Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/21/claude-artifacts/

by recvonline • 2 years ago

637 465 2 years ago

simonwillison.net

swah• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41913378

Not sure why no discussion at all - maybe the design is underwhelming.

mvdtnz4• 2 years ago

Maybe because we're all exhausted by these kinds of demos. I'll be interested in AI when I can integrate it with a large codebase and it provides any benefit. I'm happy for you that you can stand up little toy apps that pull down an NPM library and call it, but it's not useful in my professional life.

mattnewton• 2 years ago

If you have one of those larger codebases you aren't afraid of Cursor Co. getting a copy of, I would really try out Cursor. The indexing of medium sized mono-repo I've been working in is pretty flawless (contains code for a static web page, a singe page web app, and some python services along with deployment configs)

bloopernova• 2 years ago

Exactly. When the LLM can create valid tests that cover all branches, then it will be useful to me.

I use copilot every day, but it's only so good.

The LLM hype feels like it's been driven by FOMO.

williamcotton3• 2 years ago

My duties as a data scientist and forensic investigator involve writing lots of "little toy apps" for ETL and analysis.

BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"?

infoseek12• 2 years ago

It’s extraordinary!

Perhaps how quickly we become jaded should be taken as evidence of how quickly the world is changing right now.

When I looked at the examples they seemed like the kind of one off scripts, of limited complexity, that we’ve seen many times in the last year or so.

yen223• 2 years ago

To have discussions people need to be able to see your post, and on HN it can be a matter of luck.

rtzand• 2 years ago

Perhaps people want to read other blogs once in a while. We are at a stage of AI glut. If people pump out so much content in such a short time, no one can read it all (or is interested to read it).

ttepasse• 2 years ago

Apart from chance HN seems rather time dependent – those posts seem to be posted still early in the day (I assume UTC from the timestamps) when the mostly US-American visitors doesn’t seem yet in the slacking-of mode.

tessierashpool92• 2 years ago

i love the design ... especially because it is underwhelming as opposed to overwhelming! cause i care for the _content_ and not the _design_!

sourcecodeplz• 2 years ago

It's just not a big deal.

M4v3R• 2 years ago

It's funny how we went from "it's impossible for a computer to write meaningful code by itself" to "yawn, another one of these" in like 2 years.

tomrod3• 2 years ago

It's still not great at complexity. Though autocompletion does have some cool outputs.

thierrydamiba• 2 years ago

Runtime complexity or complex as in difficult problems?

onion2k• 2 years ago

It's still not great at complexity.

That's a feature, not a bug. Complexity is something to avoid.

leptons4• 2 years ago

Copilot knows what I want to console.log almost before I do. I like that aspect of it. It also gets it wrong sometimes, which is kind of dumb, especially when I just copied the variable name to my clipboard. It should know.

HaZeust20• 2 years ago

I said this last year[1] and still FIRMLY believe it:

"It's even crazier to me that we've just... Accepted it, and are in the process of taking it for granted. This type of technology was a moonshot 2 years ago, and many experts didn't expect it in the lifetimes of ANYONE here - and who knew the answer was increasing transformers and iterating attention?

And golly, there are a LOT of nay-sayers of the industry. I've even heard some folks on podcasts and forums saying this will be as short-lived and as meaningless as NFTs. NFTs couldn't re-write my entire Python codebase into Go, NFTs weren't ever close to passing the bar or MCAT. This stuff is crazy!"

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37879730

iwontberude2• 2 years ago

Nay-sayers are taking it for granted because it’s not what the they expected or wanted. It’s not some flippant inability to have gratitude. Since you brought it up, when JFK said we would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the expectation was succinct and understood. There has been so much goal post moving and hand waving that we aren’t talking about the same expectations anymore.

SubiculumCode• 2 years ago

I am not a professional coder, being in research I do not need to think about scaling my code as most of it is one and done on whatever problem I am working on at the moment. For me, this is a lot about stringing a bunch of neuroimaging tools together to transform data in ways I want, LLMs have been fantastic. Instead of spending 20 minutes coding it, its often 0-shot visit to Claude...especially when its a relatively simple python task e.g. iterate through directories of images, inspect these json, move those files over here, build this job, submit. Its not ground breaking code, but the LLM builds it faster than I would, and it does what I need it to do. Its been a 20x or more multiplier for me when it comes to one aspect of my work.

cloogshicer• 2 years ago

NFTs couldn't re-write my entire Python codebase into Go

Neither can LLMs. They can produce output that looks like a plausible re-write of your codebase, but on closer inspection turns out to have many minor and major errors everywhere.

The problem is that the closer inspection part is very often more work than writing the code by hand in the first place.

There hasn't been enough evidence for me that this will be possible to fix.

lionkor3• 2 years ago

It can autocomplete, it can't write good code. For me, that goal post has not moved. It it cant write good code consistently, I don't care for it all that much. It remains a cool autocomplete

leptons4• 2 years ago

The "AI" is still just as much hit-or-miss with code as it is writing a paragraph about anything. It doesn't really know what it's doing, it's guessing an output that will make the user happy. I wouldn't trust it with anything important, life life support systems or airplanes, etc. but I'm sure with the race to the bottom that we're in, we'll get to that point someday soon.

randito• 2 years ago

To state the obvious (again), it's shocking the rate of progress is with these tools. If this is 2 years of progress, what does 10-20 look like?

foobarqux4• 2 years ago

If what you said were actually true in a practical sense there would have been a perceptible revolution in products and services. There hasn't been.

IggleSniggle7• 2 years ago

I have no idea if you're correct about this or not. With 8 billion people in the world, and a significant number of those people working as "intelligent agents," how would you perceive the difference?

seoulmetro4• 2 years ago

Yeah. The only way this revolution doesn't happen is if humans are cheaper, easier to manage or source. And I'm pretty sure AI is already beating a human in all those categories doing the same job.

