Freelancers are shuddering in horror (or gasping in delight) at all the work they'll be getting from this in the next few years.
Endless numbers of ridiculous Ideas Guys will be showing up at tech meetups with "I got this thing like 90% of the way there, now I just need this little bit done, it'll take a good coder a few hours, right?".
Delving into the code base will be a Dantean expedition into the first few rings of Web Dev Hell, replete with LLM hallucinations of API endpoints that would be great if they existed.
I understand what you mean but Test First Development by LLM's will solve lots of problems with hallucinations and soon LLM's will be much better at coding than humans. I am always surprised that so many highly intelligent people don't understand this.
Assuming the end goal is to serve humanity. Will a human always be better at using an LLM or will LLM’s eventually be better at using LLM’s to serve humanity?
The no code space in YouTube is on fire right now with people showing off how to build apps with ai.
The tools aren't too bad, I've been building a few things with cursor and ChatGPT to see how far you can. It's basically like you're pair programming with a junior who knows how to do all the basics but needs a lot of help in review.
Your read that this is going to be a huge mess in the freelance space soon is very accurate, the better the tooling gets the worse it will be.
Everything looks great. I have tried to generate an app that generates stupid faces. At first it produced an app that generates what looks like random images - coffee tables, nature, people, pens... I have tried fixing it by chatting. It suggested to add an AI routine to make sure I'll be getting stupid faces. It broke itself and started to produce error messages instead of images. I have asked it to fix itself. It has added error handling, better error messages, and stupid face generation success rate bar to the UI, but I have never been able to generate a stupid face. Great idea though, and hopefully some day it will work.
thanks for trying it out! I guess everything is fine in your code and just needed to direct the prompt a bit in the actual code (there is a tab 'code editor'). it's a bit what we're trying to improve. The AI gets 98% of stuff correctly, but for example here it missed to adjust the prompt to output stupid face generation - which literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code.
yes totally agree with you, it's not our audience even if maybe it's not clear from our website. That's why you've got VS code online integrated in the product => it's for developers
The first "startup idea" on that page[0] is... an "AI-Powered Startup Idea Generator". I don't know if Singularity is near, but we certainly have attained Circularity.
I'm a huge fan of LLM-based tools, and I use them pretty much daily, but stuff like this concerns me a bit. In any dev process there needs to be a review step somewhere. Someone who understands code well needs to be looking at what the app is doing and making sure it's protecting my data. Someone needs to make sure there isn't a bug that loses the work I put in to creating records with a CRUD operation. They need to be making sure my privacy is respected in a legally compliant way. They need to make sure things are reasonably secure. None of that is guaranteed when you have a dev team, but it is a possibility at least.
Telling Joe Random "describe you app in a prompt and press deploy!" guarantees that isn't happening. This sort of service is great for non-dev people who want to launch something but it's a pretty big threat to my data.
I'm under no illusion that these services are going to be huge, and no doubt someone will sell an app built with one to a service that puts data about me into it. I suspect that means one day an attacker is going to learn something I'd rather they didn't. That sucks.
I wonder how much of this is that LLMs are worse than human developers (they are much more error prone right now) and how much of this is that we want someone to blame. When the elevator operator closes a door on someone fingers that's an honest mistake and/or we can fire them, but when the automated elevator bruises some 12 year olds finger that's a big problem that needs fixed
I think that the liability will just travel a layer of indirection. So in your example, I would think that the company that made the elevator would still be liable for any harm that their product causes -- if it can be established that it is their fault that a 12 year old's finger got bruised because of a poor design for the elevator.
Disagree partly - once there is monetary alignment to said risk - lets say something like the insurance policy of a Surgeon, there will be a quick alignment. All this indirection is due to lack of actuarial involvement.
In general case, won't it eventually hit the liability diffusers, i.e. insurance? Kid gets paid from an accident insurance, building owner will cover their costs from civil liability insurance, and the elevator designers or installers will get shielded by professional liability insurance.
yall nerd spniping the example and missing the point that ofered it.
the elevator example, the poster was giving chatbots the same excuse for mistakes as a person.
imagine if elevators could just make mistakes and damage people, because well, a human would too, never minda that its very much trivial to design elevators with sensors in the correct place once and then they are accident free! this is the ridiculous world ai apologists must rely on...
