6 ms·

I kind of love the diy aspect of ai coding. A dermatologist a short while ago with this idea would have to find a willing and able partner to do a bunch of wor

by jmull 1y ago

I kind of love the diy aspect of ai coding. A dermatologist a short while ago with this idea would have to find a willing and able partner to do a bunch of work -- meaning that most likely it would just remain an idea. This isn't just for non-tech people either -- I have a decades long list of ideas I'd like to work on but simply do not have time for. So now I'm cranking up the ol' AI agents an seeing what I can do about it.

asadotzler 1y ago
[flagged]
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  This is not a healthcare app, it’s a health education app. This app will never have PII, or be used for treatment/diagnosis. If it goes down tomorrow it will have zero impact on anyone’s healthcare.
- tptacek 1y ago
  It's not OK to talk this way about people's Show HN projects; this is in the guidelines.
jmkni 1y ago
Same, I've had ideas rattling around in my brain for years which I've just never executed on, because I'm 'pretty sure' they won't work and it's not been worth the effort I've been coding professionally for ~20 years now, so it's not that I don't know what to do, it's just a time sink Now I'm blasting through them with AI and getting them out there just in case They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know
- ecocentrik 1y ago
  I'm a big fan of barriers to entry and using effort as a filter for good work. This derma app could be so much better if it actually taught laypeople to identify the difference between carcinomas, melanomas and non-cancerous moles instead of just being a fixed loop quiz.
  - jmkni 1y ago
    Well I mean more low-brow stuff like "Pint?", a social media app to find other people to go for a pint with :)
  - ptero 1y ago
    IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping. Letting domain experts build what they have in mind themselves, on a shoestring, is a powerful ability. Most such prototypes get tossed because of a flaw in the idea, not because they lacked professional software help. If something clicks the prototype can get rebuilt properly. Raising the barriers to entry means significantly fewer things get tried. My 2c.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping Not in an industry where prototypes very often get thrown into production because decision makers don't know anything about the value of good tech, security, etc
      - goosejuice 1y ago
        That's completely fine for most software.
        vrighter 1y ago
        it most definitely is not.
        goosejuice 1y ago
        It's perfectly fine for most MVPs to go into production. Most SaaS software is solved. Prototypes are outsourcing the hard parts around security. The hard part is making a sale and finding the right fit. Spending 4x the cost on a product that never makes a sale is bad economics. This app isn't remotely harmful, so do you care to make an argument for why it shouldn't exist? Should decision makers be more informed? Yes, of course, but that's not an argument for gatekeeping. We shouldn't be gatekeeping software or the web. Not through licensure or some arbitrary meaning of "effort". That will do nothing but stifle job growth and I'd very much like to keep developers employed.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  >They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know I don't agree. I think because of llm/vibe coding my random ideas I've actually wasted more time then if I did them manually. The vibe code as you said is often crap and often after I spend a lot of time on it. Realize that there are countless subtle errors that mean its not actually doing what I was intending at all. I've learned nothing and made a pointless app that does not even do anything but looks like it does. Thats the big allure that has been keeping "AI" hype floating. It always seems so dang close to being a magic wand. Then upon time spent reviewing and a critical eye you realize it has been tricking you like a janitor that is just sweeping dirt under the rug. At this point I've relegated LLM to advanced find replace and Formatted data structuring(Take this list make it into JSON) and that's about it. There are basically tools that do everything else llms do that already exist and do it better. I can't count at this point how many times "AI" has taken some sort of logic I want then makes a bunch of complex looking stuff that takes forever to review and I find out it fudged the logic to simply always be true/false when its not even a boolean problem.
  - anthonypasq96 1y ago
    brother, no one cares. if LLMs made something exist that did not exist previously, they worked. it doesnt matter if you could have done it faster by hand if doing so would have resulted in the program not existing.
    - citizenpaul 1y ago
      To anyone wondering if their are LLM paid shills on HN here is proof: A less than 30 day old account which only comment is a nonsense praise of LLM against legitimate criticism. user: anthonypasq96 created: 22 days ago karma: 2 about: submissions comments favorites
      - anthonypasq96 1y ago
        why are people online obsessed with the idea that anyone who disagrees with them is a paid actor
- vrighter 1y ago
  well yeah, better not existing at all actually, if they're crap and you're ok with that. Those just serve to pad out your resume for nontechnical people. It's not like you're actually learning much if you couldn't be bothered to even remove the crap parts
  - jmkni 1y ago
    My Resume has plenty of padding already and it's not about learning, it's about "maybe this random idea might actually work" and proving out that concept