Our jobs aren't replaced yet because they can't be.

chrismarlow9• 2 years ago

I think this thread is missing that coding is a pretty small part of running a tech company. I have no concerns about my job security even if it could write all the code, which it can't.

jsheard• 2 years ago

I think we have different definitions of meaningful code, most of these are pulling in an NPM package which practically completes the given task by itself. For example the "YAML to JSON converter" uses js-yaml... which parses YAML and outputs a Javascript object that can be trivially serialized to JSON. The core of that "project" is literally two lines of code after importing that library.

  const jsonObj = jsyaml.load(yamlText);
  const jsonText = JSON.stringify(jsonObj, null, 2);

Don't get me wrong, if you want to convert YAML to JSON then using a battle tested library is the way to do it, but Claude doesn't deserve a round of applause for stating the blaringly obvious.

betaby• 2 years ago

YAML to JSON literally has `script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/js-yaml/4.1.0/js-yaml...`. I don't see how went anywhere judging from examples.

beepbooptheory• 2 years ago

I think its great we have had two years of huge enthusiasm and hype, just because in these many threads you see how much happiness it has inspired. But eventually, for most of us, it will soon become important to start getting a little more antagonistic to all this. Just really at the at end of the day to be able successfully keep navigating the world and our thoughts.

There is an awesome power and innovation to the entire of edifice of targeted advertising. The first time, perhaps, we were all "suggested" something that was in fact quite relevant, was in its own way a giddy-inspiring moment. But we have learned to hate it, not even considering the externalities it brings.

Just always remember: if you are paying for it, its not your friend!

foobarqux4• 2 years ago

I just don't seem to find this stuff as useful to me as people are portraying. Take the "extract URLs" example: I would just do

     curl -sL $URL | htmlq 'a' -a href

cpursley2• 2 years ago

Yeah, sure - if you have the memory that allows that sort of recall. For the rest of us, LLMs are like Alzheimer’s medication or eye glasses. Believe it or not, these types of esoteric commands are very difficult for some of us to remember - but AI is amazing at this sort thing (Unix commands, etc as well as trouble shooting them).

skydhash7• 2 years ago

Yeah, sure - if you have the memory that allows that sort of recall.

You don't memorize them. You learn the foundational knowledge (in this case how http works and the html format, and a bit of shell scripting), then read the manuals and compose the commands. And as days pass, you save interesting snippets somewhere. Then it becomes easier each time you interact with the tools.

Anyone would find ffmpeg or imagemagick daunting if they don't know anything about audio or graphics.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

I mean they may also make your memory worse if you always go straight for the llm instead of trying to remember.

foobarqux4• 2 years ago

That might be a reasonable argument if the LLM suggested something similar to the command I posted instead of an incredibly complicated webapp.

As is it just spits out migraine-inducing "it-works-doesn't-it" solutions from someone starting to learn to program.

pnut• 2 years ago

That's pretty happy path for one, and for two, how exactly are you doing it? Not by holding down a red button on your phone and talking into it, that's for sure.

For three, add one more subtle requirement to the task, and now you're reading awk manpages and trial-and-erroring perl oneliners.

qingcharles2• 2 years ago

I get your point, but that doesn't exactly replicate the original tool which lets you just paste a chunk of rich text in.

And I would have had to use GPT to give me the syntax for that command line anyway :)

simonw31• 2 years ago

Harder to run that on a phone. I built most of these little web apps so I could use them from Mobile Safari.

Also it doesn't look like htmlq can handle pages that render their content with JavaScript. If you want to do that you might find my shot-scraper CLI utility useful: https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/en/stable/javascript.html

    shot-scraper javascript https://simonwillison.net/ 'Array.from(document.links).map(a => a.href)'

foobarqux4• 2 years ago

I can point to similar problems even in CLI-target apps. In Nicholas Carlini's post for example he shows how LLMs helped him make curl parallel by piping to the "parallel" utility. That works but no sane person would do it given that curl has built-in parallel processing via the "-Z" flag which you could have found in 10 seconds by opening the man page. I'm sure this was an instance of a developer (truly) believing they became 10x more productive.

These aren't even the "hard" problems that are beyond the reach of LLMs today; they seem like things they should be able to do. It's just that, today, they just aren't achieving the spectacular results that many are claiming; it's mostly pretty crappy.

shot-scraper looks nice.

throwup2382• 2 years ago

The new Sonnet version is pretty great at code but I keep hitting output size limitations in the Claude app when I usually didn't use to before. Anyone else experiencing "Claude's response was limited as it hit the maximum allowed length at this time" a lot more now?

At this point their limited output limit is far behind o1/o1-mini. I really hope they significantly improve that next.

shubb• 2 years ago

It's annoying but if you you just type continue it's pretty good at writing the rest of the code in a new file that you can copy paste together...

treme2• 2 years ago

no devs should be using the chat ui. get api key via anthropic.com, add cline extension on VSCode and do away with copy/pasting

StickyRibbs• 2 years ago

i'll start panicking when it can productionalize an app and deploy it to GCP without any errors.

shishy• 2 years ago

I used cursor to manage spinning up and deploying a full stack app in AWS last week. Took me one afternoon.

trhway2• 2 years ago

I think you've just gave an idea to somebody's next startup, and we'll probably see it is being done in half-a-year. In general all that tedious YAML/etc. is ripe for the "autocompletion AI".

skydhash7• 2 years ago

And then you'll find out a node was deployed with no backup strategy while there are multiple useless ones burning money.

sigh_again4• 2 years ago

"Don't look at your Kubernetes configuration, trust our AI to do it well" sounds like a psyop straight out of GCP or AWS to charge you four times what they need to before telling you "no, you absolutely need that $500 charge for your 1RPS static website, yes yes absolutely."

CptFribble• 2 years ago

until it hallucinates a config and rings up a $10,000 AWS while you're asleep

raincole2• 2 years ago

Then you should have been panicking for several months already.

ndndjdueej• 2 years ago

Invert that.

