Show HN: AI Tool Is Now Supporting React, Angular, CSS, Svelte, Vue
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Am I the only one who feels like developers really need to be a bit more vocal in defending themselves, their craft, and even their sanity? Are we quiet because of the large salaries in the space?
I suppose the biggest question is how do you defend the craft but at the same time keep the advantage of automation and AI? (is it unions?)
I've not seen any indication an AI legitimately replacing software engineering, rather enhancing it perhaps resulting in the need for fewer engineers for the same work. Even as an engineer that's a huge win.
The role is less coding, more engineering. I suppose if the "craft" is the coding part, you're right it may need defending, but to me that's not the craft
If developer is actually solving the problems, it's like giving a tractor to dig a hole in addition to shovel
This is especially true in an industry where anyone can jump in (unless we want to lock computers behind licences).
I want the high salary to continue, so I will move where the tools take me. AI let’s me generate a ton more features in the same amount of time.
Fight against AI tools? You are not likely to win that battle.
Horse carriage manufacturers would not have stopped car makers, regardless of how hard they tried or unionized. You have to adapt.
No.
Nobody worried about optimizing compliers taking the jobs of assembly programmers.
Tools make us able to do _more_ not less. This is just one more. And it happens to be pretty good at doing obvious boring things that have been done a million times which most of us don't want to do anyway.
Like recently I needed to design a nice html error page, I don't have a designer to go to, and it wasn't really a big enough deal for that kind of thing anyway. Instead of having to dust off a bunch of web design skills and spend a long time figuring out fiddly little style sheet things... or just doing a terrible job... I asked AI to do it. 90% of the work was done in 10 seconds, then I spent 5 minutes polishing it. If I did it myself it would either have been a couple of hours to get something as nice or for the same 5 minutes I could have done a shit job. Nobody lost work because of AI that day, I was just able to do more important things than make an internal developer-facing error page look nice.
I've yet to personally benefit from AI in any of my workflows, in any meaningful capacity, but I wouldn't complain if that changed.
This is just machines for the knowledge economy.
1. It's a fight you can't win
2. It might allow me to finally build the ideas I have. I have better things to do than striking a keyboard all day.
I can't wait for AI to replace me.
Right now the sales pitch is "magical machine spits out any code you can imagine and it will all just work". This isn't the case now and I doubt it will be the case in the future.
It will get really good and make things faster and more easily, but you will still need to know how to use it to be effective and you will still need to understand the underlying tech to be the most effective.
It's like carpentry and powertools. Carpenters and slap together a whole house in a day, a big part being due to power tools. There are still carpenters who are all about the craft and traditional ways and they make amazing pieces of furniture and there are those who need to build houses, fast. Finally there are those who dip into carpentry and realise that it is a whole lot of new knowledge and a degree of understanding that was invisible to them before trying.
If you don't know what you're doing a power tool won't make you a great carpenter.
Firstly, this is never going backwards. It will only get more capable. There will likely be algo changes that unlock new capabilities over time. There are definitely areas that humans have the advantage but this is similar to the “god of the gaps” concept in that the area where people have an advantage will reduce over time.
There’s currently no real understanding in the model and it’s really amazing what we can do with hyper-autocomplete. Humans made that happen. We’re the ones doing the innovation.
We’ve long been in the business of automating jobs away. This time it’s our own.
For the foreseeable future, get good at leveraging it and stay current.
(Intuition: AI is also good at the business layers. It can probably produce better specs than many (not all) people paid to do it. It can generate ideas and communicate them in many formats. It’s super confident, so could easily be a consultant. I don’t think the business analysts and strategy people should be too confident.)
Personally, I don't find "craft"/"art form" to be the best way to think about technology either. Scientists don't think what they are doing is art (I think), so why should engineers think like that.
Imagine having a bunch of them as a bot swarm of AIs that you can have an orchestration layer upon which itself is one of them tuned to manage them.
"In Lak'ech" Mayan: I am another yourself.
That will be great.
Also when you can adopt expert personas from others that are personal AGI lego.
There are still some tells that indicate an image was AI created. It's enough to mark them as AI and discourage brands from using them, after pushback. At this point, the human difference is noticeable.
This isn't the case for code. No one can tell the difference between AI and human-generated code, not at the point at which users access it. And since there isn't there really isn't much to 'fight.'
One of the biggest challenges I've encountered so far while working on my SvelteKit with Svelte 5 codebase is that all frontier models struggle to understand differences between major versions of languages and frameworks, leading to a lot of annoying hallucinations. They're fantastic at writing code, but the last mile of figuring out how to fix issues for incorrect APIs or syntax becomes very tedious.
Seems like the software engineering role is still needed at the higher level, and that would still likely require some sort of framework to help make sense of what the AI is generating, so you can instruct it accordingly.
