, and check every 60 seconds”
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
bikamonki 2y ago
Could this be used to RPA my browser? Is it safe?
- caspg 2y ago
  What is RPA? Robotic Process Automation? If yes then I have no experience with that.
jckahn 2y ago
This sort of thing will be interesting to me once it can be done with fully local and open source tech on attainable hardware (and no, a $5,000 MacBook Pro is not attainable). Building a dependence on yet another untrustworthy AI startup that will inevitably enshittify isn’t compelling despite what the tech can do. We’re getting there with some of the smaller open source models, but we’re not quite there yet. I’m looking forward to where we’ll be in a year!
- Veuxdo 2y ago
  > and no, a $5,000 MacBook Pro is not attainable In many professions, $5000 for tools is almost nothing.
  - cpursley 2y ago
    Yep. Typical landscape crew rolls with $50k in equipment (maybe more). People push back on tooling pricing in other industries (especially when the tooling is "soft') but have no clue what that the cost of doing biz is huge for others.
  - torginus 2y ago
    Yeah, but those tools don't get obsoleted in 3 years.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      You're pretty lucky if the specialised tools for your profession cost <$2,000/y to replace and maintain. Sometimes tools last many years but cost an order of magnitude more anyways. Sometimes tools require expensive maintenance after purchase. Sometimes they are obsolete in a short number of years. Sometimes they were out quickly with use. Sometimes (often) a mix of the above. Regardless the reasons, any tooling in the ~$5,000/~3 year ballpark is not at all a high or unique number for a profession.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      high end CAD design software, the kind used to design SpaceX rocket engines, costs tens of thousands of dollars per seat per year.
bowsamic 2y ago
I’ve had insanely, shockingly good experiences prototyping a musical web app using tone.js using Claude with copilot
yieldcrv 2y ago
I wish Claude let you share conversations more easily, I’d be curious to see how this one went and what follow on questions you had
- ffsm8 2y ago
  huh? there should be a button on the top right to generate a share link in any conversation? is that really too hard? its even documented on their site https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9519189-project-visibility-and-sharing https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9519189-project-vi... Click the "Share" button in the upper right corner of your chat. Click the "Share & Copy Link" button to create a shareable link and add the chat snapshot to your project’s activity feed. /edit: i just checked. i think they had a regression? or at least i cannot see the button anymore. go figure. must be pretty recently, as i shared a chat just ~2-3 weeks ago
  - raldi 2y ago
    Note the section you’re in at that doc link: “Claude for Work (Team & Enterprise Plans) -> Team & Enterprise Plan Features -> Project visibility and sharing”
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      Huh, did they remove it from the normal subscription then? I've never had a team & enterprise plan.
spaceman_2020 2y ago
I have about 6 months of coding experience. All I really knew was how to build a basic MERN app I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 to code and I’ve managed to build multiple full fledged apps, including paid ones Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work and I’ve had no complaints yet. They might not scale to become the next Facebook, but not everything has to scale
- njtransit 2y ago
  Can you share some examples?
  - spaceman_2020 2y ago
    ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor) MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it) GoUnfaked.com PlaybookFM.com TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)
    - imiric 2y ago
      Good job, I suppose, but the existence of all of these, and the fact you're able to pump them out so quickly, is genuinely depressing.
      - 1024core 2y ago
        There was a time when mathematicians wrote LISP programs and other humans translated them into machine instructions. Then one day someone wrote a LISP program to do this, and had one of the translators translate it. A compiler was born. Think of Claude as a compiler which compiles NLP text instructions into functional code.
        imiric 2y ago
        I don't mind tools that empower programmers or even less technical people to build products. I use these tools myself in minor ways, even though I find them to be more of a nuisance than actually helpful. What I find depressing is how quickly someone with minimal experience can flood the web with low quality services, in search for a quick buck. It's like all the SEO spam we've been seeing for decades, but exponentially worse. The web will become even more of a nightmare to navigate than it already is.
Omnipresent 2y ago
it'd be cool to see the prompts used and the edits required to get to the end product here.
EcommerceFlow 2y ago
