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From the video, Second looks more like a UI wrapped over a boilerplate generators that have existed for quite a while. It's a pretty powerful one, and that can be very useful in itself but how is AI involved here? If it is, was it needed in the first place? I was expecting the inputs to be more along, "give me an app to manage a restaurant", but the inputs are modules (Forgot password, billing), which are generic pieces of software. For $299/month, it sounds like a very expensive deal to me.

Great question! So all of the files are generated with either compiles or GPT-3, or if the files already exist on the repo and need to be modified, the bots use GPT-3 code edits to modify the files.

$299/project/month will sound expensive if you compare it to starter kits (usually free), templates (usually < $100), or no-code tools (around $100). But I believe Second will feel very close to having a dedicated developer that can build commodity features for you. I want engineers to use Second for the common stuff, so that they can focus on the stuff that special to the project.

Also, yea pricing is hard! It may change.

$299/month sounds pretty reasonable if it does what it says on the tin.

That's $3.6k/year.

You don't need to make up many development hours before you've paid that back.

And it seems like there's good opportunity to stratify billing via modules -- Using only the basic stuff? $. Using more advanced / larger modules? $$.

I agree. I think if it continues to grow it will pay dividends back in development hours saved.

> But I believe Second will feel very close to having a dedicated developer that can build commodity features for you.

A “developer” or a “grunt coder”? Or, to use the ~40+ year old terms that even the least trendy places have phased out [0], a programmer/analyst or just a programmer?

[0] Largely because one of the two didn’t really fit into modern development methodologies anymore, since it presumed too narrow of a skillset and responsibility area.

This. Thinking about any of the sizeable apps I develop and maintain, 90% of the job is just thinking of edge cases in the business logic as transmitted to me by the people running the business I'm writing an app for. About 10% is actually coding and testing. While I'm impressed with copilot/GPT's ability to write SQL queries and imitate my coding style to write functions that usually have no obvious bugs, it's the subtle, non-obvious bugs that I'm worried about. Anything it writes demands careful reading and correction - just like anything written by ChatGPT demands a great deal of fact-checking. So much so that it's not really efficient. The idea of reviewing a whole code branch it's written fills me with dread, because who knows where the corner cases are lurking? And when they arise, who knows what else patching them might affect? At least with my own code or code written by humans, I know where things are and can deduce why they were written that way. With copilot, there's no why.

In a sense it's a metaphor for the whole problem of LLMs ... or AI in general. When unlimited compute lets you replace logical deduction with brute force heuristic reduction, it makes it impossible to trace routes and find bugs.

And this boilerplate can't be added fast with Copilot? Which is $100/year.

Maybe. Copilot is more like an extreme programming experience, where you are still piecing together things yourself in the IDE. Second does all of that for you by building complete features and raising a pull request!

I believe that in the future, A.I. bots will be used to build large chunks of the codebase (like Second). And then human engineers will use A.I. bots in the browser to make low level tweaks and additions (Copilot)

Hopefully in your future an AI bot doesn't invent a Second competitor and put you out of business.

Hah. To be honest, 2023 is going to be insane. I'm sure hundreds, if not thousands, of companies are going to emerge which greatly improve the software development process.

I think the software development process is fine, it's all the organizational cruft that slows it down. Your company is a good example of it--you probably didn't use Second to make Second, and being a solo dev had to have been a huge benefit to your velocity.

The things that hurt software development are people/process related, and can't be fixed by software, IMO.

Funny enough, I did use second to build the authentication flows. But I've diverged a bit because I haven't had a chance to fully build out the other modules that Second will need.

I'm planning on rebuilding Second with Second as soon as I have all of the appropriate modules in place!

Please write a blog post about that when you get a chance to do it!

What like scrum and agile? Or can you be more specific? Or point me to blog posts about this stuff.

Is it true that the larger the app, the less effective/accurate the bot is? In that case, might it be more sensible to charge a 1-time price?

Good question! I believe the accuracy will still be good, but it will just be more work for the bots to get it right (lots more files and code to reason with). So my OpenAI costs will prob go up a lot for bigger code bases. Hadn't thought about that!

What would be some examples of features that your service could add to my app?

you forgot one alternative - chatgpt, which is $20/month and infinitely flexible

True, but it's still work. Using ChatGPT manually is great, but it's not as fast as configuring a feature and then having the whole thing built and integrated. A lot of users also struggle with knowing what to even ask ChatGPT, unless they are already an experienced developer.

if they aren’t experienced, how will they know the solution is what they need? chicken/egg problem

Many people implement things like forgot password and billing once and copy/paste in the next projects if they need.

Yea! That kinda works, except that libraries, frameworks, and paradigms evolve so rapidly in the web, often times you need to rebuild it anyways.

I also want to be more supportive of junior developers. Second can help scaffold and get large chunks of standard code in place for them to build on, rather than starting with empty files. This is especially useful when adding a new feature to an existing web application (in which case boilerplates and templates are a no-op)

> libraries, frameworks, and paradigms evolve so rapidly in the web

Speaking of that issue, wasn't GPT-3 trained with data that doesn't go past 2021? Won't this be an issue for any AI assistant using GPT-3 to write code?

I was worried about this as well. However, I think the solution to this is to create fine-tuned models on specific areas that OpenAI models won't be as knowledgable about (like Next.js 13 for example)

I think OpenAI plans to continuously update ChatGPT (aka "gpt-3.5-turbo") but I don't think it has done so yet.

I could see this used at a big tech companies using golang. I think each company has their startup kit, but it still requires a lot of lifting and lacks many features like open source tools.

yea totally! My plan is to train models on companies design systems as well. I think if done correctly, it could be a huge boost to product development velocity.

This comment gave me the Dropbox vibes of 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 :)

Dropbox also launched in a non-collapsed market. OP has a cool product, but the comment is right - how wide is their moat here?

The biggest lesson to learn from Dropbox is that if you don't build a unique enough product, larger companies will eat your lunch. Microsoft already has Copilot patents, if Second ever threatens them then they have full control over the economics of GPT. Their business is built on the goodwill of a direct competitor.

OpenAI has the GPT models, not Microsoft. Also the open source models like BLOOM are getting better over time and when OpenAI pulls the rug, maybe they'll be competitive.

> OpenAI has the GPT models, not Microsoft.

Haha no. There is no future where OpenAI operates independently of Microsoft. OpenAI is functionally beholden to MS. 49% is a paper contrivance to present a facade that they're still in control. They're not. The tail is wagging the dog, and in this case the tail is a trillion dollar dragon that OpenAI lowered the drawbridge and invited inside.

Why do you say that?

The only way any MS decision is not going to go through is if all other shareholders are unanimously against it.

It seems like a stretch to say that would ever be true.

Because it is true.

At this point, Microsoft has partially acquired OpenAI and is extending their exclusivity deals to use their offerings.

But the only way to compete against them is with open source AI models that are good enough substitutes for OpenAI’s offerings.

