Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I was discussing with a client how to integrate our software with his.

He sent me a screenshot of the main form.

I put the screenshot into ChatGPT and said “make a react form like this in bootstrap”.

Made some adjustments, added my software, a few hours later showed the client who was knocked out to see a proof of concept of our systems integrated so quickly.

When doing web development I often take a screenshot of a problem with css layout, upload to ChatGPT and ask how to fix it.

The demo shown in the tweet seems pretty similar.

View on HN

But the thing is, creating a basic form page -is- simple. What is so amazing, is that after ~25 years of web development, we have continued to make it more complicated than it should be, by continuously coming up with new web frameworks that are brilliant for all kind of fancy use cases but overcomplicated for the more common and basic tasks.

Yes, there have been exceptions every now and then, but most web devs don't like them. They don't look fancy on your cv and face it, who wants to stick to building web forms for the rest of their career?

The software world is much more flexible than the real world (yeah , I know, you're taking to Sherlock here).

Go to a civil engineer and ask to create a building that tilts extremely on one side and requires concrete reinforcement with titanium whatever... they will laugh at you.

Do the equivalent to a software engineer or product manager and they will hurry to invent yet another framework to satisfy your request, without giving a second thought about long-term consequences.

My point is that the real world has the laws of physics keeping things in check. With software, we don't have such obvious hard limits and each situation is case-by-case with lots of variables... it gets messy.

I don't think this is about flexibility. It's more about culture. Software engineering culture does not value simplicity, and actually seems to value complexity. Other engineering cultures place a lot more value on simplicity, and its associated values of reliability and risk mitigation.

A civil engineer can build you that building, but they will think "what a ridiculous architect." With a software engineering mindset, they would happily build that building for you, and invent a new type of concrete mixed with titanium flakes to do it for you. And then they will go on a decades-long campaign about how titanium-flake-concrete is the Next Big Thing and that anyone using normal concrete is a simpleton.

The culture is derived from the economics though. Software engineers who value simplicity don't get promoted, or their software is not as successful, because the other engineers who produce complex software produce results that users are attracted to and the cost of that complexity is not so great as to completely ruin it (at least not at first).

On top of that, a little bit of software can be used by a lot of people, but a little bit of building usually can't, so unless you're Gaudí building the Sagrada Família, nobody really wants to spend a couple centuries building a complex building.

Clearly, you haven't worked on German automobiles.

There is no one so willing to do things the hard way as a German car engineer trying to implement something that has existed for decades, and functions perfectly in standardized form.

I'm only half kidding.

Also programmers tend to think we’re very smart and clever.

We tend to like complex problems and complicated systems and build them.

Ironically it’s much harder to make simple software that covers complex use cases than it is to make complex software to do the same.

One could argue that usability requirements are the sort of constraints that could stand in for "rules of physics" in the software world.

Basic "fill out the fields then submit" forms are simple. But many use cases these days want intakes or onboardings like apps, then complain about complexity or timelines when they fail to realize the requirements spawned 45,000 branching paths.

Yah GPT cannot create a form that has that kind of UX, I promise. Try it.

Not just simple, it's a thing I'd never even ask a coder to do anymore. I'd pay for Hubspot or some kind of form-management SaaS tool.

Yes, the customer will be impressed by your speed the first time. The second time, he will expect it. The third time, when requirements have grown enough to be beyond what ChatGPT can deal with, he'll be angry that timescales have exploded.

This comment is so relevant.. people underestimate software complexity. In software services, often it's not the algorithms that are hard to implement or maintain, as they often have very clearly defined input and output requirements, and you can and test them, but its the ever changing and regularly patched up business logic that evolves the system into a complex and fragile service needing careful maintenance.. Can't imagine an AI system taking 'charge' there as a subtle mistake by the AI system would then need a human intervention to 'fix' it which by then would be close to impossible. At that point you can't also make use of AI beyond a co-pilot role as anything complex would need line by line and careful inspection by a software dev.

I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so that you never have to set realistic expectations" is a great way to do business. Being worse at your job on purpose isn't typically a great strategy.

It sounds to me like the commenter has found a subset of his work which can be sped up significantly with chatGPT and is using that to continue conversations with a potential client. Pretty cool if you ask me.

> I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so that you never have to set realistic expectations" is a great way to do business.

It’s called Expectation Management. It’s how successful business is done.

Marketing 101: Under promise, over deliver.