Been using LLMs since got3 beta in June 2021 and it’s interesting to see how my use cases have continuously been upgraded as models advanced. Started off with having it create funny random stories, to slowly creating more and more advanced programs. It’s shocking how good 3.5 Sonnet is at coding, considering the size of the model.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  >considering the size of the model. We don't know the size of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or any other Anthropic model.
nine_k 2y ago
This is great progress. Next obvious steps: make it understand large existing programs, learn form the style of the existing code while avoiding to learn the bad style where it's present, and then contribute features or fixes to that codebase.
williamcotton 2y ago
I used Claude (and a bit of ChatGPT) to write a multi-pass recursive descent parser for a search query DSL: https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query Why multi-pass? So multiple semantic errors can be reported at once to the user! The most important factor here is that I've written lexers and parsers beforehand. I was very detailed in my instructions and put it together piece-by-piece. It took probably 100 or so different chats. Try it out with the GUI you see in the gif in the README: git clone git@github.com:williamcotton/search-input-query.git cd search-input-query/search-input-query-demo npm install npm run dev
thefourthchime 2y ago
For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. It's enabling me to use frameworks I barely know, like React Native, Swift, etc.. The first prompt (with o1) will get you 60% there, but then you have a different workflow. The prompts can get to a local minimum, where claude/gpt4/etc.. just can't do any better. At which point you need to climb back out and try a different approach. I recommend git branches to keep track of this. Keep a good working copy in main, and anytime you want to add a feature, make a branch. If you get it almost there, make another branch in case it goes sideways. The biggest issue with developing like this is that you are not a coder anymore; you are a puppet master of a very smart and sometimes totally confused brain.
- lxgr 2y ago
  > For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. This is one fact that people seem to severely under-appreciate about LLMs. They're significantly worse at coding in many aspects than even a moderately skilled and motivated intern, but for my hobby projects, until now I haven't had any intern that would even as much as taking a stab at some of the repetitive or just not very interesting subtasks, let alone stick with them over and over again without getting tired of it.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    It also reduces the knowledge needed. I don't particularly care about learning how to setup and configure a web extension from scratch. With LLM, I can get 90% of that working in minutes, then focus on the parts that I am interested in. As somebody with ADHD, it was primarily all that supplementary, tangential knowledge which felt like an insurmountable mountain to me and made it impossible to actually try all the ideas I'd had over the years. I'm so much more productive now that I don't have to always get into the weeds for every little thing, which could easily delay progress for hours or even days. I can pick and choose the parts I feel are important to me.
lxgr 2y ago
Claude has worked amazingly well for me as somebody really not into UI/web development. There are so many small tasks that I could, but until now almost never would automate (whether it's not worth the time [1] or I just couldn't bring myself to do it as I don't really enjoy doing it). A one-off bitmask parser at work here, a proof of concept webapp at home there – it's literally opened up a new world of quality-of-life improvements, in a purely quantitative sense. It extends beyond UI and web development too: Very often I find myself thinking that there must be a smarter way to use CLI tools like jq, zsh etc., but considering how rarely I use them and that I do already know an ineffective way of getting what I need, up until now I couldn't justify spending the hours of going through documentation on the moderately high chance of finding a few useful nuggets letting me shave off a minute here and there every month. The same applies to SQL: After plateauing for several years (I get by just fine for my relatively narrow debugging and occasional data migration needs), LLMs have been much better at exposing me to new and useful patterns than dry and extensive documentation. (There are technical documents I really do enjoy reading, but SQL dialect specifications, often without any practical motivation as to when to use a given construct, are really not it.) LLMs have generally been great at that, but being able to immediately run what they suggest in-browser is where Claude currently has the edge for me. (ChatGPT Plus can apparently evaluate Python, but that's server-side only and accordingly doesn't really allow interactive use cases.) [1] https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
CtrlAltmanDel 2y ago