With Stable Diffusion being open sourced, it completely ruined monetising options for DALLE-2 and threatened OpenAI to the point where they rushed out ChatGPT.

The same thing happened with GPT-3 and is going to happen again to ChatGPT and we will quickly see an open-source equivalent.

I've been looking around at open source offerings that can run on "affordable" hardware. Right now you can run something like GPT-J on 4 GTX 3090s, which will cost you anywhere between 6k and 8k not including the rest of the PC.

Once functional models get small enough, I think we'll see an absolute explosion in AI as anyone with a laptop will be able to freely tinker with their models.

You can run GPT-J on an M1 or Pi if you want, you'll just have to settle for a pruned model. No self-hosted options (besides maybe Facebook's leaked thing) can stand up to ChatGPT's consistency or size. I've also been playing with this and have had great results for non-interactive use on even the smallest models (125m params, ~2gb RAM). The problem as I see it won't be inference time/acceleration as much as it will be having enough memory to load the model, and settling for lower quality answers. ChatGPT is already pretty delusional, and pruning it doesn't make it any smarter. You can practically feel the missing connections in the quality of response.

So, big takeaway: AI text generation is legible and quick with smaller models, but "intelligence" a-la ChatGPT seems to scale directly with memory.

Could we do two models that are different levels of abstraction? One for "ideas" and one for compressing the idea into words? I've been thinking that smaller specialized networks might boost space efficiency.

I've no clue how these would be wired together, but I have done ideas.

Have you seen the latest Llama and Alpaca models?

Fingers crossed. I don't have much hope though. It feels like everyone has said that there's plenty of incentive to knock Nvidia's block off with this AI business, but we've yet to see any real competition.

My guess is that the profitability of ChatGPT is configurable enough to compete with SOTA competitors. Even if a better model crops up, out-pricing OpenAI will be a struggle. It might even require a hosting partnership with AWS or Azure.

I just released the new version of https//aidev.codes which you can use a prompt kind of like "give me a web page for managing a restaurant" .. it will output it and host it for pennies and if you want a subdomain its $5 per month. It is currently limited to simple static pages. But it can still manage something like recording restaurant schedules in localStorage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086436

It's not entirely clear to me why would I want a non-deterministic language model like Chat-GPT commit into my source tree. That sounds like a generator of complexity and code pollution I won't be able to control.

I want to commit my list of requirements in a well specified format and then generate a binary reproducible version of the site that is 100% stable for a certain version of the tool. If I don't like that output, I commit another requirement and the CI loop will take care of generating those .css etc., they are build artifacts not source files.

Yea I'm totally with you! In fact, when I started Second, I was resisting GPT-3, and had planned on using a pure deterministic compiler. However, through a lot of experimentation, I discovered that the OpenAI code edit APIs, when using a temperature value of 0 (deterministic) provides shockingly good and fairly consistently results. I found that I get the best results when combining my deterministic compilers with GPT-3

The cool thing about Second is that the handoff between bot and human is GitHub. In the tool today, changes are committed directly to the repo, however very soon the default behavior will be pull requests. This is great because it gives engineers the opportunity to see the diffs and make tweaks before merging in.

Small warning: 0 temperature still isn't deterministic with openAI endpoints. So, if you are relying on this as an absolute, it'll definitely fail at some point (this bit me at one point recently). If you just like it because it's "mostly deterministic" so it feels more well behaved, then it's fine.

From here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/completion

> Setting temperature to 0 will make the outputs mostly deterministic, but a small amount of variability may remain.

Yea definitely, I've noticed that a zero temperature isn't perfectly deterministic, but the results seem reasonably consistent.

I will honestly say that there have been a couple of wtf file generations, where even with a temperature of 0, GPT-3 created something I did not expect. I'd like to enable engineers to run a retry on specific files right from GitHub, like making comments in the PR itself.

About how soon is "very soon"?

Lol well, I planning on making it the default last night! But I ran into some serious production issues (GitHub API calls suddenly started failing) so I got side tracked. If enough folks ask for it, I could prioritize it and make the code change in like an hour (mostly testing)

Bug/security risk: Something unexpected just happened when giving this a try. Hoping there's just a default string left in the project and some bad error handling. 1. Created new account in Second linked to my personal github account 2. Created project "newproject" in Second selecting link to exisitng repo 3. Success message "git clone https://github.com/<not_my_profile>/newproject" 4. Create new project now shows the same <not_my_profile> account in the Select GitHub Account select field. 5. Stuck with no log out button

edit: delete cookies, private window fresh login with personal account details still showing <not_my_profile>

to log out, btw you can go to app.second.dev/protected. There's a "sign out" button there.

Can you jump on my discord so we can sort it out? https://www.discord.gg/ZhYUEjsW3Z

This is not expected

Looking into this right now. I'm looking through logs for your session, and I don't see any unusual accounts names being returned (looks like you're just using one specific one, won't name it here). I will keep looking

So I've looked through logs of your sessions, and the routes you hit, and APIs called, and I still don't see anything unusual. I may be misunderstanding the issue that you faced. I also don't have any client side data for your session (guessing ad blocker). I'd really like to get to the bottom of this one! If you can find some time today to join the Discord so that we can chat for a few minutes, that would be awesome!

Just seen your replies and joined your Discord.

This looks very cool, would love to see something like this take off - boilerplate code is such a hassle to stand up for each new project. Does this work with existing hand-made repos or is it mostly intended to work with projects that it generated?

I'm imagining it would be quite challenging to add in e.g. an auth system to an existing backend service and have it match the same coding paradigm as the rest of the app but maybe there'd be some way of annotating your code with comments to make it easier on this system to understand what it's looking at?

Suggestion: the PRs should be draft PRs, otherwise it'll probably be very noisy for teams.

Also, have you thought about doing any integrations with Replit? They are a yc company too and seem to be going all-in on AI and I think the bulk of their user-base is students and junior developers so there might be some synergy there.

ooh, a YC solo founder. congrats on launching!

1. your video demo's music is way too loud. blasted my apartment in the early morning and added nothing to the demo. i'd take a shitty loom video with your narration saying whats happening over this.

2. you'll have to overcome quite a lot of skepticism that this works beyond an initial demo. your video shows a very standard greenfield setup that doesnt really need AI to do. how does it handle more interesting change requests of an existing app? how does it handle fullstack changes? how does it handle design? if you could include sample output (or links to generated diffs) on your landing page you might start to deal with that cynicism.

3. how are you thinking about defensibility? if this works it can be easily copied.

4. beyond this, the business model challenge i would fear for you is this is really a use-once-and-done tool. 299/mo is not really high enough to sustain a biz for that. i guess you're very focused on making it a recurring need but you have your work cut out for you. good luck.