AI makes docker compose app. Cloud providers that cannot deploy a docker compose app simply and without errors will miss out.

corytheboyd2• 2 years ago

Just in case you need it: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef

I was just trying to be helpful, since it was relevant to content in the post…

burgerquizz• 2 years ago

if i want to just paste an url, of full page of HN, and extract all comments in a json format. would that tool work?

sigh_again4• 2 years ago

[...document.querySelectorAll(".commtext").values().map((it) => it.innerText)]

Works in every single web browser. No calls to OpenAI needed, and I'm rusty on Javascript. Make it a bookmarklet, and you don't even need to run a dedicated webpage on your machine for that.

corytheboyd2• 2 years ago

You already know the answer to that. This is just a very helpful interface for arbitrary data conversions, that I thought passers by might like to know about. It’s not an LLM, but it does what some of the examples in the article does, and more.

xster• 2 years ago

Anthropic is so close to getting to a WeChat-esque store-less super-app state. It just needs a way to gather all your published artifacts and surface them easily in the sidebar like your favorited chats.

Since Elon is so interested in that model, if xAI had Claude's capabilities, they would surely go with that angle

skydhash7• 2 years ago

I don't know if I'd take less time, but I would definitely type less.

ToJans• 2 years ago

I fully agree.

I think Claude offers me 10x productivity, especially for all these helper apps and technical POCs that I typically create during the week.

And that's without even mentioning mail chain replies, analysis of legal or financial documents, helping my kids with their math assignments,...

It's a huge enabler for me, and it's getting better every month.

We are getting up the abstraction ladder faster and faster, and I cannot even imagine where we will end up within a few months, or a few years.

djoldman• 2 years ago

@simonw: jina is getting cranky:

https://tools.simonwillison.net/jina-reader?

{"data":null,"code":451,"name":"SecurityCompromiseError","status":45102,"message":"Your request is categorized as abuse. Please don't abuse our service. If you are sure you are not abusing, please authenticate yourself with an API key.","readableMessage":"SecurityCompromiseError: Your request is categorized as abuse. Please don't abuse our service. If you are sure you are not abusing, please authenticate yourself with an API key."}

flakiness• 2 years ago

TIL Jina Reader API has (low rate limit) API key free option. https://jina.ai/reader/

rty322• 2 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of examples like this, but one thing that I find really hard to deal with is to integrate such tools into existing codebase -- you can make all these things as standalone pages, but for a professional developer, you have certain standards and conventions, and often it takes a lot of work to review/revise the code to make it work with existing codebase, so much that you end up using inline completion just to help with obvious stuff or boilerplate. I woule rather spend 20% extra amount of time to write the code myself yet have confidence, than spend time tweaking the prompt or giving follow up instructions.

salviati2• 2 years ago

Have you tried https://aider.chat ?

kridsdale3• 2 years ago

Can those kinds of things work in monorepos with 50 million files?

freediver2• 2 years ago

I am a big fan!

vbezhenar• 2 years ago

I tried it yesterday and wasn't successful. I spent like 30 minutes trying to explain to it to make a simple change. Every time it made this change and several others as well which I didn't ask for. I asked to undo those several other changes and it undoes everything or does other unrelated things.

It works good until it doesn't.

It's definitely a useful tool and I'll continue to learn to use it. However it is absolutely stupid at times. I feel there's very high bar to use it, much higher than traditional IDEs.

codingwagie• 2 years ago

cursor.sh, add context to the prompt

rty322• 2 years ago

I haven't spent enough time with cursor specifically, but with other similar coding assistants, adding context can take some time. And often, even if it does save time, the action of "adding context" itself gets tiring and tedious so that you don't want to bother but instead just write the code yourself. It's about mental affordability.

cube2222• 2 years ago

With something like the AI assistant in Zed you’d generally provide a few files the assistant can use as a reference. I’ve had good luck in having it follow the codebase’s style and standards this way.

benwilber0• 2 years ago

+1 to the completions/inferences in Zed. It's the first editor that I feel (mostly) confident about just tabbing-through the AI completions with minimal prompting/re-editing.

richardw• 2 years ago

Drag in a couple files and say “make a class that does X but use this format”. I absolutely don’t rely on it for lots of things but it’s absolutely capable of working with existing code. Claude is far better than OpenAI when dealing with sets of existing files. I also like that it’s outside of my IDE so I make the final changes. LLM’s love to just write tokens so I keep a fairly short leash.

Buttons8402• 2 years ago

With a sufficiently advanced type system, you could lay out high level building blocks, such as function definitions, and let the LLM go wild, and then if things compile there's a high chance it's correct. Or maybe even a formal proof things are correct.

I was blown away when I realized some Haskell functions have only one possible definition, for example. I think most people haven't worked with type systems like this, and there are type systems far more powerful than Haskell's, such as dependant types.

There's not much reason to worry about low level quality standards so long as you know it's correct from a high level. I don't think we've seen what a deep integration between a LLM and a programming language can do, where the type system helps validate the LLM output, and the LLM has a type checker integrated into its training process.

fhdsgbbcaA8• 2 years ago

Things I never want to hear about flight control systems before I board a plane: “if things compile there's a high chance it's correct”

halfmatthalfcat• 2 years ago

I'm not sure how much things have changed but I tried to use GPT-4 when it first came out to build a library on top of Scala + Shapeless and it utterly failed. Unless you can somehow wire in an LSP per language as an agent and have it work through the type errors as it tries to create code, I can't see where we'll ever get to a place where LLMs can work with strongly typed languages and produce compliant code.

Even with, the aforementioned "have an LSP agent work through type errors", it may be faster to just do it yourself than wait for an LLM to spit out what may be correct.

oblio• 2 years ago

With a sufficiently advanced type system

Is this a brother or a cousin of the "sufficiently advanced compiler"? :-)

skybrian• 2 years ago

The functions for which there's only one implementation are trivial examples. It's not going to work for anything even slightly more complicated, like a function that returns a float.

Even if you could, you probably wouldn't want to make any change a breaking change by exposing implementation details.

rapind• 2 years ago

Oh this is an interesting take. Haskell, F#, possibly Elm, etc.

TechDebtDevin• 2 years ago

I'm sort of playing around with something like this in go for fun.

szundi• 2 years ago

You know people work with what they work with.

rq1• 2 years ago

I did just that actually to:

* build a codegen for Idris2 and a rust RT (a parallel stack "typed" VM)

* a full application in Elm, while asking it to borrow from DT to have it "correct-by-construction", use zippers for some data structures… etc. And it worked!