What a feat! There's at least 3 pages of google search results for the nearly same thing. The "prompt" I used in google.com is: site:github.com map comparison I guess the difference, is that my way uses dramatically less time and resources, but requires directly acknowledging the original coders instead of relying on the plagiarism-ish capabilities of reguritating something through an LLM.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  But creating things for which there are many existing, documented examples is what LLMs do best. Without this use case it's almost like they don't provide any value at all.
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    Everything you can think of right now has already been made in one form or another and hence learnt by LLMs, do you agree? Or Can you come up easily with many things that LLMs have no clue of and hence will fail?
smallerfish 2y ago
Claude is fantastic. I think the model itself is good enough to be able to write good software when competently directed; it's let down only by the UI/UX around it. My only complaints are: a) that it's really easy to hit the usage limit, especially when refactoring across a half dozen files. One thing that'd theoretically be easyish to fix would be automatically updating files in the project context (perhaps with an "accept"/"reject" prompt) so that the model knows what the latest version of your code is without having to reupload it constantly. b) it oscillating between being lazy in really annoying ways (giving largeish code blocks with commented omissions partway through) and supplying the full file unnecessarily and using up your usage credits. My hope is that Jetbrains give up on their own (pretty limited) LLM and partner with Anthropic to produce a super-tight IDE native integration.
vunderba 2y ago
I think we're going to see a similar backlash to AI apps as we did with AI art. Not necessarily because users can identify AI apps, but more because due to the lower barrier of entry - the space is going to get hyper-competitive and it'll be VERY difficult to distinguish your app from the hundreds of nearly identical other ones. Another thing that worries me (because software devs in particular seem to take a very loose moral approach to plagiarism and basic human decency) is that it'll be significantly easier for a less scrupulous dev to find an app that they like, and use an LLM to instantly spin up a copy of it. I'm trying not to be all gloom and doom about GenAI, because it can be really nifty to see it generate a bunch of boilerplate (YAML configs, dev opsy stuff, etc.) but sometimes it's hard....
- grugagag 2y ago
  No doubt about it, things will get very competitive in the software space and while anyone will be able to use generative AI tools, I think more will be expected for less.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Reminds me of when OpenAI rolled out custom GPTs, and in a matter of a few months there were more than a million of them on the store. People don't seem to realize that the same thing is going to happen to regular app development once AI tooling gets even easier.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  I hope not. I commend that software devs in particular seem to be adaptable to new technologies instead of trying to stop progress. Take this very post for example. Imagine an artist forum having daily front-page articles on AI, and most of the comments are curious and non-negative. That's basically what HackerNews is doing, but with developers instead. The huge culture difference is curious, and makes me happy with the posters on this site. You attribute it to the difficulty of using AI coding tools. But such tools to cut out the programmer and make it available to the layman has always existed: libraries, game engines, website builders, and now web app builders. You also attribute it to the flooding of the markets. But the website and mobile markets are famously saturated, and yet there we continue making stuff, because we want to (and because quality things make more money). I instead attribute it to our culture of free sharing (what one might call "plagiarism"... of ideas?!), adaptability, and curiosity. And that makes me hopeful.
grp000 2y ago
Can anyone measure in how Claude compares to copilot? Copilot feels like a fancy auto complete, but people seem to have good experiences with Claude, even in more complex settings.
- cluckindan 2y ago
  You can use Claude in Copilot.
nitwit005 2y ago
Ideally, Claude should have told you about easier approaches. I don't see any reason to mess around with code. There are plenty of website builder tools that will glue third party maps. Even the raw Google Maps API website will generate an HTML page with customized maps.
wayeq 2y ago
Is Claude 'better' than o1-preview? I've had phenomenal results with o1-preview (switching to o1-mini for simpler asks to avoid running out of queries), and tried Claude once and wasn't super impressed. Wondering if I should give it another shot.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
glonq 2y ago
Has somebody evaluated the pros and cons of giving developers a programming-specific AI tool like copilot versus a general-purpose AI tool like chatgpt or claude? We are a small shop so I would prefer to not pay for both for every developer.
ronyba 2y ago
Is it possible in Java?