1. LOL! Sorry! Volume is tricky to get right. I'll fix this with my next video.

2. Agree 100%! Second bots are becoming more sophisticated, but the truth is I am still pretty early. The video on this post, and on the website, is actually about a month old. I had planned on making an updated video with more interesting scenarios, but I ran out of time! I will have an updated video within the next two weeks. I also need to show screenshots of sample outputs, agree 100%

3. Defensibility - I wouldn't say this can be too easily copied. I am building custom compilers at the feature level (the high level plan), compilers for individual files, and piecing this together with GPT-3 queries on the code base, and using GPT-3 to generate new files, and modify files. Other than that, that's all I got!

4. You are 100% right. If Second becomes just a really fancy starter kit, it won't be a great business. However, I have found that my early customers do not know all of the features that they need up front, and tend to configure features in second, and then do a lot of BE work and some tweaks, and then do another feature a few days later. So I think Second can be integrated into a normal product delivery workflow. Also, I plan to add other capabilities like AI code reviews, and auto upgrades and maintenance via bots

Also about being a solo founder. It's rough!

I know solo founder is #1 on this list, but fights between founders is #17, so we're in the clear on that one.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

Trust me, I know alllll about co-founder conflict.

How was it like applying and getting in as a solo founder? I'm thinking of applying to YC solo as well so would appreciate any feedback or tips.

You got this! Second looks really cool. Fellow solo founder here, definitely going to try it out

Thanks! Let me know if you need anything, always happy to help fellow founders in anyway that I can

nah man fix the video now you are on hn front page and it takes you all of 5 mins to record a loom

Lol you're not wrong. BUT I do want to take my time with the video. I might be slower than you – it would probably take me an hour+ to tweak it, and find a better song.

Just don't add background music :)

I honestly recommend you to add the available bots on the homepage. The fact that I have to play a video to see what you support is kind of weird. And even in the video, I have to pause it and zoom in on a screen that wasn't even made to showcase this. It's really hard to get an understanding of what the product actually does. And since you're trying to sell to tech people, I think you should prioritize this over the rest of the stuff you show on that landing.

Seems nice, good luck!

Lol you are right! I'm not doing a good job presenting the value props on my homepage. I'll get better at this as I go along.

Also, the video on this post and the homepage is about a month old! I had originally planned on making a new video last night, but I ran out of time. I'll have a better one up soon.

Can I use this with .NET on the backend and Vue.js on the front-end?

Is it capable to generate microservices in a microservice based app? If yes, can it add endpoints to the gateway and generate helm charts for deployment in Kubernetes? Can it use the default inter service communication in the project, i.e. REST API, gRPC, AMPQ?

Is it capable of using an external identity provider?

Can it use Keycloak?

Can it cache data in Redis instead of just writing it to DB?

If my data layer consists in a repository that reads and writes to sharded databases can it do the same?

If I am using CQRS and event sourcing in the code, can it do the same?

Today no. Today my bots specialize in Next.js.

But with enough demand, I plan to also support Vue (Nuxt) and Svelt.

It's possible that I may someday support .NET. I would like to eventually build bots that specialize in every framework and platform. Baby steps!

About identity providers - Yes! I've used bots to set up Auth0 for one customer, and I frequently get asks for other providers. These will be coming soon!

About Keycloak - looks really cool! I have not used it. At the moment, features are driven largely by customers and user requests. If there is some demand for it, then sure! https://second.canny.io/feature-requests

About caching in Redis - it absolutely could, but does not today

about read and writing to databases – the only thing that Second does is write code, it's not hosting the web application or managing DBs

About CQRS - I believe this could be possible, so long as GPT-3 understands that pattern

Would have saved some time if you didn't add a bunch of options in the demo video that aren't built yet or aren't available yet.

What license is applied to code generated by Second? Will Second accept liability if its bot generates code violating the GPL or other licenses? How about for damages arising from vulnerable or insecure code?

This is a really great question, and to be honest I've been putting this off. But to be a big boy company, I'll have to sort this out soon.

Congrats on the launch!

Some thoughts:

- Options are severely limited. Only Next.js and MUI? If there's only 1 stack, doesn't feel like there's any AI in going on

- Would be nice to see some live template sites without having to connect my GitHub and run them manually.

- This feels like cookiecutter, but for multiple languages and a nice wrapper. The GPT bit doesn't interest me (well, from a technical standpoint it does)

- You're running up against the hundreds of template sites that already exist. What's the unique selling point? The configurability?

- Agreed! Second is super limited right now. I have a good foundation in place though. I just need to build a lot more modules at this point - agree 100%. I will work on this - well, things ACTUALLY get interesting when you are adding full-stack features to existing projects! - for new web applications, Second is like a super starter kit on steroids. But Second can do something that no starter kit could ever do - integrate with your existing repo and start adding features.

While I have been expecting AI to replace programmers for a while, the thing I was never sure about whether this will manifest itself as a business for some companies or whether it means the end of people creating apps altogether.

Another risk for building businesses on AI in general is that unlike with software that anyone can build (e.g. for a niche), AI solutions seem to be costly because they require a lot of data and a lot of processing power (at least to train) so you'll end up using someone else's AI. And the real magic is the AI not whatever you build around it so it can be pulled from under you while the AI itself keeps developing and obviously it can make the thin layer built around it irrelevant. I know that AI companies, at least OpenAI will sell the vision that they will be like AWS (amazon) and other similar cloud providers, but I just don't see this as a realistic scenario. It can only happen if AI gets stuck near the level where it is now for a substantial period. Say, at least a decade. Where it's good enough to be included in SaaS (and maybe other) software products but it's not good enough yet to do away with all software products or at least the need for companies building software products.

Yea, it's going to be interesting to see how this all unfolds.

In my opinion, the future of software development looks like this:

1) Human developer instructs A.I. bots to build large volumes of code (like Second)

2) Human developer uses A.I. code assistants in the IDE to make "low level" changes or additions

I do not believe that developers or engineers will be replaced. The world needs more software, and there's not enough of us to build it all. Quite frankly, we need the help of bots to meet the demand.

No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology).

AI changes this, however. The scenario you are describing assumes that AI will get stuck, as I said. Otherwise I don't see why we would still need humans to supervise it. But if it can write good enough software without expensive human beings making corrections left and right, it will be able to do a lot of the jobs that we're trying to make more efficient (or even possible) with all this software we're writing. E.g. you don't really need GitHub (Jira, etc.) if you don't have a lot of developers cooperating. And this is true for a lot of white collar professions that we're creating these heaps of web apps for, that generate all that demand that you are mentioning.

If we get stuck (and, BTW, have some time to figure out how to live with AI) then sure, we'll have programmers (and non-programmers with good analytical skills) command and supervise AI coders. Everyone and their colleague will turn into a tech-lead/product manager. If.

> No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology).

That's basically my opinion, yeah sure this looks impressive, until you realise that it's basically recreating Wordpress with less modules.

Generating code is far from enough to replace developers, it's the earliest step, even Frontpage itself is 30 years old at this point.

