Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/26/dry-io-wants-to-democratize-software-development-using-ai/

by naveensundar • 7 years ago

65 82 7 years ago

PostOnce2• 7 years ago

Again? Can this end with anything other than failure? It'd be nice if it could, but that seems outside the realm of possibility.

Aside from this never having worked, and being, so far as we can all tell, incompatible with the level of fine-tuning to everything from the backend to the pixel positions of the UI that people want, there are very serious problems with the business model (or absence thereof)

Some telling snippets from the article:

"Everything you build on Dry.io right now is stuck there."

“Later on, we’re going to be making on-premise stuff, so if you want to run it on a local server or something like that,” Cassimatis promises. “But for now, yeah, stuck on our platform.”

"Dry.io also has no business model, yet."

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

Hello. I am the founder of this company. I understand your skepticism. It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. We're not claiming that. We're claiming that for a broad range of software (esp., social, messaging, and collaborative software), we can make the development process orders of magnitude faster. You do lose some customization though.

There is precedent for something like this being possible and valuable. Mid-90s level web technology was very restrictive, but did make a whole class of online service much easier to build and deploy than what existed before that (CompuServe, etc.) You didn't have complete control over every aspect of display, networking, etc., but the loss in customization/control didn't prevent it from enabling a lot of very important and valuable projects.

PostOnce2• 7 years ago

I appreciate the reply and genuinely hope you succeed, but it seems like an uphill battle and a hard sell.

For a trivial CRUD app, the dev can just re-use one they already wrote, no need to learn this layer you've created ... and for a complex CRUD app or something more complicated than that, you're going to need to write real code anyway, so who is the customer?

Why would I as a Python, JavaScript, or Ruby webdev learn your layer, which is at risk of disappearing in a bankruptcy? What will my investment of developer hours look like in 2 years on your platform, if it's still around?

Is it basically only useful for web stuff?

taneq• 7 years ago

It's true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level.

The thing is, 90%+ of the time spent developing software is spent figuring out precisely what you want everything to do. Once you actually know what you want, producing the code is pretty straightforward. Rapid application development systems are always a tradeoff between development time and "control at the pixel level". I'm absolutely not saying that a better RAD tool or a better AppWizard isn't worth having, mind you! Just that the two goals are diametrically opposed.

dwd2• 7 years ago

Hi Nick

I've had some experience around Model Driven Design and code generation tools for building web apps using technology such as the Eclipse EMF and Ecore for modelling common components.

How do you differentiate your software from that space?

bitL• 7 years ago

Great! It's precisely how trivial stuff will be handled in the future, whether we like it or not and I am glad something like your company popped up. Could you please recommend any papers your approach is based on? Thank you!

Future extension you are likely considering could be voice/gesture driven development, or "natural language" programming, where one can use this combination naturally like talking to another person, describing what kind of app one needs and how it should look like.

omouse• 7 years ago

"Dry.io also has no business model, yet."

Well at least they're not taking VC funds and are funded by the previous exit of one of the founders (though I'm guessing their previous startup wasn't profitable or had no business model aside from "get acquired ASAP").

Aiming to get acquired is cool, but at the same time, it's not really a business model.

tluyben24• 7 years ago

Sounds somewhat like Meteorkitchen from reading that story. My feeling is that it will have very little to do with AI, but let’s see.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.

banachtarski• 7 years ago

Can you speak to what "AI" means in this context?

sbr4642• 7 years ago

Interesting work Nick. I’d love to chat with you directly at some point, since our work overlaps in a few ways.

Best of luck with the launch, definitely interested in helping out with beta testing.

User@gmail

tluyben24• 7 years ago

Yes, I understand that point, but all you explain and all I read about Dry can be done with a bunch of handcoded rules and some constraints engine or solver. The scepticism comes from everyone calling everything AI just because it attracts press + investors. I would love to (beta) test your solution whenever you are ready anyway.

ohiovr• 7 years ago

Is the generated code readable?

