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Comment by GoatInGrey | Hacker News Reader

And I assume there's no actual product that customers are using that we could also demo? Because only 1 out of every 20 or so claims of awesomeness actually has a demoable product to back up those claims. The 1 who does usually has immediate problems. Like an invisible text box rendered over the submit button on their Contact Us page preventing an onClick event for that button.

In case it wasn't obvious, I have gone from rabidly bullish on AI to very bearish over the last 18 months. Because I haven't found one instance where AI is running the show and things aren't falling apart in not-always-obvious ways.

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I'm kind of in the same boat although the timeline is more compressed. People claim they're more productive and that AI is capable of building large systems but I've yet to see any actual evidence of this. And the people who make these claims also seem to end up spending a ton of time prompting to the point where I wonder if it would have been faster for them to write the code manually, maybe with copilot's inline completions.

I created these demos using real data and real api connections with real databases, utilizing 100% AI code in http://betpredictor.io and https://pix2code.com; however, they barely work. At this point, I'm fixing 90% or more of every recommendation the AI gives. With you're code base being this large, you can be guaranteed that the AI will not know what needs to be edited, but I haven't written one line of hand-written code.

pix2code screenshot doesn't load.

I can't reach either site.

Neither site works bro.

It is true AI-generated UIs tend to be... Weird. In weird ways. Sometimes they are consistent and work as intended, but often times they reveal weird behaviors.

Or at least this was true until recently. GPT-5 is consistently delivering more coherent and better working UIs, provided I use it with shadcn or alternative component libraries.

So while you can generate a lot of code very fast, testing UX and UI is still manual work - at least for me.

I am pretty sure, AI should not run the show. It is a sophisticated tool, but it is not a show runner - not yet.

If you tell it to use a standard component library, the UIs should be mostly as coherent as the library.

Nothing much weird about the SwiftUI UIs GPT-5-codex generates for me. And it adapts well to building reusable/extensible components and using my existing components instead of constantly reinventing, because it is good at reading a lot of code before putting in work.

It is also good at refactoring to consolidate existing code for reusability, which makes it easier to extend and change UI in the future. Now I worry less about writing new UI or copy/pasting UI because I know I can do the refactoring easily to consolidate.

Let me summarise your comment in a few words: show me the money. If nobody is buying anything, there is no incremental value creation or augmentation of existing value in the economy that didn't already exist.

It's not the goal to have AI running the show. There's babysitting required, but it works pretty well tbh.

Note: using it for my B2B e-commerce

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