I see that

> The world needs more software, and there's not enough of us to build it all

... is a paraphrasing of the following from your top-level text

> Moreover, the world needs more software than there are engineers to build it all.

... which I'm very skeptical about. In what sense does the world "need" more software?

What exactly is it that "the world" really needs this additional software for, and is it really software that's missing, or can the same need be fulfilled via other means (e.g. better software, or improved processes)?

And to follow-up on that, if the world does need "more software", is there some level of software that is sufficient? I.e. is there a steady state of software/world, or at least, software/person, or are we "maximizing paperclips"?

3) AI bot claims IP rights to code it wrote, but so does the AI company that provided the service, and you end up in an Oracle vs Google vs John Doe scenario.

I absolutely think people wont get hired though, that otherwise would

Instead of looking for layoffs, look for the jobs and payment transactions never happening

Note: this doesn't bother me

> I absolutely think people wont get hired though, that otherwise would

If it is successful, it increases jobs in the field, while shifting skill demands to higher levels of analysis/abstraction. Just like every change improvement in how you program computers since "physically configure wiring or switches".

Possibly some individuals won't get hired in the field that otherwise would have, but the size of the field developing software isn't likely to shrink because of it.

Software has been automating itself for 75 years. Automation cannibalizing itself forever. And yet there are more programmers than ever. AI will just expand the amount of software or create whole new fields on top.

I guess there is more complexity than ever too?

I feel like the early days of programming might've been actually easier to automate. There was often well designed specs, cleaner design and architectural patterns to follow etc. Not in all cases of course however now, I'm seeing people hoping to god that ChatGPT can write a client for the worlds shittiest XML API because no one else sure as hell wants to do it.

So what happens now? We just generate more shit and then use moar AI (tm) to work with moar shit (tm), and evolve that pattern fast and faster?

Yesterday I was using co-pilot and it was suggesting a bunch of obvious auto-completes etc, which is fine, that's why I use it, then it hit me, most people are probably going to start to not bother with libraries, clean APIs and specs because soon you will be just brute forcing your way to a solution using text to code and on we go. Maybe the answer will really just be to keep evolving generative coding AIs to keep up with it, let's see how it goes.

People using AI to generate crap faster is definitely a (short term) risk. And, BTW, not only with code. I read an article stating that in a few years (2-3, can't remember) 80% of content only will be generated by AI. Which would be a disaster. We're already swimming in low quality information and this will only make it worse.

OTOH, so much for the idea that people will guide the hand of AI to create better code. As this will unfold, there will be ever more incentives to remove (most) humans from the loop. And if past can be used to predict the future, what we have seen so far is that when AI gets reasonably competent at something it will gain superhuman capabilities very quickly. I still keep bringing up how people thought that after alpha go beat Fan Hui (European go champion) it would have taken a huge leap for it to beat Lee Sedol. Because Lee Sedol was so much better than Fan Hui. At least in human terms. It only took a few months of training and tinkering for DeepMind.

Speaking of loops: since AIs are taught from the internet (simple language models or coding specialists), we're creating an unwanted feedback loop here. More AI generated content will likely make teaching future AIs harder. At least with information harvested from the internet after ~2022-ish.

There is another way, not all AI training data must be sourced from humans. You can loop a LLM with a compiler and set of tests to run, and it will happily search for solutions on its own. Or it could be connected to a simulator, a game or any real life process and let it learn to optimise a goal that can be measured without human work.

Sure, most software developers prefer to automate as much of our work as possible. Starting with compilers, build systems, reusable software (libraries, frameworks), etc.

But these are fundamentally different from AI. As I mentioned above, Fred Brooks in his essay (The Mythical Man-month) would argue that all these just decrease the accidental complexity. The incidental complexity still remains. I.e. taking a vague description, an idea, something embedded in the heads of the stakeholders and turning it into some kind of actual computer code, finding and removing inconsistencies and with a minimal number of bugs. Now AI will be able to do it one day. And it seems that day is not that far away in the future.

The hard move is going from a vague set of incomplete requirements (which is always the case) to specific, executable code. We never had a tool that can do this transformation. Until now(ish).

I just released - https://vocalvoters.com/

It sends an AI generated letter to a congress person in a seconds. Users can edit it, but frankly the results are amazingly good.

I bring it up because effectively exactly what you described - a shim on top of 4 APIs. (Code is open sourced, link on the site)

The question is how will AI replace what I have?

The AI might get better, but ultimately someone has to mail the letter (I use a different API for that). Someone has to ensure there’s no threats (we do a manual review, combined with the AI review) and someone needs to verify location.

Sure the AI systems of the future could theoretically do all that, but it’s still the same work/services.

Before the AI the service I built required me to manually create templates or users to write the full letter. Frankly, AI opened up this business, not closed it. It was more expensive and a lot more logistical work to manually generate these letters.

> The question is how will AI replace what I have?

I think you answered your own question:

> Sure the AI systems of the future could theoretically do all that, but it’s still the same work/services.

That's it. At the moment, you had to wire together 4 APIs and, as you said, this wouldn't do the job without using (someone else's) AI. So this works as a business/service as long as the AI is not able to handle those 4 APIs by itself (or 3, if the AI is one of them). And it doesn't even have to figure out using these APIs, some company (I'd expect the owner of the AI) can create interfaces.

Not that ChatGPT doesn't know how to use APIs itself. I started a quick experiment, that I didn't have the time to finish yet, making it create a simple GUI app that is connected to a specific SaaS API. Nothing fancy.

At first it would reject my request when I told it to create an app that uses that API saying that it can't create apps. Then I told it to generate code for the main window with the most important details. And it did. Then I told it to create an API wrapper for the API. Then I told it to connect the API wrapper with the gui. Honestly, nothing that it couldn't do if it didn't reject my original request with "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I'm not able to generate code for you."

So I don't see how the current state of affairs is too far from me being able to say to a similar AI agent to send a letter to a congress person regarding this and that cause where my opinion is X.

I think that’s all fine and good, the app took me very little time to build. BUT I had to test it.

Integrations are more than code (you have to setup physical addresses in this case, transfer money, etc). I do believe an AI will get there, but all that human evaluation will still need to happen.

I personally assume these AI systems will be used as the middleware for a long time. It’ll be hard to enter other spaces because (1) it won’t be something legally the AI company wants to be liable for and (2) it often requires niche semi-documented items.

Much easier for AI companies to let people take the risks. They can then blame that party.

> It sends an AI generated letter to a congress person in a seconds. Users can edit it, but frankly the results are amazingly good.

Probably not [0]; oh, the output may read nicely, but letters to legislators, even when I was working in a state legislative office in the 1990s, before mass online template generated near-zero-user-effort spam letters were common (but not before organizations sent out template for people to use, or even xerox-and-add-name-and-signature near-zero-effort spam) mostly got read by interns and processed by a heuristic like this (for issues mail, constituent service is different):

(1) Is it from a constituent? No = done and file, Yes = continue.

