V0: Generative UI | Hacker News Reader

V0: Generative UI

vercel.com

173 pointsmooreds91 comments

It works well with a very specific stack of chosen tools. Not to say it won’t scale to others but if you aren’t a react dev using tailwind and shadcn it’s useless for now.

Yeah, it’s primarily for React right now, but it does generate HTML as well

HTMX has entered the chat

Laughs in XUL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL

Cool idea but yeah, no thanks if its React only.

I can see it working well for something like what Microsoft is doing with Adaptive Cards inside Teams conversations. I can imagine an AI chatbot that serve you targeted UI on the spot. It's integration with a whole site/app that is challenging.

with the html output, one should have plenty to quickly scaffold out some html components only real requirement is tailwind

That’s a pretty big requirement.

You should check out https://makedraft.com.

It's like v0 but for HTML and TailwindCSS +/- vanilla JavaScript.

Cool! That's more my speed, I'll give it a look... thanks.

Just generates total gibberish for me.

What were you trying to get it to do? It was working alright for me but I was mostly doing quick HTML/CSS templating. I just paste in boilerplates and get it to make tailwind styles changes

After playing with both, I’m currently more impressed by the output of Visual Copilot by Builder.io. [1]

It builds UI from Figma as the starting point, but the UI can then be iterated with prompting or made interactive, etc.

It’s based on their work with mitosis so it can already create components in a variety of frameworks.

I’d say you still have to know front end dev to do anything useful with it, but it can be a decent accelerator.

[1] https://www.builder.io/blog/figma-to-code-visual-copilot

Vercel really are the skid mark of web development part 37.

Why do you say that? Is it the pricing scheme?

Think it could be the recent debacle of making clone apps as a marketing move & one CS rep misusing access to harass a customer over a project domain/name.

Link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37887049

Yeah I'm building a few things on Vercel and the whole incident has me pretty sketched out.

I think you mean you are working on a few of the upcoming Vercel app templates.

Makes it really easy to have something that looks good.

Wow. At what point do we get Generative Web Apps or Site, full backend and front end.

Make a similar site to Basecamp, Notion, or something much simpler like an Online calculator? So people can bootstrap their App idea without even being a professional programmer?

> Wow. At what point do we get Generative Web Apps or Site, full backend and front end.

Well GameMaker came out in 1999. So maybe like 2002?

You can already do this quite well. Check out my product: https://picoapps.xyz/ We allow you to interact with backend APIs including some builtin integrations like OpenAI and image generation. We do some basic custom backend generation as well.

When we get AGI. I'm not sure how anything short of it will be able to achieve such a complex set of tasks.

Not sure why I'm getting down voted for this comment. I'd like to see an example of anything created by "AI" remotely close in complexity to Notion out there.

Unless we are talking about generic things that already exist in forms of boilerplate/templates (like what all of GPT-generated apps are) - can be in a few years, can be never.

seems pretty close for non-cutting edge stuff. It's really just about making a solid UI to tie the developer experience together because with tools like this and an OpenAPI spec you can generate a huge chunk of the frontend and backend code. Anything that isn't very niche business logic can be generated by AI

once you have the prototype you can then give the AI some of your observability data and spin up a sandbox environment and have it iterate on any code that is slow, have it create 10 new versions of the code and send some mirrored traffic to test it and then deploy the best version.

I’m having flashbacks to 2002, when a Rational Rose wielding consultant hired by our startup thought the job was done after crafting some UML

I recall a coworker drawing a nasty looking rat on a whiteboard with the title "Rational Rose Rat hates you" after a similar encounter.

Why rat? Why not a rose divided by an integer?

Dreamweaver, but you need to describe what you want instead of drag and drop.

Everything under the sun, yesteryear's discarded technology will be re-tried under the guise of AI until a new buzzword catches attention.

Every new generation reinvents stuff previous generation tried and hated. I think it is natural and kind of funny. I’ve been doing software for over 20 years + being obsessed since late 90s and I especially enjoy oscillations between server and client computing - “let’s do everything on server and make client dumb” - (5 years later) - “noooo, ma responsiveness and user experience!!!”

NextJS and HTMLx are back to server :)

And, before that, 4GLs or Fourth Generation Languages, a term that sprung from a book titled "Applications Development Without Programmers".

Is this another abstraction on top of Next.js? I recently created a new Next app with

pnpm create next-app --example blog-starter

And the resulting directory is a whopping 338M monster. Wondering what this adds.

