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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 mu
by 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 agoCan you share some examples?
- spaceman_2020 2y agoThumbnailGenius.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 agoGood 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 agoThere 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 agoI 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.
- azan_ 2y agoCould you please explain why? I'm trying to think how is it depressing and can't come up with anything.
- eastbound 2y agoBecause we don’t believe it’s equal quality to our job, so we see cheap competition arriving with swathes of bad products, but no way for customers to distinguish what makes quality. Plus we all create bugs anyway.
- imiric 2y agoIt's not really that. The quality of these tools will probably increase, and I'm fine with more competition, and with less experienced developers being empowered to build their own products. What is depressing to me is that the products showcased here are essentially cookie-cutter derivatives built on and around the AI hype cycle. They're barely UI wrappers around LLMs marketed as something groundbreaking. So the thought of the web being flooded with these kinds of sites, in addition to the increase in spam and other AI generated content, is just depressing.
- grugagag 2y agoI find that part depressing as well, like who would even listen to gen AI podcasts? Not even vetted by a person but just pumped out as filler like it’s some kind of soil fertilizer. There is already so much good human made content on the web for nearly free if you only look. No doubt this AI slop will get in out way even if we don’t want it, but think of the effect this slop is going to have on younger generation.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoWhy is it depressing? I find it exhilarating I’m able to bring ideas to life that I could only think about before
- imiric 2y agoHonestly? These were ideas that you put a lot of thought into? All your sites are essentially wrappers around LLMs. You don't disclose which models or APIs you use in the backend, so did you train your own models, or are you proxying to an existing service? Your T&C and Privacy Policy is generic nonsense. What happens to the data your users upload? ThumbnailGenius.com has an example thumbnail of a person with 4 fingers. I honestly can't tell the difference in the comparison between Midjourney, Dall-E and your fine-tuned models. MetHacker.io is not loading. GoUnfaked.com claims to have royalty and copyright-free images, which is highly misleading and possibly illegal. PlaybookFM.com is another effortless wrapper around NotebookLM or a similar LLM. TokenAI.dev is non-functional and seems like a crypto+AI scam. I'm sorry to be so negative, but if you're going to leverage AI tools, at least put some thought and effort into creating something original that brings value to the world. I think you'll find this more rewarding than what you're doing now. Quality over quantity, and all that.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoThese are not the things I wanted to create, but its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping. I did that with MetaHacker which, under the hood, is very capable. But because I spent so much time building it, I never got around to marketing it or monetizing it, so much of it is abandoned and only 1/10th of it is live for end users. So for my future projects, I told myself I will only spend at most a month working on them. Learn to launch and get users before spending months just building There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch I spent almost ten years as a b2b marketer. All the clients I worked with were established businesses that needed some scale and direction. I quickly learned that growing a 10M ARR business with established pipelines is a whole lot different than building something from scratch. This is my attempt to go from 0 to 1 as fast as possible and learn as much as I can before diving into bigger things
- lucianbr 2y agoThank you for sharing these. So many people talk in superlative terms about the stuff they did with AI and give no details. It's very hard to gauge what they actually achieved.
- mmmuhd 2y ago[dead]
- tchock23 2y agoAre you sharing your process anywhere (like on YouTube)? I’d be really curious to see behind the scenes of how you’re building these types of products. For example, are you just using Claude or Claude with Cursor (or something else)?
- spaceman_2020 2y agoI think I should create a video showing it Usually its v0.dev for the basic UI and then just prompting cursor
- vunderba 2y agoWith the lower barrier to entry comes dozens of nearly "apps" that are nearly indistinguishable from each other. ThumbnailGenius There's already several sites that generate YT thumbnails with AI: https://vidiq.com/ai-thumbnails-generator/ https://vidiq.com/ai-thumbnails-generator/ https://www.testmythumbnails.com/create-thumbnails-with-ai https://www.testmythumbnails.com/create-thumbnails-with-ai PlaybookFM AI Podcasts have been a thing for a while - though I can't imagine who finds listening to TTS voices with LLM content particularly engaging over a genuine person who puts time and effort into crafting an engaging personality. GoUnfaked I don't really understand the point of this one - it generates photorealistic AI pictures? Isn't that exactly what Getty Images AI, Freepik, etc. are all doing already? Good luck - but this feels like a very "spray and pray" approach to development. It feels like it has the same probability to generate genuine income as people who try to start Patreon pages for their AI "artwork".