(2) Is it for a specific, identifiable active bill before the body in which the legislator sits (including the other House) -- see (3), or is it a general issue or one before a different body (if it seems to be maybe about an active bill, but the information is insufficient to identify the bill readily, treat as the second) -- see (4)?

(3) Does it clearly support or oppose the bill? If so, record it in the running tally (creating it if necessary) of constituent support/opposition for that bill; file and done.

(4) Does it address an issue that the legislator has identified as important and has a message on? If so, respond with that message; file and done.

Literally, the ultimate constituent letter on a bill for effect (maximum effect, minimum chance of getting misinterpreted, minimum effort) was a postcard with sufficient address information to identify the sender as a constituent, a bill number, and "Support" or "Oppose".

I don't imagine individual issue letters are getting even that much attention these days, which is why all the serious activist trainings focus on live calls ass the "low effort but low effect" approach and visiting legislators offices as the high effort/high effect approach to influence. Letters and emails might get categorized and mined for propaganda use by legislators, but they aren't moving positions, and every new tool to spam legislators with them reinforces that effect. They are a placebo button, and incorporating AI technology to make a newer, fancier-looking placebo button isn't changing that.

[0] But at least it gets the federal legislative reps (almost) right (it makes the error of using the legal name of a Senator rather than the name they actually use publicly, and hey, if it was going to actually be read, nothing makes a better impression than using the wrong name), for state reps it gives me none of the actual reps, but three of the eight statewide Constitutional officers (the Governor, AG, and Secretary of State).

For reference, I contacted several reps to get feedback on it and was told they review letters from people in their district. (Hence I validate with the billing info). Yes, they generally follow the framework you provided.

> Literally, the ultimate constituent letter on a bill for effect (maximum effect, minimum chance of getting misinterpreted, minimum effort) was a postcard with sufficient address information to identify the sender as a constituent, a bill number, and "Support" or "Oppose".

That’s exactly what is provided. First line is a clear description, support / opposed in bold and the policy/law.

We used the billing info to verify they’re in district and provide the return address.

Phone number should also be provided for a call effort.

I was told they evaluate scales of issues, ie 10 letters from people in district might matter, 100 would matter a lot, 1000 would be a burning issue. That’s effectively all I’m trying to provide.

> for state reps it gives me none of the actual reps, but three of the eight statewide Constitutional officers (the Governor, AG, and Secretary of State).

Yeah, I automated what I could, I can manually enter / edit state reps and did for several states. Constitutional officers are mostly included because they can be pulled via api (plus their still parties who are often elected)

I mean you're not wrong about the rug pull scenario, and you're specifically increasing reliance on one monolithic company.

That said, you have exactly the same category of risk with hiring an employee or team. They could leave at any point also. You always have the option to contract in handcuffs or a notice period, but then the same applies to the AI tooling as well.

In the same way this can't end up much worse than cloud vendor lock-in either. Many businesses dream or discuss about being 'cloud agnostic' but realistically most are tightly coupled, especially around cost-of-change and institutional knowledge.

It's absolutely not the same ball park of risk. First of all, once you have a reasonable business, you'll have a number of employees (and multiple teams). And teams are unlikely to stand up at once, not to mention all your employees leaving at once. I mean unless something is seriously wrong with the company, of course.

That's one thing. The other thing is that employees who leave only hamper future development not the current business/operation. (Again, unless a large number of employees leave in a short time, which means you have screwed up something.) Once you have a stable organization, you can replace individual employees at a reasonable rate without serious issues. (You actually have to prepare for this as employees will leave, no matter what.)

The big difference with cloud providers is that they really offer something that's complementary and not something that can easily be turned into your product. (I mean except for the SaaS companies that really just repackage the cloud offer into an easier to use product. They are definitely at risk all the time.)

> There are too many things that humans are writing code for that they shouldn’t be. This includes commodity features and integrations like authentication, forgot-password flows, subscription billing, database setup, CRUD pages, collections, data tables, etc. Human developers should be focused on the code that is special to the product. Bots should take care of the gruntwork.

This isn’t grunt work in 99% of web applications - this is THE work.

I foresee this tool being used by people with very little knowledge of programming and operations to blindly release products they don't understand. And business types creating a lot of code for experienced team member to spend time reviewing.

It lowers entry barrier for creating more code of lower average quality. This will only create more grunt work for people who actually understand software development.

excellent resume, and congrats on the launch.

however, i'm bearish on AI tools not cz i'm vested as a software dev / eng.

but because we can't make software that work. if humans with massive processing power compared to AI can't make software that works. AI produced software will even be worse.

right now Software from the big companies - Google, Microsoft, Apple etc is a mess. and these firms spend a lot on engineering talent.

not only is majority of software these days slow, it's also buggy as hell. and I can only think AI software will be worse worse worse.

Thanks! You're not wrong. A.I. is nothing more than an extension of our collective minds. If our collective minds are messy, the A.I. results will be messy as well.

Are you using this to build the product itself? Seems like a prime candidate for dogfood.

If yes, where has it been useful, and if not, what does it not handle well?

Yea great question! So yes, I used Second to build the foundation, auth, and DB stuff (starter plan stuff). But other parts of my app have not been ported back into modules yet (which will become Pro modules).

At some point I want to do a full rebuild of Second using Second to test out all of the modules together. But I'm not quite there yet!

FYI you have an onboarding bug. If you don't complete the Github onboarding after creating an account there's no way to recover.

Does no one have latent fears from being asked to make tweaks to atrocious Dreamweaver-generated websites?

LOL! I'm old enough that I have experienced Dreamweaver before. And I can pleasantly say it's not like that! So far, the code that I've been able to generate looks like well written code that any reasonable developer would have written.

Also, there are elements of the generated code that are created from compilers (human written files that compile into source files). So these code files are always 100% accurate and deterministic.

That seems like the short term future of the profession, at least with a certain class of problems.

I had a similarish vision/idea about 7ish years ago https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar I was way too early though and it didn't work well. I have recoded it probably half a dozen times since then and the latest prototype attempt used GPT as the core tech.

The biggest hurdle I found was that it just wasn't deterministic enough. You can work around this with mixing and matching custom compilers into the workflow but then you run into a "only works with a limited set of components and frameworks" problem; and at that point it is basically a boilerplate tool with extra steps.

I found a workflow with prompts + some Emacs wizardy to make them runnable with a few keystrokes got me 99% of the same feature set without any of the headaches of trying to fully automate it so I stopped work on it. A prompt library and an editor extension is hard to find a userbase for though so I have yet to open source or launch anything.

I'm still not sure if these sort of tools are too early or the exact right time to be built. They won't work well yet, but maybe the issues can be worked out when LLMs tooling matures, maybe not, hard to say. Watching closely to see what happens in the space!