For a moment this post made me think I was going crazy. This post is 3 days old but it shows that it was posted 5 hours ago. I thought it was a repost but then reading the comments, I was sure I had read the exactly same thing. Is it some HN bug?

anway about v0: this open box to start a project is the AI feature with lowest effort, they are bringing nothing not even a better UI but they have the userbase. Which is good to bring more customers to AI apps.

I looked at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/37974743.json?pri... which gives back a time of 1697977491 which converts to "Sun Oct 22 2023 12:24:51 GMT+0000" which was 3 days ago.

Not sure why it's showing posted "5 hours ago".

Doesn’t that happen if it’s second chance pooled? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Jared Palmer, v0 creator/team lead here...

Happy to answer any questions!

Hi Jared.

Awesome use of LLM. Do you position V0 as helper for developers or designers?

v0 is really for everyone. We hope it makes everyone more productive and creative...reducing the cost of iteration and experimentation.

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions. Maybe it was mentioned in an earlier article but it' not in this one; is this a proprietary model?

What is the business problem you are trying to solve with this?

v0 saves loads of time by allowing you to quickly generate UIs with React via Shadcn UI (https://ui.shadcn.com) with simple text prompts. While full scale design tools are very useful, not every UI in your app needs that level of fidelity. Furthermore, a lot of UIs inside of apps and websites are already extremely programmatic (such as forms, tables, modals, etc.). The goal with v0 is to get you started (hence the name) faster....to give you something you can copy and paste and then modify yourself.

How does one get off the waitlist?

My vercel login is with github, same username as here.

Hi Jared, I'm currently working on Commitspark, a headless CMS that uses vanilla GraphQL to define the content model and GitHub for storage and workflows. With this approach I can already today use ChatGPT to not only generate a website content model from a user prompt (e.g. "I want a component-based website with a hero component with title and image, a product component with article number, ...") but also entire web page content from user prompts (e.g. "I have this marketing text here, turn it into content data for a web page using the components in my content model: ...").

The perfect addition here would be to also enable users to generate React components that visualize each content component (I was able to prototype that already with ChatGPT, but I assume what you're doing is more advanced).

Wrap all of this up into a Git repo with Vercel deployment workflow for GitHub and it should be possible to go from prompt to CMS-driven website in a really short time.

So, my question: Would it be possible to get access to V0? Also, feel free to reach out if you see potential for collaboration.

Are there any plans to support Svelte in the near future?

Can't find any mention of which AI is used but I suppose it is OpenAI GTP4 given the waitlist (OpenAI enforces strict rate limits on their API except for ChatGPT) and expensive pricing.

I have been using the open source version, it works pretty well

https://github.com/raidendotai/openv0

I've had access for a bit and it's a pretty neat tool to experiment with but not much beyond that.

I actually tried to recreate the functionality with Cody [cody.dev] in VS Code and it actually worked pretty similarly minus the GUI, but I found it a little less restrictive and I could specify the CSS framework.

Why does HN search say that this was posted three days ago?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=generative+ui

Second-chance pool?

Because I did post it a few days ago. Sometimes posts get re-upped. See this for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

(But I don't know if this was part of the pool. HN's ways are mysterious.)

More abstraction.

What happens when you need to debug this?

It does seem to output a regular web application based on their description here.

> v0 produces code using open-source tools like React, Tailwind CSS, and Shadcn UI.

So you can just debug it as always. I guess this product is for someone that COULD make the app they’re generating, but chooses not to. Rather they want an app, that they then only have to refactor.

The intention is the output is quite literally your v0. It’s a normal React application, so you’d debug it and build it as such. It’s unlikely you’d take the output and launch right away. You’d probably have other refactoring and modifications first.

You pay for their next AI service that helps you debug and refactor the code ;)

Jokes aside, I think it’s an interesting use of generative AI.

I'm not the biggest fan of this product, but I do have to say that they're pretty intentional about this not being meant for production code. It's more for testing out ideas, hence the name "v0" as in "what happens well before a v1."

Sure, however, if you have been around longer, you will know that tons of these will end up in (critical) production anyway. It doesn't matter what label they put on it.

This is indeed a fair point, and part of why I'm not really into it.

In theory, you'd save a bunch of time and then use that extra time to add more polish to the product. But in practice, what you'd actually be doing is reading someone else's (or something else's) code, and people who want to rely on AI are not the same people who have the stomach to do that.

So they're either going to (a) abandon the generated code and write their own, in which case, what was the point to begin with? Or (b) they're going to just say "fuck it" and push the generated code to prod.

Neither of those are good outcomes.