- spaceman_2020 2y agoI have at least 10 people signing up for thumbnailgenius every day when I haven’t even started marketing it So hey, maybe its not revolutionary, but some people find it useful enough Which is fine by me. Maybe you can tackle changing the world. I’ll just focus on being useful enough to some people
- njtransit 2y agoThanks. That is interesting. Did you use AI for just the front end components, or were you also able to reliably use the output for the ML portions, or were those simply offloaded to other services via API call?
- julianeon 2y agoThe most impressive part of this is your ideas, btw. I don't think for most people LLM's are nearly as effective, because they can't think of use cases.
- yodsanklai 2y agoWhat do you do if your app has a bug that your LLM isn't able to fix? is your coding experience enough to fix it, or do you ship with bugs hoping customers won't mind?
- instalabs 2y agoYou start over from scratch /s(50%)
- epolanski 2y agoWhat's the point of this question? Everybody ships nasty bugs in production that he himself might find impossible to debug, everybody. Thus he will do the very same thing me, you or anybody else on this planet do, find a second pair of eyes, virtually or not, paying or not.
- LunaSea 2y ago> Everybody ships nasty bugs in production that he himself might find impossible to debug, everybody. No.
- monooso 2y agoSome people haven't realised it yet.
- LunaSea 2y agoWhich would be a lot better than knowingly releasing in production code with important defects.
- epolanski 2y agoI haven't seen anybody, regardless of org, procedures or whatever to never ship a bug he himself could not debug. Hell, I don't even see it happening in OS space with dozens of eyes on years-long PRs. It just happens. At some point you'll write and ship a bug that you yourself can't debug in an appropriate time frame alone and needs more eyes.
- jchanimal 2y agoI think the front end is the most interesting place right now, because it’s where people are making stuff for themselves with the help of LLMs. The browser is a great place to build voice chat, 3d, almost any other experience. I expect a renewed interest in granting fuller capabilities to the web, especially background processing and network access.
- grugagag 2y agoThat seems a bit too much to ask, I want the piece of mind of knowing the browser keeps isolated sandboxes, if that philosophy changes I would be very uncomfortable using the browser. How about we go back to thick clients, with LLMs the effort required to do that for multiple operating systems will also be reduced, no?
- dartos 2y agoIn your opinion as a newer dev, what were the most complicated things that sonnet was able to do and was not able to do?
- hipadev23 2y agoGenuine question: Do you feel like you're learning the language/frameworks/techniques well? Or do you feel like you're just getting more adept at leveraging the LLM? Do you think you could you maintain and/or debug someone else's application?
- spaceman_2020 2y agoNot as much as I would have if I was writing everything from scratch. But then again, my goal isn’t to be a coder or get a job as a coder - I’m primarily a marketer and got into coding simply because I had a stack of ideas I wanted to experiment with Most of the things I’ve built are fun things See: GoUnfaked.com and PlaybookFM.com as examples PlaybookFM.com is interesting because everything from the code to the podcasts to the logo are AI generated
- an_guy 2y agoHow much time did you spend on getting it working especially for playbookfm?
- spaceman_2020 2y agoLess than a week, tops. The hard part was the content - curating the resources for creating the podcasts
- kenjackson 2y agoI’ve had the same experience, except helping complement build components or scripts. Everyone on HN tells me how LLMs are horrible, yet I’ve saved literally hundreds of hours with them so far. I guess we’re just lucky.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoLook at the replies on my comment This place is far gone. Some of the most close minded, uncurious people in tech I don’t think this place deserves to be called “Hacker” News anymore
- lostemptations5 2y agoI'm not saying you're wrong at all or in disbelief -- but I've spent lots of time with Claude 3.5 trying to prototype React apps and not even full fledged prototypes -- and I can't get it to make anything bug free somehow. Maybe I'm "holding it wrong" -- I mean using it incorrectly. True it renders quite interesting mockups and has React code behind it -- but then try and get this into even a demoable state for your boss or colleagues... Even a simple "please create a docker file with everything I need in a directory to get this up and running"...doesn't work. Docker file doesnt work (my fault maybe for not expressing I'm on Arm64), app is miss configured, files are in the wrong directories, key things are missing. Again just my experience. I find Claude interesting for generating ideas-- but I have a hard time seeing how a dev with six months experience could get multiple "paid" apps out with it. I have 20 years (bla, bla) experience and still find it requires outrageous hand holding for anything serious. Again I'm not doubting you at all -- I'm just saying me personally I find it hard to be THAT productive with it.
- fragmede 2y agowould you be willing to share any of your chats? Like say the docker one?
- lostemptations5 2y agoThat one was for work - but let me try again on an example project and I'll share it sure.
- vachina 2y agoAgreed. LLMs can give you ideas on how to get there, but you still need foundational knowledge of the language or framework to extend the code it generates.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoYou have to temper your ambitions. Choose languages it understands well. Deploy on vercel. Specify exactly what you’re working with (“I’m using nextjs 14 with app router”)
- lucianbr 2y agoI learned to drive before in-car GPS was widely available, at least where I lived. Going to some new place meant getting a map, looking at it, making a plan, following the plan, keeping track on the map, that sort of thing. Then I traveled somewhere new, for the first time, with GPS and a navigation sofware. It was quite impressive, and rather easier. I got to my destination the first time, without any problems. And each time after that. But I did remark that I did not learn the route. The 10th time, the 50th time, I still needed the GPS to guide me. And without it, I would have to start the whole thing from scratch: get a map, make a plan, and so on. Having done the "manual" navigation with maps lots of times before, it never worries me what I would do without a GPS. But if you're "born" with the GPS, I wonder what you do when it fails. Are you not worried how you would manage your apps if for some reason the AIs were unavailable?
- spaceman_2020 2y agoYou have to temper your ambitions. Choose languages it understands really well (typescript or python). Choose easier deployment solutions (vercel over docker). Be specific about the versions you’re using (“I’m using nextjs 14 with app router”)
- dmd 2y agoI was told a similar thing when a mentor discovered I didn’t know how to wire-wrap my own CPU from scratch.
- belter 2y agoIf there are complaints who is going to fix it? :-)
- poslathian 2y agoWe’ll see what the future holds but as an old timer, using LLMs to creat applications seems exactly the same as: Python/JS and their ecosystem replacing OS hosted C/C++ which replaced bare metal Assembly which replaced digital logic which replaced analog circuits which replaced mechanical design as the “standard goto tool” for how to create programs. Starting with punchcard looms and Ada Lovelace maybe. In every case we trade resource efficiency and lower level understanding for developer velocity and raise the upper bound on system complexity, capability, and somehow performance (despite the wasted efficiency).
- quantum_state 2y agoWell said .. Hope the pile of complexity accumulated would not be a time bomb ...
- lxgr 2y agoTo be fair, that ship has sailed years ago in many areas of programming, even without LLMs...
- rlty_chck 2y agoEvery time I see claims like this, I instinctively click on the user's profile and try to verify if their story checks out. >I played around a lot with code when I was younger. I built my first site when I was 13 and had a good handle on Javascript back when jQuery was still a pipe dream. >Started with the Codecademy Ruby track which was pretty easy. Working through RailsTutorial right now. posted on April 15, 2015, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9382537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9382537 >I've been freelancing since I was 17. I've dabbled in every kind of online trade imaginable, from domain names to crypto. I've built and sold multiple websites. I also built and sold a small agency. >I can do some marketing, some coding, some design, some sales, but I'm not particularly good at any of those in isolation. posted on Jan 20, 2023, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34459482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34459482 So I don't really understand where this claim of only "6 months of coding experience" is coming from, when you clearly have been coding on and off for multiple decades.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoyou do know that there are other kinds of freelancing apart from coding, right?
- azemetre 2y agoI think the comment is fair. The poster came across as inexperienced with programming when in reality they have a decade plus experience. I trust experience people can make better use of these tools because ideally they should have a foundation of first principles to work off of whereas inexperienced people jumping straight into LLMs may not be fully understanding what is happening or what they are given.
- spaceman_2020 2y agoI don’t have a decade of coding experience. I do have almost two decades of internet experience, especially marketing. I had an aborted attempt at learning to code back in 2013-14, but I never stuck around, mostly because I was freelancing as a content marketer (GrowthPub.com) My first real coding experience was when I joined a bootcamp (Code.in bootcamp) in 2022. Only reason I could stick around this time was because I had a chunk of change after selling my agency and had nothing else to do I’m a humanities grad for what its worth