222 points by caspg 2y ago

I wanted to develop a simple tool to compare maps. I thought about using this opportunity to try out Claude AI for coding a project from scratch. It worked surprisingly well! At least 95% of the code was generated by AI (I reached the limit so had to add final bits on my own).

MrMcCall 2y ago
The problem is that you must understand that 95% in order to complete the last 5%.
- negoutputeng 2y ago
  exactly right. POCs and demos are easy to build by anyone these days. The last 10% is what separates student projects from real products. any engineer who has spent time in the trenches understands that fixing corner cases in code produced by inexperienced engineers consumes a lot of time. in fact, poor overall design and lack of diligence tanks entire projects.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Sometimes it's not even inexperienced coders -- it's our own dang selves ;-)
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      Well, in my mind, the SketchySeaBeast of last week is inexperienced compared to the SketchySeaBeast of this one.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ericskiff 2y ago
  Interestingly, I’m pretty sure they mean they hit the limit with tokens on Claude. There’s a daily 2.5 million token limit that you can use up fairly quickly with 100K context So they may very well have completed the whole program with Claude. It’s just the machine literally stopped and the human had to do the final grunt work.
  - ericskiff 2y ago
    We’ve been hitting this in our work and in experimentation, and I can confirm that Claude sonnet 3.5 has gotten 100% of the way there, including working through errors and tricky problems as we tested the apps it built.
- trash_cat 2y ago
  >> The problem is that you must understand that 95% in order to complete the last 5%. What stops you from using AI to explain the code base?
ipaddr 2y ago
I asked Claude AI to make me an app and it refused and called it dangerous. I asked what kind of apps they could build and they suggested social media or health. So I asked it to make one but it refused too dangerous. I asked it to make anything.. anything app and it refused. I told it it sucked and it said it didn't. Then I deleted my account. I can't think of a worse llm than Claude.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Tbh this sounds like a skill issue.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    I'm having great success with OpenAI, local llms. I've created semi popular open source project that uses complex prompts to create specialized crms from just a few words. If ClaudeAI can't create something from my prompts or their own suggestions that's on Claude. Maybe it was my new account on that day at that time. There was a 10 response limit too which made it unworth it to even bother with. First account I ever actually deleted instead of just never going back. It was that bad.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Oh I didn't realize ChatGPT was working for you while Claude was not. It's just interesting because my experience is that claude is better at coding than ChatGPT-4o.
- 7thpower 2y ago
  There have been rumors of the system prompt changing for some services if the user had strikes on their account from earlier conversations. I wonder if you were impacted by this because what you described has not been my experience nor have I seen it discussed previously.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    I signed up two weeks ago after a hackernews story. I wanted to see quality vs OpenAI. Completely new users first prompt.

truckerbill 2y ago

Cool! Did you just prompt -> copy -> paste or did you come up with some specific workflow?

caspg 2y ago
I used Claude AI project to attach requirement for the project. Then I just went with single conversation. I specified that I want to do it in small steps and then was just doing copy -> paste until I reached the limit. I think it was because I was doing one big convo instead attaching code to the project. So pretty simple flow, totally not scalable for bigger projects. I need to read and check Cursor AI which can also use Claude models.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I wish I could try out Cursor, but I cannot due to this bug: https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/598 https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/598
  - ianhawes 2y ago
    Have you tried a different IP address?
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      I have not, I am using my residential/home IP address though and I can access https://api2.cursor.sh/ https://api2.cursor.sh/.
- Omnipresent 2y ago
  are you able to share the link to your prompts / conversation?
hijinks 2y ago
you can use the vscode cline to give a task and it uses a LLM to go out and create the app for you. In django i had it create a backend, set admin user, create requirements.txt and then do a whole frontend in vue as a test. It even can do screen testing and tested what happens if it puts a wrong login in.

2024user 2y ago

Claude built me a simple react app AND rendered it in it's own UI - including using imports and stuff. I am looking forward to this type of real time app creation being added into our OSs, browsers, phones and glasses.

swatcoder 2y ago
> I am looking forward to this type of real time app creation being added into our OSs, browsers, phones and glasses. What do you see that being used for? Surely, polished apps written for others are going to be best built in professional tools that live independently of whatever the OS might offer. So I assume you're talking about quick little scratch apps for personal use? Like an AI-enriched version of Apple's Automator or Shortcuts, or of shell scripts, where you spend a while coahcing an AI to write the little one-off program you need instead of visually building a worrkflow or writing a simple script? Is that something you believe there's a high unmet need for? This is an earnest question. I'm sincerely curious what you're envisioning and how it might supercede the rich variety of existing tools that seem to only see niche use today.
- cj 2y ago
  When I was in college (10+ years ago) there was a system that allowed you to select your classes. During the selection period, certain people had priority (people a year above you got to select first). Once a class was full, you could still get in if someone who was selected for the classes changed their mind, which (at an unpredictable time) would result in a seat becoming available in that class until another student noticed the availability and signed up. So I wrote a simple PHP script that loaded the page every 60 seconds checking, and the script would send me a text message if any of the classes I wanted suddenly had an opening. I would then run to a computer and try to sign up. These are the kind of bespoke, single-purpose things that I presume AI coding could help the average person with. “Send me a push notification when the text on this webpage says the class isn’t full, and check every 60 seconds”
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

bikamonki 2y ago

Could this be used to RPA my browser? Is it safe?