P.S. Apple is quite good at this IMHO. I notice they often very quickly go from product announcement to product availability. My theory for why this is good is that there less time in between for people’s imagination to run wild and fill in the information gaps with their own ideas that the actual product might not satisfy. Expectations remain ground when their customers receive the product vs a product getting hyped to the moon such that it’s practically impossible for it to ever live up to the hype.

i'm not replying about the concept of under promise, over deliver, but more like.... why would you avoid a tool that helps you do something quickly because you don't want to explain to your client that some steps aren't as fast to do as others.

You wouldn't avoid the tool, just avoid surfacing it too explicitly - by being too fast or by explicitly boasting about it.

Yeah, let's see about the long run.

Right now with the increased productivity, it leads to customer engagements that previously wouldn't have been possible for me. E.g. now it's feasible from a cost standpoint to let me as a freelancer build internal tooling that previously would have been to expensive in total. It's also easier to deliver initial MVP milestones for projects for a price that's in a much more comfortable range for smaller companies.

Yeah, that advantage may go away, but just like good "googling" was/is a skill that can set you apart from your peers, proper usage of LLMs is a skill as well that needs to be learned (and that many won't).

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

> The third time, when requirements have grown enough to be beyond what ChatGPT can deal with, he'll be angry that timescales have exploded.

Or worse, they'll feel they've been scammed, and that you're a fraud.

AI or not it's not a good strategy, in life and in business, to lie regarding on what you can actually do/deliver.

its a tool. use the tool. I don't care if the house is built using an old fashioned hammer or a nail gun. I do care if you used nails when you should've used something else, or used the wrong nails.

If this was an e-mail or chat conversation with a client, imagine if your client was asking ChatGPT the best way to formulate his requirements to you.

It’s turtles all the way down :+)

Yeah, but maybe the client didn't want you to expose his data to ChatGPT.

> When doing web development I often take a screenshot of a problem with css layout, upload to ChatGPT and ask how to fix it.

Oh wow, that’s a neat idea that I hadn’t thought of before. I’m decent enough at CSS that I can normally fix it in dev tools then port/copy the styles to the code but I’ll have to remember that trick.

I haven’t used ChatGPT as much for code as I have CLI piping or bash scripts to munge data quickly. Things I wouldn’t have checked (like for debugging or proving a hypothesis) become almost easy when I can give ChatGPT the output of a command and ask it for bash to format/collate/sort/extract what I want out of it. I can do it manually but I’m slow at that process and have to google or use man pages to remember flags/args/etc. For code I mostly just use GH Copilot.

Creating the front-end of a Bootstrap form with no backend logic isn't particularly impresssive, it's something that would be taught halfway through any bootcamp course. Source: me, a person who built BS sites for years until I finally got around to learning Flexbox and CSS Grid properly.

Hell, I can build that form WITH backend logic with like five minutes in django and I'm not even good with django!

If it takes you a long time to build a form, you've done something very very wrong.

i dont think you grasp the scale difference between seconds and minutes correctly. and it will add up quite fast.

how do you put a screenshot into chatgpt?

I believe it requires plus*, but I’m not sure.

However, you can paste in an image, or you can click the paperclip on the bottom left of the prompt area to upload an image (or other files).

you mean plus i assume

Just snip it and paste it. If you're in Windows, I use the Snipping Tool Windows + Shift + S. Then just go to ChatGPT4 (Pro only) and hit paste.

They are probably using the new GPT Vision API that OpenAI just added this month.

1. Take your screenshot

2. Switch model to ChatGPT 4

3. Click the attachment/paperclip button in the prompt bar

4. Send

Shudder at the thought of every client expecting this for granted

They do that anyway. I've lost count of the number of times customers have asked me for something that "could be knocked out in an afternoon".

It’s most likely using chatgpt in the backend

No need to guess, there's a thing at the bottom asking for an OpenAI API key at the bottom, and it can't function without that.

(So actually technically I think that means no, it's not using ChatGPT, but I don't think that was the point.)

I think it's accurate enough to call the OpenAI API the ChatGPT API since it's using the same models. But yeah, technically not the same thing.

Yeah I didn't mean to be pedantic about that, because actually I don't think there is a ChatGPT API, there's no reasonable way something like this even could use it I think? And the only reason to really would be to use the free one (not have to ask for a key) which would surely be against the terms, and doesn't do any computer vision or anything as presumably needed by this demo.

In other contexts though I think it can be ambiguous and I can understand why people get irritated/pedantic about it - AIUI it's the same model but different training/parameters? And ChatGPT only gives you the 'user' prompt essentially, with the 'system' one already being 'you are a chatbot called ChatGPT [...]' or whatever.

Yep: https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui/blob/2ac633bbbd5fda39e59...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com