sungam 1y ago
Yes I agree - I could probably have worked out how to do it myself but it would have taken weeks and realistically I would never have had the time to finish it.
amelius 1y ago
Well, image classification tasks don't require coding at all. You just need one program that can read the training data, train a model, and then do the classification based on input images from the user. This works for basically any kind of image, whether it's dogs/cats or skin cancer.
- chaps 1y ago
  ...none of this requires coding?
  - amelius 1y ago
    No additional coding. You can take the code from a dog/cat classifier and use it for anything. You only need to change the training data.
    - runako 1y ago
      > No additional coding. > You can take the code from https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ More seriously, for most non-programmers, even typing into a console is "coding."
      - growingkittens 1y ago
        I am a "noncoder" because of a number of reasons. My best friend is a "coder" and still starts instructions with "It's easy! Just open the terminal...". Unfortunately, I do advanced knowledge work, and the tools I need technically often exist...if you're a coder. Coding is not that accessible. The intermediary mental models and path to experience required to understand a coding task are not available to the average person.
    - chaps 1y ago
      I've done enough image classification stuff that, nah. If all you care about is high level confirmation with high error rates, sure. But more complex tasks like, "Are these two documents the same?" are much, much harder and the failure modes are subtle.
yread 1y ago
Why? I know tons of coding MDs. Pathologist hacking the original Prince and adding mods also just in assembly. Molecular pathologist organizing their own pipelines and ETLs. Lots of people like computers but earn a living doing something else
- jonahx 1y ago
  He wasn't saying no coding MDs existed. Just that, generally speaking, most MDs would have had to partner with a technical person, which is true. And is now less true than it was before.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Waterluvian 1y ago
I feel like the name “vibe code” is really the only issue I have. Enabling everyone to program computers to do useful things is very very good.
- AuthAuth 1y ago
  I wish that computers were designed in a way that pushed the users to script more. Its such a powerful ability that would benefit almost every worker.
  - Waterluvian 1y ago
    Apple has always been pretty good at this. AppleScript, Automator, Shortcuts. I did all kinds of cool stuff in OSX 10.4 back before I wrote any traditional code.
    - sleepybrett 1y ago
      Applesoft Basic
    - mbreese 1y ago
      Before that was HyperCard. It was always amazing to me the types of applications that could be written with HyperCard. In a similar way, VBA was amazing in MS Office back in the day. If you ever saw someone who was good at Visual Basic in Excel, it’s impressive the amount of work that could get done in Excel by a motivated user who would have been hesitant to call themselves a programmer.
      - cik 1y ago
        I wrote, and sold my first piece of software in HyperCard. It was a pretty lame Choose Your Own Adventure style game, where you clicked on buttons, having read the text. 7 year old me was pretty chuffed, to buy some baseball cards out of his hobby. I really, really miss that world.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
farai89 1y ago
I believe this captures it well. There are many people that would have previously needed to hire dev shops to get their ideas out and now they can just get them done faster. I believe the impact will be larger in non-tech sectors.
- utyop22 1y ago
  Most ideas suck and never deserve to see the light of day. True productivity is when what is produced is of benefit.
  - justin 1y ago
    Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    Different people have different ideas about what counts as benefit. The only kind of productivity is progress toward somebody's arbitrary goals. There's nothing "true" about it.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  Right. And what a lot of folks here miss is that the prototype was always bad. This process only speeds up the MVP, and gives the idea person a faster way to validate an idea. Focusing on "but security lol" is a bad take, IMO. Every early attempt is bad at something. Be it security, or scale, or any number of problems. Validating early is good. Giving non-tech people a chance is good. If an idea is worth pursuing, you can always redo it with "experts". But you can't afford experts (hell, you can't even afford amateurs) for every idea you want put into an MVP.
  - gentooflux 1y ago
    There's a big difference between a "prototype" (or a POC, or a spike, or whatever your company calls it), and an "MVP" (minimum viable product). An insecure product is not viable. A product which cannot be extended or maintained without being almost competitively rewritten is not viable. MVP means just enough engineered code to solve a problem, rough around the edges and lacking features sure, but not built by someone who has literally no idea what they were doing. Prototypes of physical products are never put into production and sold to consumers. Unfortunately software prototypes "run", and are sold at that point. Then they begin to scale, and the inherent flaws in their design are amplified. The same thing used to happen with MS Access apps; the same thing still happens with "low code" solutions. The engineers cost just as much after the prototype phase, but if you don't hire them to build your MVP then you never have one.