caspg 2y ago
What is RPA? Robotic Process Automation? If yes then I have no experience with that.

jckahn 2y ago

This sort of thing will be interesting to me once it can be done with fully local and open source tech on attainable hardware (and no, a $5,000 MacBook Pro is not attainable). Building a dependence on yet another untrustworthy AI startup that will inevitably enshittify isn’t compelling despite what the tech can do. We’re getting there with some of the smaller open source models, but we’re not quite there yet. I’m looking forward to where we’ll be in a year!

Veuxdo 2y ago
> and no, a $5,000 MacBook Pro is not attainable In many professions, $5000 for tools is almost nothing.
- cpursley 2y ago
  Yep. Typical landscape crew rolls with $50k in equipment (maybe more). People push back on tooling pricing in other industries (especially when the tooling is "soft') but have no clue what that the cost of doing biz is huge for others.
- torginus 2y ago
  Yeah, but those tools don't get obsoleted in 3 years.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    You're pretty lucky if the specialised tools for your profession cost <$2,000/y to replace and maintain. Sometimes tools last many years but cost an order of magnitude more anyways. Sometimes tools require expensive maintenance after purchase. Sometimes they are obsolete in a short number of years. Sometimes they were out quickly with use. Sometimes (often) a mix of the above. Regardless the reasons, any tooling in the ~$5,000/~3 year ballpark is not at all a high or unique number for a profession.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    high end CAD design software, the kind used to design SpaceX rocket engines, costs tens of thousands of dollars per seat per year.

bowsamic 2y ago

I’ve had insanely, shockingly good experiences prototyping a musical web app using tone.js using Claude with copilot

yieldcrv 2y ago

I wish Claude let you share conversations more easily, I’d be curious to see how this one went and what follow on questions you had

ffsm8 2y ago
huh? there should be a button on the top right to generate a share link in any conversation? is that really too hard? its even documented on their site https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9519189-project-visibility-and-sharing https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9519189-project-vi... Click the "Share" button in the upper right corner of your chat. Click the "Share & Copy Link" button to create a shareable link and add the chat snapshot to your project’s activity feed. /edit: i just checked. i think they had a regression? or at least i cannot see the button anymore. go figure. must be pretty recently, as i shared a chat just ~2-3 weeks ago
- raldi 2y ago
  Note the section you’re in at that doc link: “Claude for Work (Team & Enterprise Plans) -> Team & Enterprise Plan Features -> Project visibility and sharing”
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    Huh, did they remove it from the normal subscription then? I've never had a team & enterprise plan.

spaceman_2020 2y ago

I have about 6 months of coding experience. All I really knew was how to build a basic MERN app I’ve been using Sonnet 3.5 to code and I’ve managed to build multiple full fledged apps, including paid ones Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work and I’ve had no complaints yet. They might not scale to become the next Facebook, but not everything has to scale

njtransit 2y ago
Can you share some examples?
- spaceman_2020 2y ago
  ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor) MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it) GoUnfaked.com PlaybookFM.com TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)
  - imiric 2y ago
    Good job, I suppose, but the existence of all of these, and the fact you're able to pump them out so quickly, is genuinely depressing.
    - 1024core 2y ago
      There was a time when mathematicians wrote LISP programs and other humans translated them into machine instructions. Then one day someone wrote a LISP program to do this, and had one of the translators translate it. A compiler was born. Think of Claude as a compiler which compiles NLP text instructions into functional code.
      - imiric 2y ago
        I don't mind tools that empower programmers or even less technical people to build products. I use these tools myself in minor ways, even though I find them to be more of a nuisance than actually helpful. What I find depressing is how quickly someone with minimal experience can flood the web with low quality services, in search for a quick buck. It's like all the SEO spam we've been seeing for decades, but exponentially worse. The web will become even more of a nightmare to navigate than it already is.