I'm playing a bit of both sides here. I do think it's interesting that we so automatically feel like the cases are different. I used something old because I think we understand it well and I do think in the elevator case our instincts are pretty justified. The fact that we can add sensors and get near 100% reliability is a big part of why in that case it isn't very reasonable, but ML is statistical. It's not the kind of thing that you fix by adding one more sensor or one more if statement. I think some anti ML people use that to mean it's unworkable, but I'd hate to hold off on replacing drivers for example just because the kind of errors that a robo taxi makes feel more like in theory they would have been avoidable with better training while we just go and forgive drivers for letting their mind wander for a second
Everything is statistical. The explicitly defined systems are understandable and understood, but can also be brittle[0]; they do make it easier to put probabilities on failure scenarios, but those probabilities are never 0. ML systems are more like real people. They're unpredictable and prone to failures, fixing any one of which often creating a problem elsewhere - but with enough fixing, you can push the probability of failure down to a number low enough that you no longer care.
Compare: probabilistic methods of primality checking (which is where I first understood this idea). Theoretically, they can give you the wrong result sometimes; in practice, they're constructed in such a way that you can push the probability of error to arbitrarily low levels.
See also: random UUIDs, hashing algorithms - all are prone to collisions, but have knobs you can turn to push the probability of collision to somewhere around "not before heat death of the universe" or thereabouts.
This is the kind of approach we'll need with ML methods: accepting they can be randomly wrong, but developing them in ways that allow us to control the probability of error.
--
[0] - In theory, you can ensure your operating envelope is large enough to cover pretty much anything that could reasonably go wrong; in practice, having a clear-cut operating envelope also creates a pressure to shrink it to save money (it can be a lot of money), which involves eroding what "reasonably" means.
I also feel this way but I am confused why people would want this. Generating from a prompt is still introducing a human step. Why would anyone want something so basic and bland. Then again, I think about the food industry. Fast food sucks but the predictability is really attractive to a lot of people. People like familiar too. It is interesting to watch it unfold.
I take it you never worked at a cheap/local/small software shop, usually associated with an advertising agency.
because I would rather those fill-in-the-blank-forced-prompts that just add form fields and obviously broken business logic to a generic template they curate.
There is a joke about YC startups starting as "illegal taxi", "illegal hotel" … It makes sense, since law firms don't bother with lawsuits until the target has deep pockets. There are a thousand ways a startup can fail, and "got sued" in somewhere in that list of worries to focus on, but maybe not near the top at first.
You'll find plenty of experienced people in the industry that tell you not to worry about the law. Either, the company is too small for it to matter, or it is large enough to afford lawyers and lobbyists.
Given the acceptability of "saying the quiet part out loud" anymore, I'm sure you could find a famous tech guy expressing such sentiments.
Though, I'm sure those same people will throw a fit if they end up on the losing side of AI generated startups. Imagine an AI prompt that replaces and entire Oracle cluster with a self-hosted postgres one for a fraction of the cost.
The autogenerated app in their demo video comes with fake reviews and falsely claims you can make lists private when they're actually all public. Of course there's also zero GDPR/CCPA compliance on the generated app, there is no privacy policy (not that an AI could really read your mind about what you wanna with user data), no privacy contact and no account deletion, just a faceless AI-generated website. Security-wise I would place no confidence, it even failed to add a check to stop two people from having the same username. Legally this should be treated more like a toy for personal entertainment than anything
good question, it's not a no-code tool - we generate code (similar to a cursor or copilot) and we expect people to review the generated codebase. We'll add a section on the documentation like checklist you need to review to make sure there is no security issues.
should probably add ToS also yes
It's probably better to have a "for entertainment purposes only" banner plastered all over the website since it doesn't seem like this startup consulted with lawyers at all over this.
>shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point
* Laughs in UI Dev *
Accessible components are far from an afterthought. LLM generated FE code will never be sufficient without some kind of base component library to pull from for things like selects, inputs, modals, etc. that are hand built and tested.
I like the interface - I will say that it doesnt work when there is an ad-blocker installed (the workspace wont open).
When I am into the app it seems the database wasnt generated for items like the authentication system (which I would expect as it is included and mandatory).
Still more work needed but overall it looks great and I can see the advanced workings you have put in behind the scenes to make it do what it does.
I've been using marblism to build a couple of projects over the last 2 weeks.