I believe that now is the perfect time. Generative code generation is legit with GPT-3. I am constantly surprised at the results. And it will only get better.

Agreed with the comments on the demo video music. It was startling.

I'm pretty skeptical still as all your demo has shown is similar to what a boilerplate tool might do, but with more unknowns. You have to start somewhere, though, and I think you're on a decent path.

I've been experimenting with chatgpt to do similar workflows to what you're describing for your vision of Second. From my experiments, it seems your demo may be approaching close to the current limits of gpt models. Fine-tune training on my existing code base and requirements may help, but I still feel like we're a very long way away from your vision for Second. Maybe even far enough away that it won't ever be realized.

Still, you've already built a much better workflow than my experiments have yielded so far, and I think it is a very exciting proposition.

Feel free to disregard, but I think I'd approach the business differently than you have - raise your prices drastically and instead of a dev-facing tool to start, make your offering more like an agency. Hire devs and designers to build the client work and sales people to find more deals. Have devs and designers use your tool, providing feedback. Restrict modes of communication to AI-parseable docs between the client and devs/designers. Collect data as you iterate through as many projects as you can find and staff to deliver. Then train/fine-tune LLMs on that whole dataset. Iterate on your tool throughout this whole process. Even better if you could embed yourself/your tool into existing agencies and dev shop firms, but that seems like it could be difficult to navigate.

Thanks! I'll get the next video audio fixed. Agreed! Have to start somewhere. As the Second bots get more sophisticated, I think they will pull away more and more from what you get today with traditional starter kits and boilerplates. Most strikingly, you can use Second with existing web applications! Can't do that with boilerplates.

About agencies - yea some of my first customers are agencies, and the value prop is pretty great for them. Yea, pricing is super hard.

Jesus just crank it down by about 10 dB and re-upload the exact same video. The music while generic and relatively bland isn't so much an issue as is the fact that it's practically deafening.

Why are you trying to put the rest of us out of a job?

Projects like this are just going to cause economic harm to other software developers. It's punching down on others in the industry, and it's not good.

As a coder who also makes art, I feel like these companies wielding these new AI tools are screwing me twice over. Maybe it's time to retrain as a plumber or electrician, because any industry that has a large digital component is getting increasingly fucked.

You have a few options now.

1. Learn to drive the tractor

2. Be the person who can repair a tractor

3. Start a tractor company

4. Find a business application that previously was not possible without tractors, or that is now much cheaper with tractors

> Why are you trying to put the rest of us out of a job?

Why are you using a shovel when a spoon would do?

You’re in software. Surely you were aware that things can be automated.

At some point that's going to cross a threshold from things to everything, and then we'll be in trouble.

I still don't see why we'd ask "pretty please can you use spoons instead of shovels so I can keep my job?" The sensible thing is obviously for some of the savings to be diverted into a social safety net, so you can retrain as a plumber or something without losing healthcare, your home, ability to feed yourself, etc. Going back to spoons isn't gonna happen

Barbarians at the gate. It's an adapt or die moment, and OP is adapting.

No one can stop this anyway. Anyone trying will simply be left behind.

Honestly was waiting for something like this (or at least the version I imagined it would be) In my imagination - what I'd like to have as a lead of a small dev team - basically to write AI/Bot whatever, what is the issue, and for THAT tool to fix me the issue. Coming from non-tech company, where software development is not core business, we struggle to hire _good_ developers to give them a enough _interesting_ work for them to stick around, and freelancers is too much of a hassle. So some assistance that would do 2 things: create basic features and find and fix bugs based on description of an issue. I would gladly pay 300 and more for this. From the demo though - it seems quite a bit of time to wait, but definitely looking forward for it.

Also, the way I'd like to to work (or how I imagine it should work) - I define in text what I want, how I want it, including design part n stuff, and then basically I would submit issues to the bot to fix things for me. That's the future I'm waiting for

NB. Angular is not supported at the moment, right?

Thanks! Yes I see it the same way!

Today, my bots specialize in Next.js (React). Honestly I haven't had a lot of requests for Angular, but I suspect that is because I have mostly been working with startups. My intent is to support any major UI framework that my customers ask for. I would bet that I will eventually support Angular for this reason, but it will depend on demand.

It would be great if you could support Phoenix primarily and Rails. Any plans to go full stack not just JS UIs? Seems limiting if there’s no backend AI help.

I'd like to subscribe to the news but cannot find a place for it. Am I bad at finding it or is it not implemented?

Cool idea, but I'm confused about the demo. Sure, it generated a lot of code. Does that code actually work and do what you asked? It would be helpful to show the app it created actually running. And the music... lower energy at a lower volume would be better. I had to mute it in order to get through the video. Something a little less in-your-face.

Agree 100%! I need to make a new video that shows pulling down the code locally, compiling, and running. I also want to create a temp hosting service so people can run the code as well to see what they are getting.

Lol about music - I get it! I'll tone it down next time. Fun fact – the first version of the song was actually more energetic! I'll fix this. Maybe some lo-fi.

Wow, this sounds really interesting! I'm curious, how does Second determine what features to add to an existing web application? Is there a way to customize the bot's behavior to suit specific needs?

Also, what kind of applications can Second generate? Is it limited to certain types of web applications, or can it handle a wide range of projects?

So the Second UI is based on feature modules. You, the human, choose a feature to add. You configure it and then press "Commit Code" or "Raise PR". You can customize in two ways:

1) I can add more configuration options to the modules 2) you can tweak the results with code! After all, the generated code is yours to keep!

A an engineer and founder I can say this makes a ton of sense. There are often tons of generic screen very app needs to build that are just not worth the time building custom, I can imagine myself using Second for such screens that are not core to my functionality but essential to complete the product story. Kudos for the work Eric.

Awesome thanks! I hope that some day people look back on the early 2020's and say "wow I can't believe developers wrote all the code BY HAND"

Maybe they'll make documentaries about it.

Fascinating, i personally can't see myself using for anything more than setting up a project though, maybe you can provide an examples page where you show how useful it is for existing large scale projects?

also regarding the customers you've already onboarded, possibly worth it to make case study blogs?

Yes on both!

1) I will certainly work on setting up a show case or gallery of example sites 2) case study blogs are a great idea!

What could be nice is the developer providing some unit tests, and Second using those to ensure the PR is functional, re-generating if not.

Given a set of tests, I guess you could try to generate the code as well, though I could imagine it might overfit on the given tests and create a "hack" solution.

One of the great things about Second is that uses GitHub as the handoff of code between bot to human. This means you can run your own CI against the code changes that the bot generates, triggered by GitHub actions.

On existing projects, how do you know/verify that the modifications made by GPT-3 actually work? Do the commits need to be manually tested by a developer?

Or does it work only on generic projects (e.g. bootstrapped with next.js) where the bot already knows the files to modify? (hence it always works)

I duplicated a repo to test this out on and signed up, only to find that all I could try out was Authentication. That's probably one of the features most dependent on which library or identity provider you are using and they only have one library for now.