I mean this is no different than life now. You have some MVP code patched up by startup hacker or "CTO", etc, then as team grows it's hard to work with.

We're embracing copy-and-paste with the product rather than increasing abstraction. The tool provides the HTML or React code for building the generated UI. The way you actually use it, is by copy-pasting it into your app. From that moment on your workflow and specially debugging workflow is exactly as before. The tool just writes the first 100 lines of code to get you started with a great UI.

Hi @cramforce. Vercel's greed destroyed React. You guys should be ashamed of it (but I'm sure you aren't).

This is going to be a major disaster. NextJs, the "framework" that underpins Vercel, is already a massive failure for anything beyond a simple basic static site with a few server-side functions.

Maybe it'll push us for the final collapse of the web though. This video is very relevant at this moment: https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko

Nextjs and Vercel destroyed React turning it into PHP, but that was the only way they could make VC-worthy money. Great move for them, terrible for the ecosystem. React makes no sense anymore and is painful to use.

That is really slick, but why do I have to get stuck with Tailwind? Or is that configurable?

I don't know the answer, but I think, that there could be two reasons:

1. Tailwind is css but "disconnected" from other parts of the result. So it could be easier to generate.

2. The code that was used for training, often used tailwind and thus the ai can work better with it.

Jared Palmer here... v0 Creator/Team Lead.

Tailwind is indeed required at the moment. However, we're working on supporting other popular design systems as well as custom ones.

Hey Jared - that would be great, even better if it's framework agnostic. Nice work though!

We're investigating this now. Early experiments are very promising.

Woohoo, another silver bullet.

I may be getting far too cynical for this stuff, having seen it rise and disappear over and over, over the last ~40 years.

What is this trained on? the code of projects deployed on Vercel? Is it just a frontend in front of ChatGPT 4?

Just feed the data in

https://github.com/raidendotai/openv0

This takes me back to the Geo Cities days, but with prompts! Pretty neat.

"React developers" the world over should be working very hard to learn something new at this point.

Given this is Vercel, which offers NextJS and also serverless tools, you could snark Rails and other "full stack" devs should learn something new.

Congrats on shipping this game changer Vercel, this is absolutely huge for indie devs and product teams to bridge the gap of design and development without friction or insane dev costs.

Bravo!

Edit: Why the downvotes? I don't understand this at all?

This reads like it's written by someone who works at vercel

Nope, just someone who likes vercel's design plus UX/UI, :)

What's great about this is that not only this is a next step in AI generated websites, but this is actually shipped software which is much better than the overpromised and overhyped thegrid.io vapourware.

https://thegrid.io/

Ahhh the grid, I remember that. There was another highly touted company around the same time that also had some mildly interesting tech and ideas sort of in the same vein but just burned through VC money. I was hoping the grid layout system based on constraints would mature enough to become a proper css standard at some point. We did eventually get css grid, which is pretty good, but having a constraints solver in css would be pretty neat. (Or just a performance nightmare.)

Not sure if this is what you mean but built in “masonry” support is now part of the CSS spec (barely any browser support yet though.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_grid_la...

It's not, but I appreciate you sharing this anyway – thank you!

I was referring mostly to GSS: https://gss.github.io/

I think it was an interesting idea that unfortunately didn't really work out. This was before both flex and grid layouts were a thing, so anything new in this space was exciting really. It's a much better css layout world today than it was 8-10 years ago, and particularly grid layout is a very welcome change, but I can't help but think some great ideas have been left by the wayside. Maybe for good reasons, but still.

Well this reads like a competitor's bot post meant to throw shade on vercel.

I hope you understand this is a stupid game to play. We could chase our tails with this all day. Metadiscussion is off-topic.

I think it is a fair criticism about the intention as the tone in the post is a bit strange? What is shown in the video isn't great and the app isn't publicly available yet so any excessive praise really sounds strange.

Not strange at all. You're just used to the regular hate and toxicity HN is known for.

It's curious that many people are rushing to defend the notion that there's nothing suspicious about calling a non-public product with a mediocre 5/10 video a 'game-changer'.

"make the company logo blue". This is only game-changer if you also think React-PHP (RSC) is game-changer (which was, but to stop React growth and start its demise).

I think it is fair to be skeptical.

> it's curious that many people are rushing to defend

Roll a d20 and add your Wisdom modifier.

With disadvantage because 2 ≠ many.

LARPing that HN is being infiltrated by 'bad actors' like corporate/government agents is offtopic, boring, and pointless.

you know what's worse? Corporate bootlickers

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