It's an incredible product.
Here are my reviews:
- The tech stack selection is exceptional. It comes with batteries included, backend, auth, permissions etc.
- I love the ability to view the database, auth, in one place.
- The LLM itself gets stuck once the APIs and their interactions become slightly complex and deviates from the happy path. (likely because even the starter code is closer 10K lines of code across different files and frameworks)
- I wonder if instead being very opinionated, just a cloud LLM environment with a slightly less "fat" template would be optimal. because after all, people who would be twiddling with generated code are going to be developers who can (most likely) decide what they want.
thanks! true you could use it like that although I find notion and airtable to do a decent jobs if you really just want a todo list or a crm so unsure if we should dive into that segment
This is great. Created a character generator & editor for my TTRPG group in about 5 minutes. Haven't dug too deep yet, but it created a working baseline that I was hoping for. Thanks! Will definitely be an eye on this. Keep up the good work!
Evaluating startup ideas based on search volume reminds me of the apocryphal Henry Ford quote about "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". VC-backed startups don't succeed by finding an underserved niche and generating a nice, steadily growing profit over time. They are by their nature supposed to either explosively succeed or rapidly die.
I evaluated this a while back. While the app is impressive, I couldn't figure our who'd use it. A developer will feel restricted by it, a non-technical person will feel overwhelmed by it since code is at the center of it.
Are you considering adding other languages in the future ? I would like to try but not with NextJS. I have a special hate for JavaScript so I try to avoid it as much as possible except for Frontend.
TypeScript is one of the few languages (Rust being another) that should be a target of LLM-generated code, just because the static analysis is so strict you'd actually catch a lot of bugs before runtime.
(Strict) Typed Python isn't that bad either, and LLMs seem to be quite good at generating that, given how popular Python is.
Unfortunately, it tends to generate outdated types (e.g. `List` instead of `list`, `Optional[T]` instead of `T | None`, import `Iterable` from `typing` instead of `collections.abc`), so you always need to tell it to use the right one.
I'm most interested how the product can do at iterating and making a better product overall. Building a website can be kinda hard, but building the *right* website for the market is very hard
Apps like these need to be fast, produce more valid results and also support fine grained control. Maybe I'm wrong but I haven't met an ai solution that offers all of these yet
I’d love a tool like this to speed up development and I haven’t used the app but you always have to manually edit things afterwards. The difficulty with web apps is getting people to use them.
that's what we are aiming for yep! for now it takes about 10 min to generate an full stack app which I feel it's still decent compared to do it all by yourself
Like with most boilerplates the focus is too much on the landing page, but less on the actual application.
I'd be interested to know if you could integrate my boilerplate https://achromatic.dev somehow into the generation to be able to generate web apps. Would be absolutely fanstastic - endless customizations.
Error: Element type is invalid: expected a string (for built-in components) or a class/function (for composite components) but got: undefined. You likely forgot to export your component from the file it's defined in, or you might have mixed up default and named imports.
The fact that this whole AI fuzzy controlled thing builds on top of Javascript fuzzy controlled thing is really messy.
How do you make modifications to code once it is generated? This is the most interesting part to me - you say there is a chat assistant that can make changes? Does it rewrite the whole file, or how does that work? Do you use git diffs?
This is exactly what the market predicted. AI to replace full stack developers, and it will overwhelmingly succeed.
There are two reasons why this is predictable with high confidence. None of the more accurate predictions rest upon the trendiness of AI, but instead are vested in the current capabilities of the people primed for replacement and prior employment trends.
Reason 1. Most, certainly not all, full stack developers are paid far too much for what they deliver. Over the past year I have been seeing many interview referrals for just under $200k even though I live in a very low cost of living area of the US. I have turned all of these down despite currently making far less. The high compensation is not enough to make up for working in a team that has no hope deliver to expectations (more on that in the second point) and is hostile to radical change.
Reason 2. Prior employment trends suggest that many employers prioritize hiring and candidate compatibility over ability to deliver. Its a valid business decision that makes sense in the short term, but results in catastrophic debt over the long term. You have to understand that developers are a cost center and not sales people. This means they cost money and do not generate profit, so it makes sense to lower the costs of acquiring these people as much as possible.
