Testing the latest AI tools for prototyping and building simple websites
blog.codeyam.com
blog.codeyam.com
I've been trying to figure out how they do it. First, Claude3.7 is probably their backend model. Gemini 2.5 Pro is definitely getting there but I'm pretty sure Claude is still king for this kind of work. Second, if you break up the design and then implementation, you get significantly better responses. Finally, you have throw in a bit of what I'm calling stable-diffusion-prompt-isms where you almost excessively drop references to known brands or design philosophies to trigger those 'latent' memories and steer away from the more-basic stuff that seems to otherwise surface.
Anybody selling templates - dead.
Anybody selling design services to pre-seed startups and small businesses - dead.
Squarespace - probably dead soon too.
Any startup not taking advantage of these tools is stuck in the past. This is the new "going fast". You can test your ideas so quickly with these tools.
As a full stack engineer, I can build and design myself to a pretty reasonable degree. I'm not going to do that anymore. These tools are faster than me.
I disagree with the premise that somehow now all startups and small business would like to do their own webdesign simply because LLMs can help with some of the process, same goes for the rest of your points.
Those business won't disappear, but instead they'll be able to make more with less, just like in the past when automation been improved. People don't suddenly get fired, but instead pick up new skills and can suddenly do much more.
The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time, but turns out that just have the same amount of free-time as before but now we're pushed to do even more in less time.
What idyllic utopia are you living in?
It cannot be the same world I'm living in, we're just seeing mass layoffs here
> The dream was always that we could automate humanity enough so we can all have more free-time,
The dream of the workforce maybe.
I think the dream of the wealthy and owner class is that they no longer need a workforce at all and can safely grind us workers into fertilizer without losing any quality of life for themselves
I'm seeing mass layoffs all around too, I believe it's because they added too many people in the past though, not because LLMs will suddenly replace a bunch of roles that suddenly won't need humans. Of course the companies won't admit to hiring too much before, but instead find the most convenient scapegoat.
Having a different perspective is not living in a different world, it's just a different perspective.
> I think the dream of the wealthy and owner class is that they no longer need a workforce at all and can safely grind us workers into fertilizer without losing any quality of life for themselves
Certainly true in some countries like the US where the working and middle class basically has given up, but absolutely not true in other places. I'd love to see them try though, long time ago we rebalanced the scales so about time.
zero of those jobs have been replaced by AI though. We're seeing layoffs because of a one-two punch of insane overhiring during/after covid followed immediately by an economic pullback and return to "lean" operating strategies.
Chegg and StackOverflow certainly beg to differ with your hypothesis. And they're only the first to fall.
Technically yes
But the difference is not really meaningful to the people who are out of work, is it?
Hard disagree on "zero", and I've read articles about businesses laying off people specifically to replace them with AI (Washington Post had an article about people getting let go shortly after ChatGPT first came out, e.g. copywriters), so this is just demonstrably false.
That said, I agree the larger reason for the current layoffs are (a) massive Covid overhiring, (b) end of the ~decade long ZIRP era, (c) at least in the US, much more outsourcing now that video conf tech is good and everyone is used to remote work. Long term, though, I think we've reached a state where, for a ton of jobs, technology is destroying jobs a lot faster than it's creating new ones. Lots has been written about how many startups can now execute quickly with a team half the size or less than what was required just a couple years ago. Many forms of labor have just become devalued in an incredibly short time span.
Out of curiosity, were these announcements by AI companies or companies with an interest in AI companies?
At lot of articles you read are effectively advertising, especially if it’s a CEO talking about their company.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...
That article seems to be about contracted copywriters.
If your whole job is writing “150-word descriptions” (the article’s words) for $60 an hour and the like, yeah LLMs got you beat.
But that’s a far cry from mass layoff territory.
Also, in that same article, he was rehired by a (granted, a single) client who didn’t like chatgpt. What is the rate of clients that dropped chatgpt?
It's not just the price. Most I know feel scammed and would jump at the bit of getting rid of those "service providers"
I definitely agree we all need to learn these tools and use them in our favor, but I'm not sure they'll directly take our jobs as for now.
I remember having the same kind of fear of loosing my job around 10yrs ago when templates and came up, but we just learnt how to include them in our workflows and continued working from there.
Gemini seems to now advise you when you’re telling it to do something that may not make sense - first time I’ve really seen a non-Yes Man LLM. It’s more like a Yes-but-are-you-sure man.
But it's a lot more than just "the best system prompt". E.g. Cursor uses RAG (it indexes your repo in a vector DB) so it can use the right parts of your repo as context when calling the model. The biggest benefit I initially got from Cursor was asking it questions about my own repository, not a generic "how do I do X in Python" type of question
I'd also say UI and workflow mean a ton here. The agentic mode of Cursor is very well integrated.
Every one of these companies is using agents. they’re not relying on a single LLM call with some kind of prompt.
So while I'm here, here are links to the tools they mentioned:
If you point it to a site to clone with instructions on what to change, you get very good results in half an hour's work and <5$ spent.
Pretty stiff competition for the bottom end of the web creation/maitainance market for sure.
That seems impossible for any non-trivial project. I may have misinterpreted the idea, but calling it a "simulator" and the video leads me in that direction.
Our goal is to simulate every function and aspect of your application and in doing so provides both a test suite and demonstration artifacts. it's akin to an intelligent, semantically aware fuzzer that is creating both good and bad results (vs. a fuzzer just creating bad results with the intent of breaking things).
It is connected to your code via a GitHub app with read permissions and the ability to comment on PRs when analysis happens.
Let me know if this helps (or doesn't!). I think it's a little different from what you're envisioning but you're not far off.
Instruct it to do vanilla js + css + html, no weird/annoying frameworks, and you can whip up something in minutes
Built from the couch: https://www.agile9000.org/
Amazing. One of my clients Jira has tickets assigned to me from 2016. Those projects are long, long, long done.
For UX specifically, it makes creating personas so much easier that I think we’ll see a UX once this hype cycle ends.
I don’t know or talk to any PMs, personally.