Regrettably I don’t have the link saved on my iPad I’m using right now, but there’s a public GitHub repo where all commits are made by sone LLM-based agent with zero human intervention - IIRC its a React+NodeJS app (cliche as it is) - all commits are made in response to Issues/Tasks filed by human users but humans can’t touch the code themselves - I couldn't tell it it was/is a genuine experiment - or a glorified arts project…
But if it is a demonstration of what the state-of-the-art is, then from what I could tell it was a strange kind of managed-chaos: from what I remember seeing the codebase was a complete dog’s dinner: LLMs are great at dropping-in dozens of lines of code to a new - or existing method/class/function, but utterly hopeless at keeping the codebase coherent - and LLMs (just like so many subcontractors I’ve dealt with myself) never push-back against bad ideas. Even if an LLM/agent did decide to do some kind of code-cleanup, it’s easy to see how a jumble of glorified copilot addendums results in .js/.ts files far larger than their context-window could take).
…but the miracle was that this repo had tests - and the tests all passed! (I think, perhaps, any test-failures triggered an automatic prompting of LLMs to fix the tests? So that’s to be expected).
Now assuming that repo was actually using “real AI” (as opposed to Amazon’s retail computer-vision AI: “Actually Indians”) I don’t know what technique they used to stop hallucinations of nonexistent APIs from breaking everything.
If anyone else knows that repo, I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
I really wish framework developers would stick with an existing decent solution longer instead of trying to release new versions with breaking changes in search of some kind of ideal API.
I actually prefer the syntax of Svelte 5 with runes over the previous one as it looks a little less magical to me, but I still wish they wouldn't release another major version and instead just focus on making Svelte 4 really solid. I felt the same about the React move from class components to hooks. I know these two examples come with backwards compatibility, but still would be nice to have just one way to do something and make it really solid and polished.
That should help mitigate the problem. If it tries to use the old API it just won't compile.
To me it's not clear how I would debug the component, I can ask for modifications but not like add log statements, inspect variables, and give feedback on errors.
But they tend to have also been trained on code under copyright, without license to do so.
Some code LLM tools vendors have had to put in 'safeguards', to try to avoid further embarrassing evidence of outright copying. That doesn't mean that they're not still often passing through obfuscated copying.
In real life, when someone is caught plagiarizing, such as copying a paragraph from a published work, and changing some words to fit, it's a career-ending scandal.
And other times, in a grayer area, of mechanical mashing up of multiple works, with the intent of "take these multiple copyrighted works, and mechanically combine them to my needs, in a way that's hard to explain to a judge, and forget about all the copyrights, so I can claim copyright". (Hey, if merely saying "it's an app" can smokescreen an illegal taxi service, hotel service, or rental price-fixing, just think how effective a shield even matrix multiplication is.)
In software, copying code without license, or being tainted by exposure to code when you're supposed to "cleanroom" it, are both already considered illegal or shady.
A lot of the current enthusiasm around generative AI feels a bit like the popularity of media piracy -- many people know, or have a nagging suspicion, that it's against norms or laws, but it's just so appealing, and everyone around you is doing it.
It also has the dynamic of the many exploiting the relative few creators, in a way that wasn't part of the social contract or laws, and which the creator doesn't want, but the many can simply take.
Especially when the many are armed and cheered on, by tool vendors, many of whom should know exactly what they're doing, but who want to win big from this nonconsensual exploitation of the works of others.
And, as the former head of Google recently advised at Stanford, just take it, get big money, and pay lawyers later.
Maybe i am missing something. I tried the trading template
Also: BUG report.
I asked for a complex field change. This gave me an orange error message "failed try again". But now there is no abort/cancel button. Only a retry button.
Good luck
It is incredible, and it genuinely feels like magic when it comes to codebase context.
That said, this particular tool seems like it's trying to be very hand-holdy, maybe not targeting developers?
For developers Claude Dev seems like a more functional equivalent: https://github.com/saoudrizwan/claude-dev
Looks like it's not open source
IMO the document layout folks and people building on top of that like at least 1 YC startup have a more promising path forward for whole-cloth complex component representations versus LLMs with robust prompts but no fine tuning.
With the base models you can ask: Hey, make me 5 designs that fit xyz requirements and it will go to work. If you already know front end design, you can take that up a level and pass it an emmet abbreviation of the rough code you want and say only use tailwind colors of sky, zinc, and blue.
I am decidedly not your audience, but if anyone on HN is thinking about how to speed up frontend dev and they are a frontend dev, I'd suggest just messing with the base models more.
Once you get the hang of it, it can be like working with a designer who's feelings don't get hurt... which I love.
"Meh, I don't like those designs, generate me 5 more and feel free to increase the model's temperature up quite a bit to see if you can come up with something cool."
Don't get me wrong. There are many good arguments against AI but claiming we don't need more automation is one I don't understand, so please enlighten me.