Starting about a year or two after I started doing full time JavaScript programming in the corporate space employers started looking at solutions to turn developers into commodities because they were spending too much on hiring with disappointing results. I can remember the entire industry trying to do this on both the front end and back end, but the movement received far less penetration on the back end, which was more entrenched. It received overwhelming success on the front end with tool suites like prototype.js and YUI before jQuery formed a dominating cult of personality. Then once Node got popular and the browsers got faster those front end libraries were largely replaced by large MVC frameworks like Angular and React.
Before the strong focus on external tool libraries JavaScript developers had to do it all themselves. At that time the browsers were too slow for things like Photopea, but the first large browser apps were already rolling out. These were some really excellent developers, but it was really hard to find people who could perform at that level, and of course the pay was ridiculously low. Moving to these external libraries really opened up hiring to people who could not perform otherwise, and that really lowered the cost of candidate selection. Unfortunately, these external libraries were generally slow and sometimes broke when they were just expected to work, but now you had an entire work force that could not live without them.
Reliance upon external tools to keep your job creates insecurity. It limits the availability of design options to what a given set of tools allow, and developer's first priority at work is to retain employment. That insecurity grows over time as applications grow larger, solution delivery slows, developers get further and further more reliant upon solutions in conflict with the desires of the business's profit generators. Its why a lot of people I have talked to over the past year moved on to other things and refuse to go back despite the far higher compensation.
I agree with this. Businesses aren't big on spending for overhead and that's exactly how software and R&D gets taxed in 2024. If you spend 200k on software and only break even you get taxed on 200k (meaning you're fucked).
> You have to understand that developers are a cost center and not sales people
What definition of cost center are you using? If a developer makes a widget that generates my company more money, they’re not a cost center.
> Starting about a year or two after I started doing full time JavaScript programming in the corporate space employers started looking at solutions to turn developers into commodities because they were spending too much on hiring with disappointing results
This has been the case in tech since…forever? What can be automated is, with the end result being more tech work for a broader market. If the market is finally at capacity (or AI is capable of doing everything a human dev does, but then most white collar jobs are gone) then dev jobs are gone. Otherwise, it’s just new tools that enable more work to get done.
although there is a lot of truth in your analysis I think developers don't just output code but "think"/solve problems. And problem solving is not a common skills , it's interesting to see what non-technical people VS developers prompt on marblism. Like you would be surprised how many people struggle with the concept of an if condition.
So developers are definitely not dead but will be empowered by the new tools and maybe their work will shift from solving problems+writing code to only solving problems.
Perhaps, but this isn't about non-developers or developers in general. This is targeting "full stack" developers, the overwhelming majority of which cannot write original software. If a tool provides a business the ability to replace a developer that cannot solve problems on their own, without some tech stack and colossal framework, it pays for itself immediately. That's why it is inevitable.
> the overwhelming majority of which cannot write original software
Usually a client or employer does not want write original software. I can code in C++/Rust/$LANGUAGE and am able to write you a high performance backend for some very specific, custom use case, but in 99% of the cases that isn't necessary because the underlying business is either 1) too generic or small to need something like this or 2) doesn't want the hassle of having to maintain something in-house.
Most companies that hire typical web/full stack devs value speed over anything else for the nth crud app they churn out. But I also don't see the value in these companies either.
In my 15 years of doing that work most of the time employers couldn't tell if a solution were original or not unless it was something they specifically requested. Even then most of the original work was in context of original content messaging, user interaction, and the measurements there of.
Where employers in the past really cared is in the speed of delivery. Typically speed of delivery was faster using a framework solution only if the exact solution were already written and available as an extension. In absolutely every other case software originally written in house was always faster to deliver back to the business. This is because with original software the developers are not limited by prior existing conventions. It always comes down to the prior experience and confidence of a given set of developers.
The business knows this before assigning the tasks to the development team, and that awareness (more than anything else) determines the opportunities for developers to identify their own speed of delivery. Most development teams are entirely unaware of just how thoroughly their performance is measured from a business perspective. That should be painfully obvious, because developers only cost money, and those costs go straight to the bottom line.
> This is targeting "full stack" developers, the overwhelming majority of which cannot write original software
Does this mean they just copy paste solutions? Otherwise I’m not sure how they’re writing anything but (albeit it might be very similar to code written at some other point in time, but do that often enough and you turn into an AWS service).