Omnipresent 2y ago

it'd be cool to see the prompts used and the edits required to get to the end product here.

EcommerceFlow 2y ago

Been using LLMs since got3 beta in June 2021 and it’s interesting to see how my use cases have continuously been upgraded as models advanced. Started off with having it create funny random stories, to slowly creating more and more advanced programs. It’s shocking how good 3.5 Sonnet is at coding, considering the size of the model.

GaggiX 2y ago
>considering the size of the model. We don't know the size of Claude 3.5 Sonnet or any other Anthropic model.

nine_k 2y ago

This is great progress. Next obvious steps: make it understand large existing programs, learn form the style of the existing code while avoiding to learn the bad style where it's present, and then contribute features or fixes to that codebase.

williamcotton 2y ago

I used Claude (and a bit of ChatGPT) to write a multi-pass recursive descent parser for a search query DSL: https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query Why multi-pass? So multiple semantic errors can be reported at once to the user! The most important factor here is that I've written lexers and parsers beforehand. I was very detailed in my instructions and put it together piece-by-piece. It took probably 100 or so different chats. Try it out with the GUI you see in the gif in the README: git clone git@github.com:williamcotton/search-input-query.git cd search-input-query/search-input-query-demo npm install npm run dev

thefourthchime 2y ago

For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. It's enabling me to use frameworks I barely know, like React Native, Swift, etc.. The first prompt (with o1) will get you 60% there, but then you have a different workflow. The prompts can get to a local minimum, where claude/gpt4/etc.. just can't do any better. At which point you need to climb back out and try a different approach. I recommend git branches to keep track of this. Keep a good working copy in main, and anytime you want to add a feature, make a branch. If you get it almost there, make another branch in case it goes sideways. The biggest issue with developing like this is that you are not a coder anymore; you are a puppet master of a very smart and sometimes totally confused brain.

lxgr 2y ago
> For years I've kept a list of apps / ideas / products I may do someday. I never made the time, with Cursor AI I have already built one, and am working on another. This is one fact that people seem to severely under-appreciate about LLMs. They're significantly worse at coding in many aspects than even a moderately skilled and motivated intern, but for my hobby projects, until now I haven't had any intern that would even as much as taking a stab at some of the repetitive or just not very interesting subtasks, let alone stick with them over and over again without getting tired of it.
- Sakos 2y ago
  It also reduces the knowledge needed. I don't particularly care about learning how to setup and configure a web extension from scratch. With LLM, I can get 90% of that working in minutes, then focus on the parts that I am interested in. As somebody with ADHD, it was primarily all that supplementary, tangential knowledge which felt like an insurmountable mountain to me and made it impossible to actually try all the ideas I'd had over the years. I'm so much more productive now that I don't have to always get into the weeds for every little thing, which could easily delay progress for hours or even days. I can pick and choose the parts I feel are important to me.

lxgr 2y ago

Claude has worked amazingly well for me as somebody really not into UI/web development. There are so many small tasks that I could, but until now almost never would automate (whether it's not worth the time [1] or I just couldn't bring myself to do it as I don't really enjoy doing it). A one-off bitmask parser at work here, a proof of concept webapp at home there – it's literally opened up a new world of quality-of-life improvements, in a purely quantitative sense. It extends beyond UI and web development too: Very often I find myself thinking that there must be a smarter way to use CLI tools like jq, zsh etc., but considering how rarely I use them and that I do already know an ineffective way of getting what I need, up until now I couldn't justify spending the hours of going through documentation on the moderately high chance of finding a few useful nuggets letting me shave off a minute here and there every month. The same applies to SQL: After plateauing for several years (I get by just fine for my relatively narrow debugging and occasional data migration needs), LLMs have been much better at exposing me to new and useful patterns than dry and extensive documentation. (There are technical documents I really do enjoy reading, but SQL dialect specifications, often without any practical motivation as to when to use a given construct, are really not it.) LLMs have generally been great at that, but being able to immediately run what they suggest in-browser is where Claude currently has the edge for me. (ChatGPT Plus can apparently evaluate Python, but that's server-side only and accordingly doesn't really allow interactive use cases.) [1] https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/