by jmull 1y ago

asadotzler 1y ago

[flagged]

bitmasher9 1y ago
This is not a healthcare app, it’s a health education app. This app will never have PII, or be used for treatment/diagnosis. If it goes down tomorrow it will have zero impact on anyone’s healthcare.
tptacek 1y ago
It's not OK to talk this way about people's Show HN projects; this is in the guidelines.

jmkni 1y ago

Same, I've had ideas rattling around in my brain for years which I've just never executed on, because I'm 'pretty sure' they won't work and it's not been worth the effort I've been coding professionally for ~20 years now, so it's not that I don't know what to do, it's just a time sink Now I'm blasting through them with AI and getting them out there just in case They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know

ecocentrik 1y ago
I'm a big fan of barriers to entry and using effort as a filter for good work. This derma app could be so much better if it actually taught laypeople to identify the difference between carcinomas, melanomas and non-cancerous moles instead of just being a fixed loop quiz.
- jmkni 1y ago
  Well I mean more low-brow stuff like "Pint?", a social media app to find other people to go for a pint with :)
- ptero 1y ago
  IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping. Letting domain experts build what they have in mind themselves, on a shoestring, is a powerful ability. Most such prototypes get tossed because of a flaw in the idea, not because they lacked professional software help. If something clicks the prototype can get rebuilt properly. Raising the barriers to entry means significantly fewer things get tried. My 2c.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping Not in an industry where prototypes very often get thrown into production because decision makers don't know anything about the value of good tech, security, etc
    - goosejuice 1y ago
      That's completely fine for most software.
      - vrighter 1y ago
        it most definitely is not.
        goosejuice 1y ago
        It's perfectly fine for most MVPs to go into production. Most SaaS software is solved. Prototypes are outsourcing the hard parts around security. The hard part is making a sale and finding the right fit. Spending 4x the cost on a product that never makes a sale is bad economics. This app isn't remotely harmful, so do you care to make an argument for why it shouldn't exist? Should decision makers be more informed? Yes, of course, but that's not an argument for gatekeeping. We shouldn't be gatekeeping software or the web. Not through licensure or some arbitrary meaning of "effort". That will do nothing but stifle job growth and I'd very much like to keep developers employed.
citizenpaul 1y ago
>They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know I don't agree. I think because of llm/vibe coding my random ideas I've actually wasted more time then if I did them manually. The vibe code as you said is often crap and often after I spend a lot of time on it. Realize that there are countless subtle errors that mean its not actually doing what I was intending at all. I've learned nothing and made a pointless app that does not even do anything but looks like it does. Thats the big allure that has been keeping "AI" hype floating. It always seems so dang close to being a magic wand. Then upon time spent reviewing and a critical eye you realize it has been tricking you like a janitor that is just sweeping dirt under the rug. At this point I've relegated LLM to advanced find replace and Formatted data structuring(Take this list make it into JSON) and that's about it. There are basically tools that do everything else llms do that already exist and do it better. I can't count at this point how many times "AI" has taken some sort of logic I want then makes a bunch of complex looking stuff that takes forever to review and I find out it fudged the logic to simply always be true/false when its not even a boolean problem.
- anthonypasq96 1y ago
  brother, no one cares. if LLMs made something exist that did not exist previously, they worked. it doesnt matter if you could have done it faster by hand if doing so would have resulted in the program not existing.
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    To anyone wondering if their are LLM paid shills on HN here is proof: A less than 30 day old account which only comment is a nonsense praise of LLM against legitimate criticism. user: anthonypasq96 created: 22 days ago karma: 2 about: submissions comments favorites
    - anthonypasq96 1y ago
      why are people online obsessed with the idea that anyone who disagrees with them is a paid actor
vrighter 1y ago
well yeah, better not existing at all actually, if they're crap and you're ok with that. Those just serve to pad out your resume for nontechnical people. It's not like you're actually learning much if you couldn't be bothered to even remove the crap parts
- jmkni 1y ago
  My Resume has plenty of padding already and it's not about learning, it's about "maybe this random idea might actually work" and proving out that concept

sungam 1y ago

Yes I agree - I could probably have worked out how to do it myself but it would have taken weeks and realistically I would never have had the time to finish it.