Wish I could have actually tried this out.

Interesting project. I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions:

(a) If it's about modules, currently, people tend to use some open source projects or buy existing solutions (for example, SaaS dashboards). Is the core value the code copied into the repo?

(b) Does the code written by the bot match the repo style? Not just the file names and variable/functions names, but the overall code architecture, including database integration?

(c) I'm guessing most people would ask for similar modules (forgot password, subscription, billing, profile settings etc.). Will you generate the code every time through prompts or re-using (or mapping) some existing code previously developed for other customers?

There's is no AI in it. It just a wrapper to configure boilerplate. There are lots of SaaS boilerplate out there like this (gravity, nodewood). I don't know how simple app like this got approved in YC which has 1-2% acceptance rate.

It had the words AI in it

Also someone who builds "for the web" rather than builds "on the web". As if the web needs any sites full of dark patterns like LinkedIn to thrive. https://www.deceptive.design/brands/linkedin

Working with someone else’s code is always slower. As a mostly solo developer, I’m curious if a tool like this could speed me up vs writing code myself and using code I’ve written in the past. I think even in with a small team, specific devs can have complete ownership over different chunks of code.

Having AI write a chunk of your codebase may be kinda like having someone else write it, but then leave the project. Plenty of companies work like this, but they move much slower. Anyways I’m sure tools like this will have a market, but I’m not sure they make sense to be adopted by the fastest moving companies

Agreed, we shall see! I empathize with what you are saying, because personally I am very slow to understand other people's code.

But, because Second builds commodity features, everything is so vanilla that it's actually pretty easy to understand. No weird anti-patterns or anything.

So GPT could cut you off and launch their own and you would be fucked?

I was going to test this out on an existing repo, but it wasn't clear from the outset that this is next.js only. I have a Create React App repo (with MUI) I'd try this on.

Yes today the bots assume you are connecting to a Next.js 13 app. Bad assumption I know! I am working to add repo a scanner (ChatGPT prompts!) to understand the general tech stack of a connected repo. This will be coming soon.

Why not just let the user select?

The future of software development is, I think, a collaboration between human developers and AI bots, where bots can build large volumes of code and human developers can use AI code assistants to make low-level changes or additions, but the AI is a tool to enhance human developers ability, leading to better products.

I think it'll bridge the gap between low level and high level engineers dramatically. AI is a tool, like any other powerful tool, it'll empower humans to do more and deliver better.

yea!

AI will have to get a whole lot better before I ever consider this. It’s already hard enough to tell human developers what you want. I don’t need them hallucinating on top of it.

Congratulations on the launch! Your app made me excited, although I don't believe I am the target audience. I am a graduate student, I have experience with Python and have built some simple websites using Django, Alpine, HTMX, and Tailwind. I have a few days off and would like to build some projects quickly. Does anyone have any recommendations, ideas, guides, or examples on how I can leverage ChatGPT to build quickly using a strategy similar to the one used by the OP?

Thanks! One thing that I've been learning is that a handful of developers I know are integrating ChatGPT into their workflows more and more.

1) Use ChatGPT to generate small blobs of code 2) tweak it and integrate it 3) repeat

Interestingly, this is very similar to how Second operates as well – but the tweaking and integrating is automated.

Thanks!

I can see how “divide and conquer” can get the job done for many standard tasks/modules, but it seems like it invites a lack of coherency across units as the model stumbles into a different style and approach each time you engage it.

This sounds like it would bring huge maintenance and optimization challenges to any large effort.

What are you seeing so far and how are you planning to keep it under control? Or is the utility of this always going to be fundamentally bounded by the context size?

Yea you're totally right! So the more I learn on compilers vs GPT-3, the more of a maintenance issue things become. So as much as possible I'm using GPT-3, and then using compilers where it makes sense.

I have had good results so far feeding in things like directory structures, and asking the model a question, and getting good answers as to what files and folders should be added or modified for an outcome.

For example, a prompt might be "given the following directory structure, where should I put my prisma schema file?" and GPT-3 tends to answer this correctly

I'm generally interested, but it would be helpful to understand what the different plans are actually offering? I have no idea what the difference is between:

- Starter Developer Bot - Pro Developer Bot - Enterprise Developer Bot

Also, the music on your demo video is a bit excessive, I don't really expect hype music when I'm looking at a demo. It would be more helpful to have someone talking explaining what's going on (or silence)

Yea! So the idea is for the free Starter plan to provide basic web application configuration to help get you started. Kind of like a starter kit on steroids.

The Pro plan will give you access to a lot more feature modules, like subscriptions, forgot password flows, data tables, CRUD pages, etc. To be fully transparent, most of the Pro plans are not implemented yet (I just started building Second two months ago!). But I'm working with early customers and their use cases to build those out.

Can it upgrade my Rails 4.2 app to Rails 5?

That’s a serious question, but also makes me wonder how maintaining AI generated apps will work in the future?

Yea, this is one of the capabilities I want to support. Auto upgrades. I am very confident it is possible, but it will be later on in my roadmap. Right now, most users and customers are interested in speeding up feature development vs. one time upgrades. But I'm with you!

299 per month is reaching for a non battle tested product. At most I would pay 30 usd one time and see what it gives me. Amjad at replit is already building this with a whole bounty thing thrown in so tough market. Good luck to you though. Getting yc investment is already a big deal and i think you can definitely lock on to a niche and find PMF soon

They probably aren't ready for a lot of users yet, and the high price will keep only quality customers that might be more likely to stick around and give feedback.

Congrats! Looks useful. Can you explain the difference between Starter, Pro, and Maintenance Bots? $299/mo is pretty steep w/o a trial period. If you're against a trial period, what's the refund policy? Can we change the project it's pointing to at any given time? When does the 50% promo end?

The Stater plan is free for all time!

If you upgrade to Pro, and for whatever reason it's not for you, I'll give folks a 100% refund. I'm not going to charge anything if it's not delivering real value. The 50% promo ends EOD tomorrow.

I intend to add something similar to InventAI (https://inventai.xyz), which is a general purpose creator web app launching soon (MVP). I agree with your vision, it should be possible. Our approaches will likely vary quite a bit though.

Cool! I will check this out! Yea 2023 is going to be an exciting year.

Great, thanks. This year is absolutely crazy regarding AI tech.

It would be very interesting to see this given to (young) students with a few "hello world" examples for various types of basic sites where they have zero or very little coding expertise and get them from zero to having a live site for a simple project - and push them further down the path.

Agreed! I would love that. I do plan on having "pre-configured" web apps as well to make it even easier.

Another cool technology that I think would work with yours is WebContainers for PR handling. I'm not involved with it in any way, I just think the way it makes testing and editing changes in-browser easy (by bundling a full Node environment) would make your product better.

