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Comment by mlajtos | Hacker News Reader

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mlajtos

> Find all of the phone numbers of form 0001234567 in a document and convert them to (000) 123-4567

> Reorder a photo directory from year/event/photo to event/year/photo

> Check daily on a few airbnbs to see if any lowered their prices

> Sending a PDF on your computer to your kindle via Amazon’s “email the file” thingy

> Check if there’s a Cubs game today to avoid the trains

> Take some structured data and put it into a template

I believe that all these kind of tasks will be fully doable through ChatGPT(-like) assistant.

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I think that makes sense. Because the difficulty and challenge of coding is not so much the code, but the understanding of requirements.

No-Code solves the coding part but you still need to be able to express the requirements, which is difficult for someone who doesn't have the thought process of a coder.

ChatGPT also solves the requirements part in that you can speak in English and be vague and (if you're lucky) it understands what you mean, just as a senior coder might.

And that means that expressing requirements to chatGPT is not easier than expressing them to a human professional. Which is hard. And prone to misunderstanding, re-explanations, back and forth. Formalisms and modelisation have been invented (even before computers, eg. blueprints or paper forms) to simplify expressing requirements and make communication about problems and solution better. Natural language is a worse way of expressing intent and complex needs that other forms of UIs. It has the benefit of plasticity, but is really bad at discoverability, consistency, least-surprise, recognition vs. recall, and many other important aspect of an effective, leveraging UI.

Spreadsheets get a bad rap, particularly from software developers. However, even as a dev myself, I've always found them to be surprisingly powerful and a great tool for people who can bridge their gap in coding skills using formulas to build data-driven declarative capabilities. It might not be as powerful or performant as SQL or Pandas, but it's rather impressive given that you can do it off-the-shelf within a widely-used application.

I've seen non-technical people build some really cool things off of the back of spreadsheet data using things like AppSheet and Google Looker Studio (not sure why they changed the name from Data Studio). And now with Excel adding a ChatGPT formula and Google Sheets adding their own AI-driven features, power and non-power users alike will be able to really up their capabilities using only plain-language queries without having to devise complex algorithms or formulas (I realize ChatGPT isn't flawless yet).

I would love to introduce Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as a gateway to software development, but even positive receptiveness to model and simulate requirements is welcome.

If only we could onboard a friction-free process from Excel to git! Some way to configure Github Actions, say, and have them upload their sheet somewhere. #ExcelOps

I think it would be easier then to say, "Here's why a real app would scale better." And they would be 100% behind that.

100% agree, No Code (and possibly All Code, unfortunately, ha) was just a clunky, slow way to do what search-capable chatbots can now or will soon do.

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