* Whilst at it, I built Elm but in Idris2, while improving on the rendering part (this is WIP)

* data collators and iterators to handle some ML trainings with pausing features so that I can just Ctrl-C and continue if needed/possible/makes sense.

* etc.

At the end I had to rewrite completely some parts, but I would say 90% of the boring work was correctly done and I only had to focus on the interesting bits.

However it didn’t deliver the kind of thorough prep work a painter would do before painting a house when asked for. It simply did exactly what I asked, meaning, it did the paint and no more.

(Using 4o and o1-preview)

runeks• 2 years ago

With a sufficiently advanced type system, you could lay out high level building blocks, such as function definitions, and let the LLM go wild, and then if things compile there's a high chance it's correct. Or maybe even a formal proof things are correct.

A formal proof is simply a type that allows only the correct implementation at the term level. And specifying this takes ages, as in hundreds of times longer than just writing it out. So you want to use an LLM to save this 1% of time after you've done all the hard work of specifying what the only correct implementation is?

gabigrin• 2 years ago

That's one take I'm trying to take with https://www.flyde.dev. Build that higher-level abstraction that allows LLM to shine and us humans to enjoy a more effective way to view and control its outcome.

I know it's not what you meant, but tbh I don't think going deeper than Haskell on type-system power is the route to achieve mass adoption.

fny2• 2 years ago

I find it helps if you treat the code generated as a third-party package with a well defined API. Then your role becomes gluing things together.

It’s an approach similar to how I’ve dealt with junior devs in the past. You specify an interface for a class, provide examples as a spec, and you get what you want without colliding with the main project.

For sanity’s sake, I keep these AI generated modules in single files just so it’s an easy copy and paste into ChatGPT.

tharant33• 2 years ago

It’s an approach similar to how I’ve dealt with junior devs in the past.

Your experience with and approach to juniors is different than my own. I don’t ask juniors to write a single class file; I give them a design document, an API spec, and documentation for standard practices, then I work as closely with them as needed to get the results I need and the experience they need. This approach works well for me and the vast majority of juniors with whom I’ve worked because we can pretty quickly identify gaps in their knowledge so we can then provide experience and education that benefits both parties. The same approach has failed miserably for me when pairing with an LLM for anything other than trivial code-generation tasks. The models don’t learn (sure, some providers offer “memory” but the limits of those features are pretty obvious once you try to use ‘em in practice for anything other than “don’t forget that I like tacos, the color blue, and sci-fi”)

For sanity’s sake, I keep these AI generated modules in single files just so it’s an easy copy and paste into ChatGPT.

That’s not acceptable for production-quality code—at least not in my environment.

Atotalnoob• 2 years ago

Just tell it those conventions or standards.

Using GitHub copilot, I just tell it to style its code like an example and it gets pretty close.

paradite3• 2 years ago

I built a tool specifically for integrating LLMs like Claude into existing codebase and daily coding workflow: https://prompt.16x.engineer/

beefnugs• 2 years ago

This isn't for professional software developers. This is for managers, so they can shit out a one week test and then feel superior enough to pay software engineers less for the "easy" job they do.

Volrath89• 2 years ago

You are right, except on the part about tweaking the prompt to get your desired code styling.

The easier way to integrate into an existing code base is just to refactor the code yourself. AI gives a working version, you refactor and move on. For me this has been a huge productivity boost from writing everything from scratch

bboygravity• 2 years ago

You can feed it a bunch of your code style as part of a project and it will just adhere to that.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

You spend 40-100 hours/wk at work. Ok to spend 2 hours to give Claude the info around those conventions. It should then save you 20-40 hours/wk

inciampati• 2 years ago

Exactly. Use aider to do this.

Tell claude or your favorite LLM to write a full plan to implement what you need in such a way that your coworker can implement it.

Copy the result into aider, and check the results!

v3ss0n• 2 years ago

None of them worth writing home about

nichochar• 2 years ago

We built an open-source and local tool that allows you to take these even further. Highly recommend plugging in the latest model, but you can keep iterating on the apps.

Currently also on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41926067

thimabi2• 2 years ago

I take tools like these as an inspiration. All of us have at least some trivial tasks that can be automated. In the past, automating them might have been a hassle, but with LLMs, that’s no longer the case. I, for one, have a “scripts” folder with dozens of one-off mini-apps to handle specific tasks, and this folder keeps growing every day.

yapyap• 2 years ago

wish there was an option to hide all chat AI related topics on HN

thimabi2• 2 years ago

Maybe it’s time to create a new HN client with this feature. Ironically, an AI can be of assistance in filtering AI-related submissions or comments.

GaggiX2• 2 years ago

Ask Claude to write the browser extension for you so you can stop whining.

tomrod3• 2 years ago

HN has always had a focus on what will change the world 5 years out.

Chat-based AI is a remarkable set of functionalities to build with. It isn't the only improvement in Tech, let alone AI/ML, but it is massive.

I quite enjoy learning more about it from dedicated folks like simonw.

neom3• 2 years ago

I stopped building web early 2000s to build web businesses instead, but I was pretty creative with the ol' LAMP back in the day, this whole thing is honestly just... it makes me giddy. I can build super fun stuff now without asking people, for example this took me... I dunno, from telling what I want to deploy... 15 minutes? And to ME, it's awesome: https://funds.ascent.ca/ - I doubt it's well coded or w/e, but the fact that I could get a "cool" marketing property online in < 20 minutes basically exactly as I want... giddy is the right word.

adriand• 2 years ago

A friend of mine said to me a few months ago, “all existing software is technical debt”. Meaning that owning software now is, in many cases, a burden not an asset since you can spin up new greenfield software using the latest tech so quickly.

neom3• 2 years ago

That's a super interesting way to look at it. Got my wheels spinning, I guess you can in a way then say... the person who makes super easy click in persistence is very winning. For example, lets say I want to make an app that hosts all the docs the founders in my "funds" accelerator thing above. I probably want to spend a week once a year upgrading that front end with the AI tools, new coat of paint if you will, but I want it to "just work" on top of however the data it's pulling is persisted on. At that point, I really could do anything I think... at that point, people are gonna build some cool stuff I'd imagine.