Ah I see the use case since I've often needed this. I'll have an app I make to pass the time and then I'll want to add auth to it. It's always a bit of a thing. Okay, I like the idea. I don't have a present use for it, but I will try it when I do.

Nice job! Do you do affiliates? I’d love to list you on https://www.starter.place even though I know it’s so much more than a typical starter, I think it’s for the same audience.

How does it work?

It’s a marketplace for starter kits. An affiliate link would give me a commission for referring buyers.

No offense but that demo video is pathetic not to mention the weird background music. Actually, I think the entire thing is way too rushed and you haven't thought this through at all.

Are you seriously so desperate to ride this stupid AI hype that you couldn't do a better job at showcasing what the app can actually do?

I am sorry for being so critical, but I believe I am right. With a free account, you can do like two basic things, but if I click on one of the "Pro" features, there is no preview or nothing at all.

Why would I give you _$299_ to actually try the app only to end up going through the hassle to charge it back because the app didn't do what I thought it would? Is it even possible to get a refund?

Where is an example of a project/app/website you've built with this? I think you might've lost yourself some credibility and long-term customers by publishing it this way.

Totally agree that I'm launching super early. I'm working really closely with some early customers to build out the modules that they need, and then I'll make those available for Pro users. Also completely agree that I need a showcase of apps. I'll have those put together soon.

Right now, anyone who upgrades to Pro basically gets direct access to me so that I can build out the modules that are needed for their use case. 100% if anyone pays something and isn't getting value, or asks for a refund, I would give a complete refund no questions asked.

> I am sorry for being so critical

You should apologize for being disrespectful. There's no reason to attack the founder personally with words like: pathetic, desperate, or insulting their critical thinking by saying "you haven't thought this through at all." You can write an equally critical comment without the vitrol.

I was considering adding a parenthesis that says "I understand you're a human being", but I didn't think I have to. You don't walk into an Apple store to see 2 items on display and the rest wrapped in Christmas boxes.

Furthermore, "Backed by YC" is supposed to mean something, and this kind of a launch is simply watering it down. In fact, there are several YC "AI" backed startups that use lousy marketing terms - "We're better than ChatGPT", and lastly, Launch HN is not something you can do every other day because you forgot something the first time.

He should be able to take my feedback on the chin and correct his mistakes. Not taking care of basic UI principles is the actual disrespect towards me as a customer not me calling him out on it.

We need more direct criticism like this.

I’m not even sure if this even needs AI in the first place or how this is any different to a boilerplate generator using templates. An AI can hallucinate and generate a broken codebase which means it needs to be checked again for its correctness.

I guess if this was a web3 project template generator funded by YC, I would be seeing everyone including the mountains throwing heated exchanges at the founder.

Funny enough, when I started Second, I was an A.I. skeptic. I was very resistant to it, and felt similarly to a lot of the comments on this page. I started out by building a really robust compiler that could handle lots of combinations of features and configurations. But as I began to see the real power of A.I., I started integrating it more and more. Second bots V1 was 100% deterministic compiler. Second bots V2 was mostly compiler, and some A.I. The current version of Second bots, V3, is about half compiler and half A.I.

The video and page did not help me to explain what is going on here.

Maybe you could walk through setting up an actual project with Second that solves an issue much better than without?

Amazing. If it can learn my style and code conventions and create features in architectural style of the current product - it is my dream and I can pay a lot for it.

Yea that's the plan! Currently I am not building fine-tuned models on top of your codebase (and potentially other related code bases) but I will be doing that soon.

I have found that even without a fine-tuned model, the OpenAI code edit and code writing APIs are actually quite good at the file level. Fine-tuned models will just make it even better!

I'm doing this manually now, combining JHipster, ChatGPT and myself.

An AI that can see into your Git repo would be very useful, as a helper.

So, I support this idea!

So far the really interesting stuff seems to be missing, and isn't really in sight either. I would go with low code tools (JHispter, Bootify.io) and continue from there, for now.

Yup, Bootify.io too!

The Bootify-generated code is easier to read than JHipster's output, too.

lol please be gentle. This is a great idea, but most of these features are tablestakes and likely already implemented in an existing web application. Now, if you had a feature like... create a WebRTC connection API + the UI for full video chat and screensharing with React, that might be interesting.

It is a good idea - but a 2 week trial period would be a good idea. Keep going, I know the pain of being a solo dev :-)

Thanks! Right now the Starter is completely free. Do you mean a 2 week trial on the Pro?

yes

This is what AWS Amplify is trying to do. But they don’t call it AI

Kinda sorta. Second is actually using AI to rationalize your codebase, and modify your files. It's pretty different.

I will say though, that a lot of my users / customers prefer to use AWS Amplify Hosting to keep everything on the same VPC (vs using Vercel). I would say about half. AWS Amplify Hosting is fairly good actually.

The deployment module is a Pro module, but it includes AWS Amplify Hosting as a hosting option. But for Second, it's pretty much a no-op, because with AWS Amplify Hosting you just point to the GitHub repo that Second has been modifying.

Are you the sole developer or you have some help?

I am solo, and God is it brutal

Congratulations for the lunch Second team. :)

Thank you!

Can it reason about the code it generates?

I am very optimistic about this.

Man, what will be left for devs.

If the code has been written before, and is available online (GitHub, Stack overflow etc.), GPT is just a much better search engine than Google.

Even though CMSs have been around for decades, there are MANY, and many new ones created all the time. Companies and people have reasons for reinventing the wheel with a proprietary solution (sometimes control, sometimes legal, etc.).

So, you'll still have a job.

If the code hasn't been written before, gen-AI will be able to help flesh out a structure from requirements, but you'll still need a dev to make sure the all of the requirements are present (based on what humans know about humans within the context of the problem being solved) and that logic is solid (AI can supplement here). Especially when you start creating or modifying 1M+ line codebases.

And humans will always trust humans (or humans + machines) more than machines acting alone. Maybe I'm just starting to sound old, but "AI + Da Vinci" is NEVER performing an operation on my body. I'm choosing "an experienced human surgeon + Da Vinci" 100% of the time.

All the regular programmers like us, working a bit and living our lives, are on the block. People like this guy want to take bread off our tables so he can roll around in even more money, but he has a soul, so he has to rationalize it away. He insults us by saying the work we do is useless grunt work and hypes it up so the less perceptive of us get excited about it.

immortalloom, I think you genuinely believe in what you're doing. But drive through an old factory town and think about it for a bit.

Congratulations Eric!!

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yes but what does it do?

The main value prop of Second is that it can generate large volumes of code for common web app features, and integrate it into your codebase via GitHub

So to confirm it won't generate new features from prompts, but only templated scenarios? Is there a list of templated scenarios that you currently support?

Correct! Second generates new features from configurable modules in the Second UI. I cannot use a prompt because this would require massive context windows (4k tokens is the limit). I'm using configurations so that I can use a mix of compilers and GPT-3. My compilers construct individual prompts for different tasks.

Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps