4 ms·

people say this like it's a criticism, but damn is it ever nice to start writing a simple crud form and just have copilot autocomplete the whole thing for me.

goalieca 1y ago
Back in the 90s you could drag and drop a vb6 applet in Microsoft word. Somehow we’ve regressed.. Edit: for the young, wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) was common for all sorts of languages from c++ to Delphi to html. You could draw up anything you wanted. Many had native bindings to data sources of all kinds. My favourite was actually HyperCard because I learned it in grade school.
- squeaky-clean 1y ago
  Wysiwyg kind of fell apart once we had to stop assuming everyone had an 800x600 or 1024x768 screen, because what you saw was no longer what others got.
  - hackit2 1y ago
    Most of the internet still assumes you're using a 96 DPI monitor. Tho the rise of mobile phone has changed that it seems like the vast majority of the content consumed on mobile lends itself to being scaled to any DPI - eg.. movies, pictures, youtube ect.
  - eternauta3k 1y ago
    Not a big issue with QT layouts (still have to test the result though)
  - benterix 1y ago
    Not entirely, in these RAD tools you also had flexible layout choices and obviously you could test it for various window sizes (although the maximum was the one supported by your graphics card). Too bad many chose the lazy way and just enforced fixed window size at 800x600.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    I can imagine adding breakpoints to a wysiwyg editor being not terribly difficult. They decouple presentation from logic pretty well.
- mcmoor 1y ago
  I still miss my days of programming Visual Basic 6. Nothing since then ever compares.
- ako 1y ago
  4gl or RAD is still here, but now it’s called low- or no-code.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
chairmansteve 1y ago
I agree. I am "writing" simple crud apps for my own convenience and entertainment. I can use unfamiliar frameworks and languaged for extra fun and education. Good times!
tclancy 1y ago
People say inbreeding like it’s criticism too.
Arisaka1 1y ago
Before copilot what I'd do is diagnose and identify the feature that resembles the one that I'm about to build, and then I'd copy the files over before I start tweaking. Boilerplate generation was never, ever the bottleneck.
pja 1y ago
Yep. I find the hype around AI to be wildly overblown, but that doesn’t mean that what it can do right now isn’t interesting & useful. If you told me a decade ago that I could have a fuzzy search engine on my desktop that I could use to vaguely describe some program that I needed & it would go out into the universe of publicly available source code & return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find then that would have been mindblowing. Suddenly I have (slightly lossy) access to all the code ever written, if I can describe it. Same for every other field of human endeavour! Who cares if AI can “think“ or “do new things”? What it can do is amazing & sometimes extremely powerful. (Sometimes not, but that’s the joy of new technology!)
- mrugge 1y ago
  Why do you think what you describe being excited about does not warrant the current level of AI hype? I agree with your assessment and sometimes I think there is too much cynicism and not enough excitement.
  - pja 1y ago
    Oh sure, there’s also way too much cynicism in some quarters. But that’s all part of the fun.
  - afpx 1y ago
    The current AI hype is causing a lot of leaders to put their organizations on the path to destruction.
  - notatoad 1y ago
    the current level of AI hype amongst a lot of people, but especially investors and bosses, is that you can already give an AI a simple prompt and get it to spit out a fully functional, user-ready application for you. and we're so incredibly far off that. the things that AI is able to do are incredible, but hype levels are just totally detached from reality.
    - pmarreck 1y ago
Tade0 1y ago
It is, because the frontend ecosystem is not just React. There are plenty of projects where LLMs still give weird suggestions just because the app is not written in React.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
I've probably commented the same thing like 20 times, but my rule of thumb and use with AI / "vibe coding" is two-fold: * Scaffolding first and foremost - It's usually fine for this, I typically ask "give me the industry standard project structure for x language as designed by a Staff level engineer" blah blah just give me a sane project structure to follow and maintain so I don't have to wonder after switching around to yet another programming language (I'm a geek, sue me). * Code that makes sense at first glance and is easy to maintain / manage, because if you blindly take code you don't understand, you'll regret it the moment you need to be called in for a production outage and you don't know your own codebase.
smrtinsert 1y ago
"Anything that can be autogenerated by a computer shouldn't have to be, it can be automated"
Mabusto 1y ago
I've been using AI like this as well. The code-complete / 'randomly pop up a block of code while typing' feature was cool for a bit but soon became annoying. I just use it to generate a block of boilerplate code or to ask it questions, I do 90% of the 'typing the code' bit myself, but that's not where most programmers time is spent.
- notatoad 1y ago
  i'm not sure when you tried it, but if you've had copilot disabled it might be worth giving it another go. in my totally anecdotal experience, over the last few months it's gotten significantly better at shutting up when it can't provide anything useful.