Have you even written an original essay, article, or research thesis? Those thoughts are entirely of your creation or finding from evidence as well as the organization thereof. Original software is no different in that you are writing both the solutions and the architecture.
It sounds like this originality should be slow and of great challenge. It isn’t. With practice the words just appear in the correct order as fast as they are typed.
In the overwhelming majority of full stack jobs that level of originality does not exist. Most of these jobs, and the developers filling them, are utterly reliant upon large tool sets of prior formulated architectures. These large frameworks rob the developers of the practice necessary to become faster in their solution delivery and cripple their ability to consider answers of their own design.
As an example consider state management. That is an astonishingly simple problem to solve, essentially saving a result of modification for later artifact generation. With these large frameworks, however, the solution becomes a complex science to compensate for modularity considerations introduced by the frameworks that do not otherwise exist. For developers that have never written an original application without one of these large frameworks the simplicity of the solution is almost impossible to fathom, thus resulting in solutions of complexity outside their control and no ability for consideration of alternatives.
That you think full-stack developers such as myself are routinely earning "just under $200k" (but please feel free to reach out to me if you need an experienced dev and think that's a fair price to pay) yet "cost money and do not generate profit" seems to speak of a skewed perspective and/or experience, I think. I mean, if that were true, then what would be the point in hiring a web developer in the first place? Some sort of weird nepotistic makework scheme? Again, if that's your perspective…
In my world, clients come to me with a web site and a problem (or no web site and the problem of "I don't have a web site"), we agree on contract terms, and I solve their problem. If I do a good job at it (and I want to do a good job at it, because solving problems and making clients happy feels good while failing at that feels really bad), the client finds value in my work and they will come back to me the next time they have another problem that needs solving. It's that simple. Nobody's hiring me because of "candidate compatibility" and then throwing a bunch of money at me to do nothing.
At least in the short term, I'm not too worried about AI taking my job, because, as stated elsewhere, it's not yet good enough to do more than the least complex of tasks, and as one tries to get it to do more complex things, the odds that it will hit a brick wall due to a bug it can't code its way around or a creative understanding it can't unravel increase - so these sorts of tools might actually end up creating more work for more experienced professionals like myself (although I don't necessarily look forward to the days where I'm regularly being hired to unravel a plate of ChatGPT spaghetti). But even more than that, I feel like a good deal of the value I provide is in being able to talk to a client about what they want the site to do, how it will earn them money, and foresee potential problems or offer better solutions based on my experience - to answer questions that they didn't think to ask, and ask questions of my own to make sure we're on the same page on things. A client just giving me a description of what they want built followed by me just building it? That never happens. There's always discussion and back-and-forth to nail down details and make sure the site is as good as it possibly can be. So long as clients see the value in that, and until AI can do that sort of thing, I'm not sweating it.
The only purpose of software is automation, which is elimination of labor. Eliminating labor reduces expenses. While that is certainly valuable as it contributes toward profit it is not sales. Sales make money.
As a general rule profit is 10% of revenue and revenue is 10% of sales. Sales are the money paid by outside parties. Revenue is money left over after spending associated with sale acquisitions, for example after: marketing, merchandising, and advertising. Profit is money left over after accounting for internal expenses.
As such software never directly contributes toward sales unless software is a product directly sold to an outside party. The developers responsible for that software are virtually never responsible for sales generation even when that software product is directly sold to outside parties. The exception occurs when developers introduce a solution to a business problem into that software product and that solution becomes a direct point of merchandising.
As for the current capabilities of AI the LLM approach does not seem capable of writing original software. Most full stack developers are not writing original software though. The LLMs are already writing superior output with use of large frameworks to the extent that they can generate more efficient products and write the documentation sufficient to teach humans the approach to these large frameworks. Whether you should be worried then becomes a consideration of your employer’s perception of software authorship.
I take incredible exception to what you are saying. What you are saying might be broadly correct for software as a whole, but not at all for web sites; most commercial web sites exist to drive sales, through advertising and promotion of products for sale if not actually selling the products. The largest client I've had for the past six years or so is a web site that makes revenue through advertising and subscription/premium account sales, so improving the site such that it draws in visitors, entices them to stick around and view ads, and encourages them towards ponying up for a premium account for access to more features is the motivation behind everything I do on it. Everything I do on that site is for the purpose of generating revenue. Another site I'm currently building is just a straight-up e-commerce site for specialized products. One I worked on in the past was a credit provider that specialized in loans for medical professionals and encouraged them to take on loans which in turn made the company profit in the form of interest. One major project I worked on early in my career was for a local newspaper that sold advertising and newspaper subscriptions. I could go on.