williamcotton3• 2 years ago

Software is definitely an asset. "Becoming less valuable over time" is called depreciation, or in the case of IP, amortization. Poorly written software amortizes at a higher rate.

xhrpost• 2 years ago

Software is more than just the code to make a computer do something. It is the auditor's log of rules that were painstakingly researched and decided on over months, years, etc. A lot of time goes into deciding what the program needs to do and only after some decision is made is it written down as code. "Do we ship the customer order after payment is authorized or after the funds settle? Depends what we're selling maybe? What does the finance department think? Oh we have regulatory rules to follow, better make sure those are there too. Oh we need to be able to back-wipe PII on-demand as well. But maybe we need to retain certain attributes, let's schedule a meeting." Etc. This is where a lot of the value lies.

pryelluw• 2 years ago

Cool design. It’s well done for it being a 20 minute effort. And that’s where these things currently shine.

kevinmerritt• 2 years ago

I learn so much from you. Thank you.

fHr• 2 years ago

if this aren't amazing times to be alive I don't know, this is insane, I also started to learn some rust on the weekend and it is nuts how good a chatgpt 4 can be as a teacher to support you on the fly

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

No you don't understand. My programming is so advanced that LLMs cower and shut themselves down when I try to use them. I am a senior developer! Clearly you don't know what you're doing and all the code it writes is bad and you'll never be able to maintain it. LLMs can't invent cutting edge, never before seen code that I do everyday because the problems I solve are so advanced even god himself can't understand my codebase. /s

freediver2• 2 years ago

A very interested paradigm introduced here by Anthropic is that this content is hosted. And the output of LLM is amde a self-hosted app, ready for consumption by consumer. Not far away from build my own site kind of thing.

harry8• 2 years ago

Anyone got a "best practises" or even a few "my workflow" blog posts on how to best use LLM's with a local code base?

Just saw someone recommend:

https://aider.chat/

Thought there might be more worth exploring from this community. ;-)

alphan0n• 2 years ago

That’s pretty slick.

paradite3• 2 years ago

I wrote one: https://prompt.16x.engineer/blog/ai-coding-workflow

ripley122• 2 years ago

I've written a bit about how I use Aider: https://www.reillywood.com/blog/how-i-use-llms-sep-2024/

It's not magic, but it is very useful. I find that it works best if you have a commit-sized piece of work in mind; something that might take you half an hour but can be described in a few sentences.

pluc• 2 years ago

and you didn't learn a goddamn thing

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

I just tried the following prompt:

please write a rust library implementing a variant of simple8b integer compression augmented to use run-length encoding whenever it's beneficial to do so.

Initially I was sort of impressed, it quickly generated a program which looked like rust code, and provided an explanation that, while not as technically detailed as I'd hoped, seemed to be at least related to the topic.

Then I tried to compile the program. Turns out the bot didn't quite actually write rust, it had written something closely resembling rust though, and the compiler errors helped me fix it.

Then I tried to run the tests--yes! the bot even wrote tests, although it did so in a totally bone-headed way by writing multiple distinct tests in one test function--not good. Panic on integer overflow trying to left shift a value. There were also multiple pages of compiler warnings complaining about dead code, unused functions, enum variants, etc. I always fail on warnings.

This is not a lot of code. 190 lines including tests. At this point, given that I already have concerns about its correctness, I don't think there's anything I can really use here. I'm worried the deeper I dig the worse it'll get, so better to cut my losses now, sit down and read the simple8b paper, and implement this from first principles.

Every time I try to use one of these things it's the same story. I cannot understand the hype. I'm genuinely trying but I just can't understand it.

throwup2382• 2 years ago

Did you feed it the simple8b paper along with your prompt?

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

No, that's an interesting idea though. Hard to imagine how that would help with the code correctness issues, though. I haven't even dug into algorithmic correctness yet so I have no real idea whether there's room for improvement there--although I sure do suspect there is!

EDIT: Oh my. After digging into the code I found this gem:

  fn encode_rle(&self, value: u64, count: usize) -> u64 {
      let selector = Simple8bSelector::RLE as u64;
      (selector << 60) | ((count as u64) << 30) | (value & 0x3FFFFFFF)
  }

And this one:

  fn try_rle(&self, input: &[u64]) -> Option<(u64, usize)> {
      if input.is_empty() {
          return None;
      }

      let value = input[0];
      let mut count = 1;

      for &x in input.iter().skip(1) {
          if x != value || count >= 0x3FFFFFFF {  // Max 30-bit run length
              break;
          }
          count += 1;
      }

      Some((value, count))
  }

What even is going on here? Compare to an actually sane implementation like[1] or[2].

[1]https://github.com/lemire/FastPFor/blob/master/headers/simpl... [2]https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/403782a5899c75...

Vaslo• 2 years ago

The biggest acceleration is for the mediocre coders like me - the one who knows 90% of the code but will spend 95% of the time (perhaps several hours) trying to get the data structure correct. These systems can the code almost all the way there and I can now spend that couple hours running tests rather than pounding my head against the wall realizing this is faster and easier to understand in a dictionary than the dumb tuple (round peg) I would have spent hours trying to jam through the square hole.

literalAardvark5• 2 years ago

o1 found a new feature I hadn't noticed became available and replaced some nasty regex code I had been working on for hours with 1 library call.

4o had been happy to attempt to help me fix my function, o1 just went "well that's interesting, meatbag, but have you considered reading the manual?"

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

I think the problem you're describing might be a symptom of coding as the first step instead of the last. I find once I specify a problem and my proposed solution in sufficient detail, the structure of the code becomes obvious. This is best done with the various tools of human communication--visual diagrams, prose, mathematics, and algorithmic descriptions in the form of pseudocode. Only then, when I sufficiently understand what I'm actually trying to do, should I actually start writing code in a programming language. Otherwise I get pigeonholed into some half-baked idea by the various rigours of the language itself. Writing code before I truly understand what I'm trying to accomplish, I've learned over time, is an awfully costly form of premature optimization.

