11 ms·

Testing the latest AI tools for prototyping and building simple websites

78 points by nadis 2y ago

isoprophlex 2y ago
If you want absolute troglodyte style pages, Claude (either claude code or vanilla claude.ai) is good enough for me. Instruct it to do vanilla js + css + html, no weird/annoying frameworks, and you can whip up something in minutes Built from the couch: https://www.agile9000.org/ https://www.agile9000.org/
- ifellover 2y ago
  I enjoyed your website far too much. I’m gonna go permanently cancel our retros.
- apercu 2y ago
  > Every two moon cycles, the team gathers and delete all tickets older than two seasons. Amazing. One of my clients Jira has tickets assigned to me from 2016. Those projects are long, long, long done.
- nadis 2y ago
  1. I love this site haha. 2. I'll need to try this, ty for the suggestion!
siliconc0w 2y ago
Lovable definitely seems to have a bit of a secret sauce. I've been trying to figure out how they do it. First, Claude3.7 is probably their backend model. Gemini 2.5 Pro is definitely getting there but I'm pretty sure Claude is still king for this kind of work. Second, if you break up the design and then implementation, you get significantly better responses. Finally, you have throw in a bit of what I'm calling stable-diffusion-prompt-isms where you almost excessively drop references to known brands or design philosophies to trigger those 'latent' memories and steer away from the more-basic stuff that seems to otherwise surface.
- echelon 2y ago
  It's so good that I think it kills off a bunch of businesses. Anybody selling templates - dead. Anybody selling design services to pre-seed startups and small businesses - dead. Squarespace - probably dead soon too. Any startup not taking advantage of these tools is stuck in the past. This is the new "going fast". You can test your ideas so quickly with these tools. As a full stack engineer, I can build and design myself to a pretty reasonable degree. I'm not going to do that anymore. These tools are faster than me.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > It's so good that I think it kills off a bunch of businesses. I disagree with the premise that somehow now all startups and small business would like to do their own webdesign simply because LLMs can help with some of the process, same goes for the rest of your points. Those business won't disappear, but instead they'll be able to make more with less, just like in the past when automation been improved. People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more. The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time, but turns out that just have the same amount of free-time as before but now we're pushed to do even more in less time.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - bluefirebrand 2y ago
      > People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more. What idyllic utopia are you living in? It cannot be the same world I'm living in, we're just seeing mass layoffs here > The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time, The dream of the workforce maybe. I think the dream of the wealthy and owner class is that they no longer need a workforce at all and can safely grind us workers into fertilizer without losing any quality of life for themselves
      - 2y ago
emurph55 2y ago
On a slightly related note, I have created a tool for generating web pages based on any subject using different "themes". You can create one here with a "Mario-Bro's" theme for example: https://thedeadweb.eu/?q=honey&style=mario-bros https://thedeadweb.eu/?q=honey&style=mario-bros
- nicbou 2y ago
  This is so weird! I entered "German health insurance" because that's what I'm working on at the moment. Every link I clicked had the faintest whiff of usefulness, but was ultimately completely worthless. It was like a pointless maze that never had any satisfying payoff. The name is really appropriate.
  - emurph55 2y ago
    yeah, it usually functions like a simplified wikipedia. It is more useful for simpler subjects in its current form, but ultimately its just a bit of fun
yahoozoo 2y ago
Considering all of these probably use either ChatGPT or Claude, is this entire business basically which company sends the best system prompt with your ask?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  No. Cursor, for example, let's you choose your model, and you can even use your own OpenAI API key for example if you want. But it's a lot more than just "the best system prompt". E.g. Cursor uses RAG (it indexes your repo in a vector DB) so it can use the right parts of your repo as context when calling the model. The biggest benefit I initially got from Cursor was asking it questions about my own repository, not a generic "how do I do X in Python" type of question I'd also say UI and workflow mean a ton here. The agentic mode of Cursor is very well integrated.
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  Sure. Just like all social apps are just about who can send the best code to run on a hyperscaler's servers.
  - yahoozoo 2y ago
    Right, because the defining factor between Facebook and Friendster was just ‘who compiled their code better.’ Amazing take. Meanwhile, LLM wrapper startups are out here acting like sending a slightly fancier paragraph to OpenAI is the new gold rush—until OpenAI just builds the feature themselves.
    - LewisVerstappen 2y ago
      You have zero idea what you’re talking about. Every one of these companies is using agents. they’re not relying on a single LLM call with some kind of prompt.
    - BoorishBears 2y ago
      No clue what you're on about unless you seriously couldn't get the irony of my comment, in which case I'm not sure it's worth trying to discuss anything more nuanced than a sledgehammer in the current company.
jeswin 2y ago
Slightly meta. I was trying to understand your product. Does Codeyam simulate how the software looks/works without actually running it? That seems impossible for any non-trivial project. I may have misinterpreted the idea, but calling it a "simulator" and the video leads me in that direction.
- jimmySixDOF 2y ago
  For that you can try same.dev
- nadis 2y ago
  "Software simulations" is a working title but it is sort of a new kind of thing we're trying to do and describe - definitely room to improve. Our goal is to simulate every function and aspect of your application and in doing so provides both a test suite and demonstration artifacts. it's akin to an intelligent, semantically aware fuzzer that is creating both good and bad results (vs. a fuzzer just creating bad results with the intent of breaking things). It is connected to your code via a GitHub app with read permissions and the ability to comment on PRs when analysis happens. Let me know if this helps (or doesn't!). I think it's a little different from what you're envisioning but you're not far off.
qingcharles 2y ago
Did this article really have no links to the tools?
- falcor84 2y ago
  Yeah, that's really in poor taste of them. So while I'm here, here are links to the tools they mentioned: https://www.cursor.com/ https://www.cursor.com/ https://v0.dev/ https://v0.dev/ https://lovable.dev/ https://lovable.dev/ https://bolt.new/ https://bolt.new/
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    I tried Lovable and it made a really lovely looking landing page, but it uses god-alone-knows how many frameworks and dependencies, so now I have to throw it into something else to make it vanilla.
    - apercu 2y ago
      That was exactly my experience.
  - nadis 2y ago
    That's a good catch - sorry we missed including the links initially and thanks for including them here. The blog post has been updated to include links in a dedicated section.
asdev 2y ago
to the two designers that go on HN, rejoice! your jobs are safe
- hbosch 2y ago
  UX designers, PMs and devs are all currently sweating to see which role will be replaced by AI first.
  - dartos 2y ago
    I know 0 devs or UX designers with any real world experience that are sweating. For UX specifically, it makes creating personas so much easier that I think we’ll see a UX once this hype cycle ends. I don’t know or talk to any PMs, personally.
- bastadanii 2y ago
  haha guilty! I'm actually one of them, I think we need to include these tools to our daily workflows to make sure that our jobs are safe
siquick 2y ago
Cursor has gone to the next level with Gemini 2.5. The reasons it gives for what it’s doing are well thought through and far more in context. Gemini seems to now advise you when you’re telling it to do something that may not make sense - first time I’ve really seen a non-Yes Man LLM. It’s more like a Yes-but-are-you-sure man.
kylecazar 2y ago
Are the UI's for bolt.new and lovable really that similar? That's nuts.
- nadis 2y ago
  I also found this surprising! I think a lot of UIs are sort of still just riffs on ChatGPT type products but with some exceptions/improvements (v0 stood out here).
- bastadanii 2y ago
  I thought that was crazy too
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
PeterStuer 2y ago
Roo-Code with Claude Sonnet 3.7 as the backend has worked near perfect for me for small websites. If you point it to a site to clone with instructions on what to change, you get very good results in half an hour's work and <5$ spent. Pretty stiff competition for the bottom end of the web creation/maitainance market for sure.