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

No. The point is to never have to look at, modify, or understand the underlying code. So, in this sense, it's not a typical code generation tool where if you want to tweak something you need to do a lot of work to find the right place in the code.

mbesto• 7 years ago

Cassimatis believes that Dry.io doesn’t have any competitors.

There is a huge category of providers that do this:

https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterpris...

https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-plat...

I wish tech journalists would do their research.

sbr4642• 7 years ago

There were definitely several broad claims made. Without seeing the platform though, within the context claimed, it’s difficult to include the entire low-code industry, especially 80%+ of the logos included in the link you mentioned, being related to an AI driven coding platform, including Salesforce.

neya• 7 years ago

Cool, regardless of other commenters' advice, I think you should go forward with this. I run a dev shop and I have done this with Rails and boy, does it save you a lot of time (and thus, money). But, you should ensure there isn't a learning curve for your platform. It should be in a UI that's familiar to someone who is familiar with building their apps manually. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose. As for worrying about pixel perfect designs, don't worry about those, they're the easy part. The difficult part will be the parts that contain the majority of value for a business - the backend. Frontend is as simple us throwing in a nice UI framework and mixing and matching color themes. It is good enough and works well for most clients. The ones that require pixel perfection probably aren't your target audience as it has a lot to do with the frontend than the backend.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of money in this. I sincerely wish you luck and hope you succeed.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

Thanks. I think that's right. There are a lot of use cases where super-precise UI control is not necessary. The early web and many blogging platforms are an example where you can get very far despite some limits on UI customization.

puranjay• 7 years ago

Slightly OT, but on my browser, dry.io is not on https. Big red flag for me. Chrome shows a 'Not Secure' tag for me, plus there is no favicon.

Small things but important. You might want to fix that

kough• 7 years ago

In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with any sort of inference.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

There is a partial answer to this in another thread, but here is a response to your specific point:

It depends what you mean by inference. In statistical machine learning and deep learning, inference means predicting things using large amounts of data. Philosophers call that inductive inference.

But there is also deductive inference. Given some general knowledge (e.g., "All men are mortal") and some facts ("Socrates is a man"), you infer other facts ("Socrates is Mortal"). There is a huge amount of work in AI that has developed algorithms that do very complex and powerful versions of this kind of inference. You can use those to infer from a brief description of what you want a computer to do what the sequence of actions the computer can take to achieve that goal. You can use these kinds of methods to generate software behavior without explicitly programming the behavior in advance.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

That's a link to a widely-used AI textbook. The methods that most people today associate with AI (i.e., the learning-based inference methods), are only a fraction of the overall content.

TimTheTinker4• 7 years ago

You have a lot of buzzwords in that headline. I’m not planning to read TA because the buzzwords made my eyes glaze over.

No offense intended, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

So you wanted the headline to be more dry?

TimTheTinker4• 7 years ago

I'm just saying I might have read the article if the headline explained using fewer buzzwords.

[pithy word].io, democratize (that doesn’t mean anything anymore), AI (everything is AI these days)

Without more descriptive words, it seems to mean simultaneously a whole lot and not very much.

ndnxhs2• 7 years ago

I read the article but didn't watch the video but isn't this essentially code generation/metaprogramming that we already have? In rails you don't have to write a fraction of the code that actually runs because its generated for you.

Also the AI part is very worrying. To me this sounds like a programming language where no one exactly knows what the rules are and every update to the training model could break everything. Imagine trying to debug an issue when there is no documentation or any knowledge on what is going on.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

Re AI, check out the thread where I explain how we don't use training models or conventional machine learning. We use very deterministic.

xapata• 7 years ago

Artificial intelligence is a superset of, not equivalent to statistical machine learning.

ndnxhs2• 7 years ago

You could label anything AI. Might as well call my if statement AI

bitwize2• 7 years ago

Ever since expert systems fizzled out and failed to deliver on their promise in the 80s, AI has been roughly equivalent to statistical machine learning and its applications. Everything else became just logic that needs statistical inference in order to work intelligently in a complex setting.