EDIT: I don't mean to suggest programming languages aren't tools of human communication--they absolutely are. In fact, that's their primary purpose--to communicate ideas about the structure of a computation to other programmers. But starting with structural ideas about the implementation rather than conceptual ones about the nature of the problem and the shape the solution should therefore take is putting the cart before the horse.

joeevans10002• 2 years ago

If you drop it down a level and ask for block level code or functions you'll find it works. At this point users still have to organize the output. But I'm getting the sense that latter task is something LLMs are going to get better at.

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

Was it a word choice issue on my part then? Like, this task should be achievable using two functions. Should I ask it to write the encode function and then ask it to write the corresponding decode function? Then finally in a third step ask it to write various test functions?

bugglebeetle• 2 years ago

I recommend this for a more nuanced view:

https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

Yes, I've read that and it seems like the use cases the author can really get behind are basically "fuzzy search" queries, not implementing things. I don't think I really have those needs? My entire adult life I've cultivated a "precise search" skillset (e.g. using google and (rip)grep) that continues to serve me well--and very quickly! So I'm not seeing the value there. I've tried those use cases too and it doesn't really add up either...

loki-ai• 2 years ago

It feels exactly like me programming. The first pass resembles whatever I'm trying to do, and only after some struggle with compiling errors, squiggles from the LSP and some Google fu that I get something meaningful running.

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

Not unlike me! The difference is it's incremental. I write one function, then write a test, and get it working. Then, building on that stable foundation I write another function, more tests, etc. Crapping out an entire pile of garbage at once is not the way.

I guess I'm holding it wrong? Is there a better way I could phrase my query?

zurfer• 2 years ago

I gave your prompt to o1-preview and with one correction it did something that seems good to me (I am not a rust programmer, so please double check). :)

first attempt: https://onecompiler.com/rust/42w2duuqh

final result: https://onecompiler.com/rust/42w2e3jr4

PS: it "thought" about it for 2 x 60 seconds

jcgrillo10• 2 years ago

This is looking better! L49 is giving me a little anxiety though, I'd really love to see some kind of justification for that decision. Compare e.g. to Lemire's[1].

EDIT: To be clear, I do understand that I'm making an unreasonable demand. I know the process that came up with this program has no ability to justify this or that "decision" (deliberately scare quoted because it doesn't actually have agency and can't decide at all). And that's the problem. That's why I find it very difficult to trust it.

[1] https://github.com/lemire/FastPFor/blob/52e45deeab9c3a481daa...

almog2• 2 years ago

For the majority of these, a simple google search would have lead to an existing program/website that does the same thing.

We're past the POC stage. LLMs can generate code for simple programs. It's when you try to tweak the requirements and point how a program introduces a bug that you eventually realize they still fail to take you through the last mile just as they did year and a half ago.

simonw31• 2 years ago

"For the majority of these, a simple google search would have lead to an existing program/website that does the same thing."

That's what's so wild about this: that's true, and yet in most of those cases it's still faster and more productive for me to ask Claude to build me a brand new tool _from scratch_ than it is for me to try and find an existing one via Google.

The problem with trying to Google for these kinds of things is that you have to evaluate the results that come back and figure out which one of them correctly solves your problem. That's a few extra steps.

It's genuinely faster to prompt something like this instead:

Build an artifact (no react) where I can paste text into a textarea and it will return that text with all HTML entities - single and double quotes and less than greater than ampersand - correctly escaped. The output should be in a textarea accompanied by a "Copy to clipboard" button which changes text to "Copied!" for 1.5s after you click it. Make it mobile friendly

Done: https://claude.site/artifacts/46897436-e06e-4ccc-b8f4-3df90c...

In this case I knew exactly what I wanted: it had to do less than, greater than, ampersand, double quotes AND single quotes. I know from past experience that many tools like this forget about single quotes, so I'd have to evaluate any tools I found to check that they do that. And I was on my phone so I wanted a "copy to clipboard" button.

almog2• 2 years ago

Simon, all these example are great and on a side note I've learned a lot through your writing. However, as so many other AI for low/no code examples, it starts feeling like trying to perform a dexterity intensive task such as knotting while wearing thick gloves. All these examples are great on their own. What to me feels so wrong about seeing so many of these on HN front page is that my experience has been that even after almost 2 years from when ChatGPT was initially introduced, all models that I've been using improved a lot in accuracy, speed, input/output size but still more often than not fail to be useful when used with even a small _existing_ code base and an evolving set of tasks that aren't the busy work / boiler plate type.

bravura• 2 years ago

Is the realtime audio API now open to everyone?

simonw31• 2 years ago

I'm not using the Realtime audio API here - I'm using the Chat Completion API, which added support for audio files a few days ago: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/18/openai-audio/

joeevans10002• 2 years ago

These LLMs create significantly useful code and they are getting better. Those professionals who deride their utility are putting themselves at risk of not strategizing well for their future.

bilsbie2• 2 years ago

What’s the best and easiest way to host and share these artifacts? GitHub html?

simonw31• 2 years ago

Easiest is to use the "publish artifact" button, but that wraps them in a giant blob of obtuse React code which means they load slowly and view source is pretty much useless, e.g. https://claude.site/artifacts/46897436-e06e-4ccc-b8f4-3df90c...

Second easiest is to take the code and paste it in a Gist - like this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/14a2c3ef508839f26377707dbf5dd...

And then take the Gist ID and add it to this URL:

https://gistpreview.github.io/?14a2c3ef508839f26377707dbf5dd...

That gives you a URL you can load in your browser.

My preferred route is to host the generated HTML directly myself. I mainly use that via GitHub Pages - I can drop an extract-urls.html file into https://github.com/simonw/tools and about 20 seconds later it becomes available at https://tools.simonwillison.net/extract-urls

Those last two options only work for Artifacts that didn't use React (that's why I use "no react" in most of my artifact prompts). If you DID use React you can turn that into a standalone HTML and JavaScript app that you can deploy using https://github.com/claudio-silva/claude-artifact-runner - I wrote some notes on using that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/23/claude-artifact-runner...

bilsbie2• 2 years ago

I had no idea gistpreview existed! That’s really easy. I guess you can’t host static files like images though?

Do you do anything special to make the tools directory work like that?

ks20482• 2 years ago

Simon, (if you’re reading), if you “like programming”, is there any point that you get depressed about LLMs doing all the fun stuff that you wanted to do?

