Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've known about artifacts for a couple of weeks now, but didn't have the time to really test it, although they had appeared in a few prompts I made but mostly related to documents and stuff.

For he sake of it, to test the waters would you say, I decided to prompt for a small React app I've had in my mind [1] (Link below app description) for a couple of days now. I know this is far from being a polished, market ready app. But I do think Junior Devs are all outta job (Or going to be, within 6 - 18 months). Prepare for the shift, this one particular paradigm is taking no prisoners.

---

For the record, this is the app I got out of it, fully working:

My GF owns a cafeteria and she's running a promo on all her menu, _except_ other promos. The promotion is a 20% discount on all products, with the price rounded to the nearest 100 pesos (Argentina).

The small app I requested is single page, with a large number (total price) displayed on top. Below is a 3 tabbed panel, with tabs being PROMO, REGULAR and SELECTED Each tab has a list of products, with buttons [ - ][ # ] [ + ] <name> $<price> When a [ + ] button is clicked, the number increases, and that product appears in the SELECTED tab if it wasn't there. [ - ] decreases the # in both listings, and if its zero it disappears from selected. The price on top is always updated to reflect the total price. The SELECT tab has all the selected products (You can change the # for each product there as well) with price, and a per type subtotal (as the discount is only applied to REGULAR products). The subtotal when discounted appears as ~$#.##~ $#.## where the first instance of a number is the price without discount and the 2nd number is the price after discount.

My knowledge of React is negligible, and even if I know it enough to do this it would had taken me at least a couple hours to code. I could probably deploy it as an app to my GF's phone in less than an hour compiling and all.

It has also the possibility of an API call, so I could shove all them products in a page and go changing accordingly.

[1] https://claude.site/artifacts/2fe3c97d-88f6-4e2f-9ed2-96452e...

This does not take a couple of hours. I can assure you of that.

The app description sounds like it was more work to come up with than the app code itself.

Also, this is an extremely common, bland and simplistic example. You’ll see it flail and falter on slightly less generic boilerplate-heavy “apps” and there is no known tech/theory that’ll get us there. We just hope more “scale” will magically solve all its issues, but IMO that’s not going to happen. The paradigm just doesn’t allow it. Time will tell who is right of course.

I don’t want to downplay the recent LLM achievements because they are amazing, but this is not taking any (programming) jobs.

I’m actually not too worried about the current wave of AI. Copilot is an annoyance and GPT4 is lying so much it’s getting old. LLMs have deep issues that I’m not seeing much improvement on. The next wave of AI however.. I’m not sure. It’s a matter of time.

That's pretty neat.

I'd like to see how it handles implementing a Sudoku solver.

I've tried, with multiple different AIs as a benchmark to ask them to implement a Sudoku solver in Rust. And it always turns into an uncompilable mess at worst, or a solver that fills the grid at best but which is not actually following the rules of Sudoku.

Maybe I'm just bad at "prompting". But with all of the material online about implementing your own Sudoku solver I don't understand why any of the models I've asked always produce incorrect solutions. There should be enough info in their training material to know how to do this. I've tried a bunch of different ways like just asking a short simple question without detail ("Implement a Sudoku solver in Rust"), or having it discuss general strategies for the implementation first, along with things like telling it that it's an expert software developer or a professional computer scientist etc. The textual descriptions that it gives sound like they make sense, but when it comes to implementation in code, I've so far never seen actual success with that.

Feeding compile errors from the compiler back into the different LLMs I've tried, often times result in the AI fixing a compile error in one place and then introducing new compile errors in other parts of the code.

If this Artifact thing could enable me to do the following then I am probably going to cancel my OpenAI ChatGPT subscription and start using Claude with Artifacts on the Claude Pro plan instead:

1) Implement a Sudoku solver in Rust. The program will be a command line tool that takes as input a grid of numbers for a Sudoku to solve, and prints the solution to it. It also needs to properly identify invalid input, and input that has no solution. (This alone would be impressive to me because I've never gotten any of the LLMs I've tried to properly do even this.)

2) Make use of serde and hyper to accept a Sudoku puzzle to solve as JSON input over HTTP. Respond with a JSON response that gives the solution to the puzzle.

3) Create a graphical, run-of-the-mill web frontend for the Sudoku solver.

The criteria for success is that the person (me) talking with the LLM never provides any of the actual thoughts about the algorithms and data structures used. If I wanted to do that I'd write it from scratch myself. I want to have the LLM pick the algorithms and data structures, and that the most I do is to paste back any errors and have it actually fix those.

I just asked ChatGPT 4o to generate a Sudoku solver in Rust, and the code compiles and works fine.

Edit: tried with Llama 3.1 70B as well, and funnily enough it outputs the exact same Sudoku puzzle as an example to test the code with.

All of these “make me stereotypical app that you’ve seen thousands of examples of online” that people are using to prove how great AI is at programming now is actually just a shittier version of copy paste where your clipboard randomly changes arbitrary parts of the text before pasting it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com