amelius 1y ago

Well, image classification tasks don't require coding at all. You just need one program that can read the training data, train a model, and then do the classification based on input images from the user. This works for basically any kind of image, whether it's dogs/cats or skin cancer.

chaps 1y ago
...none of this requires coding?
- amelius 1y ago
  No additional coding. You can take the code from a dog/cat classifier and use it for anything. You only need to change the training data.
  - runako 1y ago
    > No additional coding. > You can take the code from https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ More seriously, for most non-programmers, even typing into a console is "coding."
    - growingkittens 1y ago
      I am a "noncoder" because of a number of reasons. My best friend is a "coder" and still starts instructions with "It's easy! Just open the terminal...". Unfortunately, I do advanced knowledge work, and the tools I need technically often exist...if you're a coder. Coding is not that accessible. The intermediary mental models and path to experience required to understand a coding task are not available to the average person.
  - chaps 1y ago
    I've done enough image classification stuff that, nah. If all you care about is high level confirmation with high error rates, sure. But more complex tasks like, "Are these two documents the same?" are much, much harder and the failure modes are subtle.

yread 1y ago

Why? I know tons of coding MDs. Pathologist hacking the original Prince and adding mods also just in assembly. Molecular pathologist organizing their own pipelines and ETLs. Lots of people like computers but earn a living doing something else

jonahx 1y ago
He wasn't saying no coding MDs existed. Just that, generally speaking, most MDs would have had to partner with a technical person, which is true. And is now less true than it was before.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Waterluvian 1y ago

I feel like the name “vibe code” is really the only issue I have. Enabling everyone to program computers to do useful things is very very good.

AuthAuth 1y ago
I wish that computers were designed in a way that pushed the users to script more. Its such a powerful ability that would benefit almost every worker.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  Apple has always been pretty good at this. AppleScript, Automator, Shortcuts. I did all kinds of cool stuff in OSX 10.4 back before I wrote any traditional code.
  - sleepybrett 1y ago
    Applesoft Basic
  - mbreese 1y ago
    Before that was HyperCard. It was always amazing to me the types of applications that could be written with HyperCard. In a similar way, VBA was amazing in MS Office back in the day. If you ever saw someone who was good at Visual Basic in Excel, it’s impressive the amount of work that could get done in Excel by a motivated user who would have been hesitant to call themselves a programmer.
    - cik 1y ago
      I wrote, and sold my first piece of software in HyperCard. It was a pretty lame Choose Your Own Adventure style game, where you clicked on buttons, having read the text. 7 year old me was pretty chuffed, to buy some baseball cards out of his hobby. I really, really miss that world.
- worldsayshi 1y ago

farai89 1y ago

I believe this captures it well. There are many people that would have previously needed to hire dev shops to get their ideas out and now they can just get them done faster. I believe the impact will be larger in non-tech sectors.

utyop22 1y ago
Most ideas suck and never deserve to see the light of day. True productivity is when what is produced is of benefit.
- justin 1y ago
  Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Different people have different ideas about what counts as benefit. The only kind of productivity is progress toward somebody's arbitrary goals. There's nothing "true" about it.
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
Right. And what a lot of folks here miss is that the prototype was always bad. This process only speeds up the MVP, and gives the idea person a faster way to validate an idea. Focusing on "but security lol" is a bad take, IMO. Every early attempt is bad at something. Be it security, or scale, or any number of problems. Validating early is good. Giving non-tech people a chance is good. If an idea is worth pursuing, you can always redo it with "experts". But you can't afford experts (hell, you can't even afford amateurs) for every idea you want put into an MVP.
- gentooflux 1y ago
  There's a big difference between a "prototype" (or a POC, or a spike, or whatever your company calls it), and an "MVP" (minimum viable product). An insecure product is not viable. A product which cannot be extended or maintained without being almost competitively rewritten is not viable. MVP means just enough engineered code to solve a problem, rough around the edges and lacking features sure, but not built by someone who has literally no idea what they were doing. Prototypes of physical products are never put into production and sold to consumers. Unfortunately software prototypes "run", and are sold at that point. Then they begin to scale, and the inherent flaws in their design are amplified. The same thing used to happen with MS Access apps; the same thing still happens with "low code" solutions. The engineers cost just as much after the prototype phase, but if you don't hire them to build your MVP then you never have one.