I see some arguments about high-level languages, eg “I’d rather program in Python than assembly - this is just another step-up”. But I feel natural language is altogether different and obliterates any skill/knowledge you’ve built-up in programming.

I can think other things, for example music - I like playing guitar even though I’ll never create something totally original or do better than a machine could do. But for me, programming combines the fun of creation with the satisfaction of the end result - something you wanted to exist now exists.

To clarify, I’m not talking about “usefulness” or accomplishing some business objective, I’m talking about the joy and satisfaction of programming.

simonw31• 2 years ago

If anything, it's the opposite. LLMs are making programming even more fun for me, because I can choose what and when I delegate to them.

Looking up how to accept a drag and dropped file (and then implementing it) in a JavaScript application isn't really that fun to me - certainly not for the tenth time.

I thrive on variety and building interesting things. LLMs let me incorporate WAY more tools into my work - I can build with Go and AppleScript and Bash and ffmpeg and jq, all things I have never climbed the learning curve enough to feel confident using in the past.

ks20482• 2 years ago

Yeah, that makes sense. But I wonder, going forward, what is the relationship between "building abstractions/libraries" vs "Using LLMs"?

For your example, "How do I accept a drag and dropped file in JS?" - An LLM can spit out 100 lines that does what you want, OR someone writes a nice library that does what you want in a single function call (say, for the common case. More complicated usage requires more arguments, etc.)

(Of course, another option is LLMs are the ones writing these library functions).

I guess I am one of those programmers who is allergic to boilerplate (for better or worse), so having LLMs split out lots of code bothers me.

harisec4• 2 years ago

If you want to really get depressed about the future of software developers try aider.

rtpg• 2 years ago

I am a bit frustrated that I don't have a great "tool" environment to build out this stuff, because of having to futz with the I/O. Like most of that stuff is "well I know how to write the Python to do the last step, but wrapping it all up in a simple web UI is Too Much Work". That effort might be small, but it's still orders of magnitude larger than the snippet!

Lots of TUI interfaces try to approximate this, but I think I really just need to build out something a bit like https://anvil.works/

psadri• 2 years ago

You should try SkyMass. You can put up a web ui in as few as 10 loc. and something actually useful in around 50.

Contact me if you need some help getting going…

simonw31• 2 years ago

There are a bunch of comments in this thread along the lines of "these are just toys" and "anyone could build these without an LLM".

I need to update my post to emphasize this, but that's kind of the point.

Every one of these 14 tools (with the possible exception of the OpenAI Audio debugger one, that one's quite hard) is something any web programmer could build relatively quickly.

... but not as quickly as I did with an LLM, because they almost all took less than 5 minutes from idea to finished implementation.

The key point is that if I didn't have Claude to help build these, I wouldn't have built them at all. None of them would justify even an hour of work - they weren't essential tools that I needed to get stuff done, they were just things I built because building them is now so cheap (in terms of time) that there was no reason not to.

That's the real magic here. The cost of knocking out a single page app that does something simple is often now lower than even the cost of spending a few minutes on Google trying to find an existing tool that solves the same problem.

sogen• 2 years ago

Yes, exactly my thoughts. I needed a RSS converter from JSON to XML, and was able to quickly made one.

I'm not a programmer.

It's life-changing.

harisec4• 2 years ago

These are toys but in 2 years they will probably be full projects and 2 years later people will ask "why do i need a software developer?"

simonw31• 2 years ago

I just don't think that's true.

If all someone does is write code based on specifications handed over by someone else then yes, they have cause to be worried - but in my career as a software engineer the "typing code into a computer" bit has only ever been 10-20% of the work that I do.

The big challenge of software development has always been turning human needs into working software. That requires a great depth of experience in terms of what's possible, what isn't possible, how software works and how to architect and design software to deliver value today while still staying flexible for future development.

LLMs can accelerate that process a bit, but I don't think they can replace it. Someone still has to drive the LLMs. I think people with software development skills are best placed to do that.

chadcmulligan• 2 years ago

All these sort of statements assume growth is linear without justification, its more likely exponential. ie it took 2 years to get here, so it will take 2 more to get to this point, but in reality it may be 100 years to get to the next point. No one knows, and if in 2 years it is able to write that sort of code then the singularity is very close indeed.

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

Here's one I built with Claude last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855594

lgessler• 2 years ago

I'll add mine to the pile: I needed a visualization of the classic Towers of Hanoi puzzle for a course I'm teaching and Claude banged it out (in pure JavaScript, no less) in like 3 minutes of me typing: https://lgessler.com/files/towers.html

The first stab was basically correct, but then I needed to prompt him several times to correct an issue where the disk that's currently picked up was being rendered as a vertical strip instead of as a disk, and then I just told him to convert the React into pure JS and IIRC it worked first try.

lemming• 2 years ago

This is interesting, I also tried this with my daughter after we had been talking about Towers of Hanoi, and like you it worked really well. Then we tried to get it to implement a little version of the game where you have a farmer, some corn, a chicken and a wolf and you have to get them across the river in only one boat (actually Wiki says goat and cabbage, but whatever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem). I wasn't trying to get it to solve the puzzle, just give us a UI to play the game. We gave up after an hour or more of going in circles. I wonder if there's a lot of Towers of Hanoi implementations out there it can use as references.

jjcm2• 2 years ago

One of the other things I've been noticing is diffusion models are starting to get quite good at UI design. They're still only well-tailored for landing pages (due to most of the training data being based on portfolio sites like dribbble), but still the output is at a point where I'd at least start with some AI riffs before jumping in myself on design.

Once these are at a point where we can automatically interpret them into usable workflows, it's going to be incredible how quickly you can develop your ideas. I'm really excited for it.

Some examples of outputs:

https://image.non.io/cd90cc33-4a6a-41d8-abd2-045d3a272010.we...

https://image.non.io/5a0c3fc7-37f8-4e72-aba9-cd61f3c18517.we...

https://image.non.io/920adf7c-a554-41bd-a29c-77bebed1cdad.we...

markusw• 2 years ago

Are there any particular models you’re using for this, or are they equally good at this in your opinion?

jjcm2• 2 years ago

Flux is infinitely better than the others from what I've found, but I haven't tried SDXL 3.5 yet as that just launched. The output you're seeing above is a combination of two LoRAs I've trained for this purpose.