goalieca 1y ago

Back in the 90s you could drag and drop a vb6 applet in Microsoft word. Somehow we’ve regressed.. Edit: for the young, wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) was common for all sorts of languages from c++ to Delphi to html. You could draw up anything you wanted. Many had native bindings to data sources of all kinds. My favourite was actually HyperCard because I learned it in grade school.

squeaky-clean 1y ago
Wysiwyg kind of fell apart once we had to stop assuming everyone had an 800x600 or 1024x768 screen, because what you saw was no longer what others got.
- hackit2 1y ago
  Most of the internet still assumes you're using a 96 DPI monitor. Tho the rise of mobile phone has changed that it seems like the vast majority of the content consumed on mobile lends itself to being scaled to any DPI - eg.. movies, pictures, youtube ect.
- eternauta3k 1y ago
  Not a big issue with QT layouts (still have to test the result though)
- benterix 1y ago
  Not entirely, in these RAD tools you also had flexible layout choices and obviously you could test it for various window sizes (although the maximum was the one supported by your graphics card). Too bad many chose the lazy way and just enforced fixed window size at 800x600.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  I can imagine adding breakpoints to a wysiwyg editor being not terribly difficult. They decouple presentation from logic pretty well.
mcmoor 1y ago
I still miss my days of programming Visual Basic 6. Nothing since then ever compares.
ako 1y ago
4gl or RAD is still here, but now it’s called low- or no-code.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

chairmansteve 1y ago

I agree. I am "writing" simple crud apps for my own convenience and entertainment. I can use unfamiliar frameworks and languaged for extra fun and education. Good times!

tclancy 1y ago

People say inbreeding like it’s criticism too.

Arisaka1 1y ago

Before copilot what I'd do is diagnose and identify the feature that resembles the one that I'm about to build, and then I'd copy the files over before I start tweaking. Boilerplate generation was never, ever the bottleneck.

pja 1y ago

Yep. I find the hype around AI to be wildly overblown, but that doesn’t mean that what it can do right now isn’t interesting & useful. If you told me a decade ago that I could have a fuzzy search engine on my desktop that I could use to vaguely describe some program that I needed & it would go out into the universe of publicly available source code & return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find then that would have been mindblowing. Suddenly I have (slightly lossy) access to all the code ever written, if I can describe it. Same for every other field of human endeavour! Who cares if AI can “think“ or “do new things”? What it can do is amazing & sometimes extremely powerful. (Sometimes not, but that’s the joy of new technology!)

mrugge 1y ago
Why do you think what you describe being excited about does not warrant the current level of AI hype? I agree with your assessment and sometimes I think there is too much cynicism and not enough excitement.
- pja 1y ago
  Oh sure, there’s also way too much cynicism in some quarters. But that’s all part of the fun.
- afpx 1y ago
  The current AI hype is causing a lot of leaders to put their organizations on the path to destruction.
- notatoad 1y ago
  the current level of AI hype amongst a lot of people, but especially investors and bosses, is that you can already give an AI a simple prompt and get it to spit out a fully functional, user-ready application for you. and we're so incredibly far off that. the things that AI is able to do are incredible, but hype levels are just totally detached from reality.
  - pmarreck 1y ago

Tade0 1y ago

It is, because the frontend ecosystem is not just React. There are plenty of projects where LLMs still give weird suggestions just because the app is not written in React.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

I've probably commented the same thing like 20 times, but my rule of thumb and use with AI / "vibe coding" is two-fold: * Scaffolding first and foremost - It's usually fine for this, I typically ask "give me the industry standard project structure for x language as designed by a Staff level engineer" blah blah just give me a sane project structure to follow and maintain so I don't have to wonder after switching around to yet another programming language (I'm a geek, sue me). * Code that makes sense at first glance and is easy to maintain / manage, because if you blindly take code you don't understand, you'll regret it the moment you need to be called in for a production outage and you don't know your own codebase.

smrtinsert 1y ago

"Anything that can be autogenerated by a computer shouldn't have to be, it can be automated"

Mabusto 1y ago

I've been using AI like this as well. The code-complete / 'randomly pop up a block of code while typing' feature was cool for a bit but soon became annoying. I just use it to generate a block of boilerplate code or to ask it questions, I do 90% of the 'typing the code' bit myself, but that's not where most programmers time is spent.

notatoad 1y ago
i'm not sure when you tried it, but if you've had copilot disabled it might be worth giving it another go. in my totally anecdotal experience, over the last few months it's gotten significantly better at shutting up when it can't provide anything useful.