Ask HN: Will AI take no-code to the next level?
Building applications without code is not new, but lately I've been thinking a lot about how AI will allow anyone to become a developer and make building applications without writing any code easier than ever.
Is anyone thinking about this? This is going to be a huge trend in the next couple of years. It will put pressure on the software development and start to take more and more low-budget projects away from programmers. If course this is already happening. For example, you can easily pay $10000 to a trendy developer to build a chatbot for your data, or you can use one of dozens of web applications to do the same thing for less than $100. Vercel now has a system for generating React UIs which could literally replace hiring a second developer in many projects (you would still need a human programmer for some things I think). I have built web apps that can iterate on programs or shell scripts and directly launch servers in VMs for you. The trick is getting this stuff to be robust enough in the face of infinite potential requirements. When you narrow the scope down and add a bit of an error correcting loop, GPT-4 can absolutely create working applications. I am working on an agent framework and hosting system that will have agent that can build agents or apps. Thanks for your comment. Yeah I agree that narrowing the scope definitely makes sense initially. Definitely an exciting space though! I've tried getting chatgpt and others to write code for me but it just seems to get confused about most everything once you get past the "write a function that does X" and X is some well known thing. Mostly I use it to suggest me a bunch of different ways to solve a problem so I can do research while I think about it. And I've been using it on an R library I'm developing and it ends up being a crutch. It's like following your GPS around. You will get somewhere but you'll never learn how to get there. Thanks for sharing! I have heard similar feedback from others. What if it wasn't broken or confused and it worked immediately...like for example you don't just generate the code as output, instead it is immediately deployed and usable? Yes of course if it was like the computer in star trek the next generation then I would find it quite useful. But I'm not convinced that will occur any time soon. you should check out this: I love the potential of AI agents. Thanks for sharing! Not until it can recognize and give a solution to an XY problem.