78 points by nadis 2y ago

If you want absolute troglodyte style pages, Claude (either claude code or vanilla claude.ai) is good enough for me. Instruct it to do vanilla js + css + html, no weird/annoying frameworks, and you can whip up something in minutes Built from the couch: https://www.agile9000.org/ https://www.agile9000.org/

ifellover 2y ago
I enjoyed your website far too much. I’m gonna go permanently cancel our retros.
apercu 2y ago
> Every two moon cycles, the team gathers and delete all tickets older than two seasons. Amazing. One of my clients Jira has tickets assigned to me from 2016. Those projects are long, long, long done.
nadis 2y ago
1. I love this site haha. 2. I'll need to try this, ty for the suggestion!

siliconc0w 2y ago

Lovable definitely seems to have a bit of a secret sauce. I've been trying to figure out how they do it. First, Claude3.7 is probably their backend model. Gemini 2.5 Pro is definitely getting there but I'm pretty sure Claude is still king for this kind of work. Second, if you break up the design and then implementation, you get significantly better responses. Finally, you have throw in a bit of what I'm calling stable-diffusion-prompt-isms where you almost excessively drop references to known brands or design philosophies to trigger those 'latent' memories and steer away from the more-basic stuff that seems to otherwise surface.

echelon 2y ago
It's so good that I think it kills off a bunch of businesses. Anybody selling templates - dead. Anybody selling design services to pre-seed startups and small businesses - dead. Squarespace - probably dead soon too. Any startup not taking advantage of these tools is stuck in the past. This is the new "going fast". You can test your ideas so quickly with these tools. As a full stack engineer, I can build and design myself to a pretty reasonable degree. I'm not going to do that anymore. These tools are faster than me.
- diggan 2y ago
  > It's so good that I think it kills off a bunch of businesses. I disagree with the premise that somehow now all startups and small business would like to do their own webdesign simply because LLMs can help with some of the process, same goes for the rest of your points. Those business won't disappear, but instead they'll be able to make more with less, just like in the past when automation been improved. People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more. The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time, but turns out that just have the same amount of free-time as before but now we're pushed to do even more in less time.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more. What idyllic utopia are you living in? It cannot be the same world I'm living in, we're just seeing mass layoffs here > The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time, The dream of the workforce maybe. I think the dream of the wealthy and owner class is that they no longer need a workforce at all and can safely grind us workers into fertilizer without losing any quality of life for themselves
    - 2y ago

