Comment by luisml77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luisml77 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree and I also think the problem is deeper than that. It's about not being able to do most code testing and debugging remotely. You can't really test anything remotely really... Its in an ephemeral container without any of your data, just your repo. You can't have the model do npm run dev and browse to see the webpage, click around, etc. You can't compile or run anything heavy, you can't persist data across sessions/days, etc.

I like the idea of background agents running in the cloud but it has to be a more persistent environment. It also has to run on a GUI so it can develop web applications or run the programs we are developing, and run them properly with the GUI and requiring clicking around, typing things etc. Computer use, is what we need. But that would probably be too expensive to serve to the masses with the current models

Definitely sounds cool. But the problem hasn't even been solved locally yet. Distributed microservices, 3rd party dependencies, async callbacks, reasonable test data, unsatisfiable validations, etc. Every company has their own hacked together local testing thing that mostly doesn't work.

That said, maybe this is the turning point where these companies work toward solving it in earnest, since it's a key differentiator of their larger PLATFORM and not just a cost. Heck, if they get something like that working well, I'd pay for it even without the AI!

Edit: that could end up being really slick too if it was able to learn from your teammates and offer guidance. Like when you're checking some e2e UI flows but you need a test item that has some specific detail, it maybe saw how your teammate changed the value or which item they used or created, and can copy it for you. "Hey it looks like you're trying to test this flow. Here's how Chen did it. Want me to guide you through that?" They can't really do that with just CLI, so the web interface could really be a game changer if they take full advantage of it.

What you're describing feels like the next major evolution and is likely years away (and exciting!).

I'm mainly aiming for a good experience with what we have today. Welding an AI agent onto my IDE turned out to be great. The next incremental step feels like being able to parallelize that. I want four concurrent IDEs with AI welded onto it.

Exactly, I want to go to sleep knowing I have an AI working in a computer developing my project. Then wake up to the finished website/program, fully tested top to bottom backend frontend UI etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com