Other things that are important are img2img and inpainting flows to give the model more context for generation.

Eliezer• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, no luck getting it to build something that reverses a GIF. (Also, weirdly, no luck with finding a working GIF reverser online.) (Trying to reverse this: https://www.tumblr.com/necessary-disorder/765064008182235136.)

SamDc73• 2 years ago

These things give me a weird fuzzy feeling when looking at !

synthoidzeta• 2 years ago

Try running this from the CLI (you'd need to install gifsicle first):

gifsicle --unoptimize input.gif '#-1-0' > reversed.gif

fragmede3• 2 years ago

ask it to install ffmpeg and have it use that to reverse the gif.

ainiriand4• 2 years ago

Hey some time ago I needed this at work:

https://www.jsoncomments.com/

it is basically a tool to add some additional text to json text files and interpret it as comments for each line. I did it with ChatGPT.

purple-leafy• 2 years ago

Wild that people lap this up. Absolutely wild

galaxyLogic5• 2 years ago

I think there is a commonly accepted rule of thumb that it is easier to write new code than modify existing code. Right?

Why that is there may be several reasons one being that when you try to improve existing code you would need to know all the untold dependencies in it to not break anything. Whereas when you write new code, there are no dependencies you don't know about.

But so, if you take an AI provided implementation, and try to fix it, you are basically doing just that, trying fix old code you don't know much about. You are working on a (AI-provided) legacy code-base in essence.

te_chris• 2 years ago

This is an underrated point. And it’s not just an old code base. I find AI generated changes can lead to messy debugging when they don’t work as I didn’t write it first off.

berkes• 2 years ago

The hard part about writing code, isn't writing the code.

It's writing code that can be read, changed, understood. Today, next month, after ten years of random freelance engineers abusing it. By caffeinated me, tired me, bored me, that way too smart junior and that boneheaded senior.

danielovichdk• 2 years ago

No. That's not how it works. Reading code towards refactoring it is harder than writing new code. Lots of fine literature has been written about this, it's all psychology and cognition.

What you are trying to propose is that computer generated code should somehow make a programmer feel better about one self because they are given the opportunity to improve something that no one knows where is coming from and without a context.

I think you are forgetting that computers can not generate context aware systems or programs. Look at the list by the author - useless in a different context than the one the author lives in. It does not improve anything, it simply adds more things someone else potentially has to worry about. Furthermore it adds to the same cognitive load than any other code - one needs to read it before one can change it, and changing it is really the first step to fully understanding it.

You are not fixing anything old with AI generated code. Ask yourself also, where is the upstream you are trying "to fix".

palata2• 2 years ago

Are you sure you replied to the right comment? You seem to have misunderstood it, I would say.

fulafel• 2 years ago

On the other hand, you can cheaply have a lot of rewrites iterating with updated requirments now.

lynx232• 2 years ago

Thats a bit like calling the code your intern just handed in "legacy". Modifying AI code doesn't have all the same shortcomings as with a legacy codebase, because the AI code was likely not very good in the first place. It feels like doing code review for a newbie. They come up with nice ideas, but if you take a good look at it, you usually find logic errors.

galaxyLogic5• 2 years ago

I can see your point, AI is in many ways like an intern. And I'm not saying that interns can't be helpful.

I wonder though if I have an intern and I tell them what is wrong with their code, they do learn from my feedback. One purpose for having interns write code is for them to learn. But is it the same with AI? Does it really learn from my feedback, or will it then just try something else, until I'm happy with its output?

When (and if) AI learns from my feedback, does it then apply it's learning when other people ask it to do similar tasks?

tomcam• 2 years ago

I love love love that the transcripts are included.

wraptile2• 2 years ago

Most of these are really just 10 lines of python code. The value of generating an entire HTML with GUI is great but then the overhead comes in when you need to modify it or fix something or god forbid add a dependency library and you end up spending more time than actually building the tool from scratch. It's getting close though.

vasco• 2 years ago

How many google results amount to this level of complexity though? How many phone apps?

Anyone taking bets on how many years till the operating system doesn't install any software anymore, and just dynamically generates whatever software you need on the fly? "Give me a calculator app" is doable today "give me an internet browser" isn't but it should be a matter of time.

hshshshshsh• 2 years ago

Give me a calculator app" is doable today "give me an internet browser" isn't but it should be a matter of time.

Based on what? Magical thinking?

wraptile2• 2 years ago

"Give me a calculator app" is doable today "give me an internet browser" isn't but it should be a matter of time.

I just don't see that as being a sound solution. If the user requesting to solve a solved task then using an existing tool will always be a more efficient path.

What I do see as a desired option is where AI could take an existing tool and personalize it to your specific use case. In this example it takes web browser as a GUI lib and wraps it around generic solutions like library that quotes HTML entities which is kinda this just very poorly done so far.

I'd imagine that future programs will be much more component driven with AI connecting components to produce personalized solutions as this is really the only viable option until AI can reason at least in some reasonable capacity to fix its own mistakes.

dev0p• 2 years ago

A useful prompt to quickly generate this kind of website is

"generate an index.html for {idea}".

It's so much faster to just work within a single file. Of course, you have to be limited in scope, but for quick tools such as these it's excellent.

gcanyon• 2 years ago

This is pretty amazing: I asked it to build a single-page app to accept and parse a PDF and give it back in a JSON structure I provided, and it did exactly that!

The parsing was terrible, but it worked at all, which is impressive. It suggested multiple next steps, one of which was to work harder on parsing, so I told it to do that. The resulting app showed a similar UI, but was non-responsive. I noticed it had output a message in small text that said "Claude’s response was limited as it hit the maximum length allowed at this time."

So I told it that it had gone over its own limits and to try again, making an effort to stay within its limits. It tried again, and this time the UI didn't even render beyond a text outline of the UI elements, and I got the same message.

So: pluses and minuses.

Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week

Related Stories