emurph55 2y ago

On a slightly related note, I have created a tool for generating web pages based on any subject using different "themes". You can create one here with a "Mario-Bro's" theme for example: https://thedeadweb.eu/?q=honey&style=mario-bros https://thedeadweb.eu/?q=honey&style=mario-bros

nicbou 2y ago
This is so weird! I entered "German health insurance" because that's what I'm working on at the moment. Every link I clicked had the faintest whiff of usefulness, but was ultimately completely worthless. It was like a pointless maze that never had any satisfying payoff. The name is really appropriate.
- emurph55 2y ago
  yeah, it usually functions like a simplified wikipedia. It is more useful for simpler subjects in its current form, but ultimately its just a bit of fun

yahoozoo 2y ago

Considering all of these probably use either ChatGPT or Claude, is this entire business basically which company sends the best system prompt with your ask?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
No. Cursor, for example, let's you choose your model, and you can even use your own OpenAI API key for example if you want. But it's a lot more than just "the best system prompt". E.g. Cursor uses RAG (it indexes your repo in a vector DB) so it can use the right parts of your repo as context when calling the model. The biggest benefit I initially got from Cursor was asking it questions about my own repository, not a generic "how do I do X in Python" type of question I'd also say UI and workflow mean a ton here. The agentic mode of Cursor is very well integrated.
BoorishBears 2y ago
Sure. Just like all social apps are just about who can send the best code to run on a hyperscaler's servers.
- yahoozoo 2y ago
  Right, because the defining factor between Facebook and Friendster was just ‘who compiled their code better.’ Amazing take. Meanwhile, LLM wrapper startups are out here acting like sending a slightly fancier paragraph to OpenAI is the new gold rush—until OpenAI just builds the feature themselves.
  - LewisVerstappen 2y ago
    You have zero idea what you’re talking about. Every one of these companies is using agents. they’re not relying on a single LLM call with some kind of prompt.
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    No clue what you're on about unless you seriously couldn't get the irony of my comment, in which case I'm not sure it's worth trying to discuss anything more nuanced than a sledgehammer in the current company.

jeswin 2y ago

Slightly meta. I was trying to understand your product. Does Codeyam simulate how the software looks/works without actually running it? That seems impossible for any non-trivial project. I may have misinterpreted the idea, but calling it a "simulator" and the video leads me in that direction.

jimmySixDOF 2y ago
For that you can try same.dev
nadis 2y ago
"Software simulations" is a working title but it is sort of a new kind of thing we're trying to do and describe - definitely room to improve. Our goal is to simulate every function and aspect of your application and in doing so provides both a test suite and demonstration artifacts. it's akin to an intelligent, semantically aware fuzzer that is creating both good and bad results (vs. a fuzzer just creating bad results with the intent of breaking things). It is connected to your code via a GitHub app with read permissions and the ability to comment on PRs when analysis happens. Let me know if this helps (or doesn't!). I think it's a little different from what you're envisioning but you're not far off.

qingcharles 2y ago

Did this article really have no links to the tools?

falcor84 2y ago
Yeah, that's really in poor taste of them. So while I'm here, here are links to the tools they mentioned: https://www.cursor.com/ https://www.cursor.com/ https://v0.dev/ https://v0.dev/ https://lovable.dev/ https://lovable.dev/ https://bolt.new/ https://bolt.new/
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I tried Lovable and it made a really lovely looking landing page, but it uses god-alone-knows how many frameworks and dependencies, so now I have to throw it into something else to make it vanilla.
  - apercu 2y ago
    That was exactly my experience.
- nadis 2y ago
  That's a good catch - sorry we missed including the links initially and thanks for including them here. The blog post has been updated to include links in a dedicated section.

asdev 2y ago

to the two designers that go on HN, rejoice! your jobs are safe

hbosch 2y ago
UX designers, PMs and devs are all currently sweating to see which role will be replaced by AI first.
- dartos 2y ago
  I know 0 devs or UX designers with any real world experience that are sweating. For UX specifically, it makes creating personas so much easier that I think we’ll see a UX once this hype cycle ends. I don’t know or talk to any PMs, personally.
bastadanii 2y ago
haha guilty! I'm actually one of them, I think we need to include these tools to our daily workflows to make sure that our jobs are safe

siquick 2y ago

Cursor has gone to the next level with Gemini 2.5. The reasons it gives for what it’s doing are well thought through and far more in context. Gemini seems to now advise you when you’re telling it to do something that may not make sense - first time I’ve really seen a non-Yes Man LLM. It’s more like a Yes-but-are-you-sure man.

kylecazar 2y ago

Are the UI's for bolt.new and lovable really that similar? That's nuts.

nadis 2y ago
I also found this surprising! I think a lot of UIs are sort of still just riffs on ChatGPT type products but with some exceptions/improvements (v0 stood out here).
bastadanii 2y ago
I thought that was crazy too

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

PeterStuer 2y ago

Roo-Code with Claude Sonnet 3.7 as the backend has worked near perfect for me for small websites. If you point it to a site to clone with instructions on what to change, you get very good results in half an hour's work and <5$ spent. Pretty stiff competition for the bottom end of the web creation/maitainance market for sure.