AlotOfReading• 7 years ago

An interesting difference between this and "traditional compilers" is that since it's targeted to user-facing applications and the output is intentionally hands-off, there are incentives for dry to subvert developers. Imagine inserting unrequested ads or silently reselling end-user analytics for extra money. The developer might never even know, let alone be able to fix it.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

Yes, any company that's serving a lot of web pages would be tempted to put ads on their pages. As the article and our website state, we are doing several things to preserve people's privacy. If we do ever serve ads, you and others can help us find a way to be super-transparent about it.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

That is, until the VCs take over or it goes to private equity, and the new stockholders say it's much easier to monetize if you're super-opaque about it.

marcell• 7 years ago

I'm trying to understand how this would actually work. A lot of app development for a mid-size CRUD app is around encoding business logic and handling edge cases.

Let's take a specific example. Say I'm writing a software to help manage weekly CSA (box of veggies) deliveries. Sometimes a driver will miss a delivery, and in that case, you want three options:

(1) Fully refund the customer for that week

(2) Let them another receive another delivery the next day

(3) Give them company credit

If (2) happens, the driver component needs to receive a notification for the next day delivery.

Is this in scope of dry.io? If it handles this kind of thing, how?

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

Yes. We have an event language where you basically can say "IF X happens do Y".

weego• 7 years ago

Hey that's how Watson handles AI too

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

The idea is that in many cases how an edge case is handle is up to the person requesting the software. So unless you build an AI that can read minds there needs to be an easy way to express what their preferences are.

IshKebab• 7 years ago

Sounds like normal programming...

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

Oh I remember that it ran on CBM 8096 back in 81 - I seem to recall it was called "The Last One"

JamesAdir• 7 years ago

I understand the use of AI is mandatory this days for any startups, but basically this is Microsoft Access 2019 if it was online. Access once solved the problem of creating small inhouse applications for departmental use. Since then a magnitude of online services offered the same solutions, so you don't need to create anything from scratch now.

I'm sure there is a market for Dry.io solution, just can't estimate how big it really is.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

Like Access, we do aim to make development much easier, and in-house tools are an obvious first market. However, there are a lot of aspects of Dry (involving access permission, data tagging, moderation, and more) that aren't all together in any other platform. These make it easier to build social, collaborative, and messaging apps much more easily than other approaches.

mountainofdeath• 7 years ago

Where is the AI here? This is yet another line-of-business app generator. Others include Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Access back in the day, etc.

gamesbrainiac• 7 years ago

My point exactly, and furthermore, the whole UI looks very cumbersome. You still have to understand the software underneath in order to actually build the application itself.

harrisreynolds5• 7 years ago

Yes. I am wondering the same thing. We are currently working on NimbleHQ [1] which is an app that lets you build apps. And it is pretty cool. But it doesn't use AI.

Maybe we should say it does to get some press! :-)

[1] https://www.nimblehq.com/

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

You actually do not have to understand the software underneath. The point is for that to be invisible to the developer.

mlboss• 7 years ago

Where is the AI ? I thought it would be some tool which uses program synthesis.

stevengraham• 7 years ago

Despite the (predictable) skepticism, there are some real enterprise use-cases for something like this being served by similar "self-serve" tools. I'd be willing to take a look.

nickcassimatis30• 7 years ago

I'd be happy to hear more about these use cases you have in mind, either here or over email.

htkibar• 7 years ago

There are a couple points to be made on this.

1. This is less of a "AI" issue, more of a UI/UX for specialized tools issue. Dreamweaver comes to mind especially; the moment you are trying to get something that can be flexible and accommodate different needs it is mostly about learning the tools. Often, the result is that learning the tool itself is almost harder than learning to code.

2. Any code that you generate via AI will most probably be crap. A huge part of coding is making it understandable and easy to touch later on; how can you do this without AI that has a proper understanding of the worlds (probably on the level of a AGI).

Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

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