CtrlAltmanDel 2y ago

What a feat! There's at least 3 pages of google search results for the nearly same thing. The "prompt" I used in google.com is: site:github.com map comparison I guess the difference, is that my way uses dramatically less time and resources, but requires directly acknowledging the original coders instead of relying on the plagiarism-ish capabilities of reguritating something through an LLM.

mvdtnz 2y ago
But creating things for which there are many existing, documented examples is what LLMs do best. Without this use case it's almost like they don't provide any value at all.
- smusamashah 2y ago
  Everything you can think of right now has already been made in one form or another and hence learnt by LLMs, do you agree? Or Can you come up easily with many things that LLMs have no clue of and hence will fail?

smallerfish 2y ago

Claude is fantastic. I think the model itself is good enough to be able to write good software when competently directed; it's let down only by the UI/UX around it. My only complaints are: a) that it's really easy to hit the usage limit, especially when refactoring across a half dozen files. One thing that'd theoretically be easyish to fix would be automatically updating files in the project context (perhaps with an "accept"/"reject" prompt) so that the model knows what the latest version of your code is without having to reupload it constantly. b) it oscillating between being lazy in really annoying ways (giving largeish code blocks with commented omissions partway through) and supplying the full file unnecessarily and using up your usage credits. My hope is that Jetbrains give up on their own (pretty limited) LLM and partner with Anthropic to produce a super-tight IDE native integration.

vunderba 2y ago

I think we're going to see a similar backlash to AI apps as we did with AI art. Not necessarily because users can identify AI apps, but more because due to the lower barrier of entry - the space is going to get hyper-competitive and it'll be VERY difficult to distinguish your app from the hundreds of nearly identical other ones. Another thing that worries me (because software devs in particular seem to take a very loose moral approach to plagiarism and basic human decency) is that it'll be significantly easier for a less scrupulous dev to find an app that they like, and use an LLM to instantly spin up a copy of it. I'm trying not to be all gloom and doom about GenAI, because it can be really nifty to see it generate a bunch of boilerplate (YAML configs, dev opsy stuff, etc.) but sometimes it's hard....

grugagag 2y ago
No doubt about it, things will get very competitive in the software space and while anyone will be able to use generative AI tools, I think more will be expected for less.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Reminds me of when OpenAI rolled out custom GPTs, and in a matter of a few months there were more than a million of them on the store. People don't seem to realize that the same thing is going to happen to regular app development once AI tooling gets even easier.
CaptainFever 2y ago
I hope not. I commend that software devs in particular seem to be adaptable to new technologies instead of trying to stop progress. Take this very post for example. Imagine an artist forum having daily front-page articles on AI, and most of the comments are curious and non-negative. That's basically what HackerNews is doing, but with developers instead. The huge culture difference is curious, and makes me happy with the posters on this site. You attribute it to the difficulty of using AI coding tools. But such tools to cut out the programmer and make it available to the layman has always existed: libraries, game engines, website builders, and now web app builders. You also attribute it to the flooding of the markets. But the website and mobile markets are famously saturated, and yet there we continue making stuff, because we want to (and because quality things make more money). I instead attribute it to our culture of free sharing (what one might call "plagiarism"... of ideas?!), adaptability, and curiosity. And that makes me hopeful.

grp000 2y ago

Can anyone measure in how Claude compares to copilot? Copilot feels like a fancy auto complete, but people seem to have good experiences with Claude, even in more complex settings.

cluckindan 2y ago
You can use Claude in Copilot.

nitwit005 2y ago

Ideally, Claude should have told you about easier approaches. I don't see any reason to mess around with code. There are plenty of website builder tools that will glue third party maps. Even the raw Google Maps API website will generate an HTML page with customized maps.

wayeq 2y ago

Is Claude 'better' than o1-preview? I've had phenomenal results with o1-preview (switching to o1-mini for simpler asks to avoid running out of queries), and tried Claude once and wasn't super impressed. Wondering if I should give it another shot.

deleted 2y ago

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glonq 2y ago

Has somebody evaluated the pros and cons of giving developers a programming-specific AI tool like copilot versus a general-purpose AI tool like chatgpt or claude? We are a small shop so I would prefer to not pay for both for every developer.

ronyba 2y ago

Is it possible in Java?