As for "original software," how are you defining that? Is software only original if it doesn't use any pre-existing frameworks? Okay, is it all right if I use a pre-existing programming language with a pre-existing standard library, or do I need to build my own? Is it all right if I host on a pre-existing VPS provider, or do I need to start my own hosting company? Can I host in pre-existing datacenters or do I need to build my own? Can I use pre-existing server hardware, or… At the end of the day all programmers who are getting anything practical done are using pre-existing tools at some level to solve their problems, often building new tools along the way. If I use the right tools for the job, build what my client wants, and keep end user experience in mind as much as possible (and I always do), then what's the problem?
Are you actually a web developer? Are you not passionate about it?
I was a full time JavaScript developer for 15 years. I still write personal software, but the corporate world killed my spirit for doing this for employment. I blame the exceptionally high insecurity of my prior developer peers, the extraordinary lengths businesses will go to in order to avoid correcting for that, and the diminishing expectations that follow. I will not go back to that. My own bias though is irrelevant to my comments here though as the identified trends and business terms apply the same irrespective of any such bias. Its all about the numbers.
As for advertising that is what's considered transactional revenue, or revenue generated upon the traffic from some other unrelated engagement. Nobody goes looking for advertisements intentionally. They just happen to appear on a site a user visits and eyeballs on that site thus generate revenue in consideration of some contracted term.
Transactional revenue is interesting because it generally has very low associated expenses which all associated revenue is far more closer aligned to profit. It is also insidious in that it tends to get in the way of what users actually want and will over time tank an associated product/brand unless the product/brand is so compelling that it drives substantial repeat traffic. That is the fundamental distinction between media and e-commerce. In media they can throw as many advertisements at you as they want because repeat traffic is deterministic and you are the product. With e-commerce, on the other hand, there exists actual products users must purchase. That purchase process is called conversion and over time advertisements erode the frequency of conversion. As conversion tanks over time users have less reason to access the associated website and so then advertising revenue also tanks.
With regards to sales and revenue developers still have no role in that relationship even in respective to advertisements and transactional revenue. Sales are literally money paid by an outside party directly to your business. Transactional revenue is indirect so it does not qualify as a sale. Even if it did quality the sales people are the ones negotiating the corresponding contracts and revenue terms, which is still not the developer.
I once wrote an advertising pop under for Travelocity from the homepage. The change in presence increased ad click-through impressions upon that placement from 0.3% to approx 14% at approximately 1.1 million page impressions per day. That is a massive revenue boost, but the customers hated it. Part of the massive traffic increase was change of visibility and part of it was content intentionally shifting low quality traffic off site. Stuff like that really killed the business.
It is all about the numbers you like, it seems. Developers sell too, a good % of successful software is created and marketed by a single person. It seems like you can't or couldn't sell while developing. Your achievement was to be a cost center for 15 years and it shaped your vision of the whole profession.
Tools that gives the power to allow anyone to become a developer or create their own apps without the need to spend $$$ consulting with a developer is amazing
I hope we get more startups like yours that lower the barrier to entry for tech for everyone and we get quality software at the same time.
This is the best and most exciting time to create and build startups.
Freelancers are shuddering in horror (or gasping in delight) at all the work they'll be getting from this in the next few years.
Endless numbers of ridiculous Ideas Guys will be showing up at tech meetups with "I got this thing like 90% of the way there, now I just need this little bit done, it'll take a good coder a few hours, right?".
Delving into the code base will be a Dantean expedition into the first few rings of Web Dev Hell, replete with LLM hallucinations of API endpoints that would be great if they existed.
I understand what you mean but Test First Development by LLM's will solve lots of problems with hallucinations and soon LLM's will be much better at coding than humans. I am always surprised that so many highly intelligent people don't understand this.
Assuming the end goal is to serve humanity. Will a human always be better at using an LLM or will LLM’s eventually be better at using LLM’s to serve humanity?
The no code space in YouTube is on fire right now with people showing off how to build apps with ai.
The tools aren't too bad, I've been building a few things with cursor and ChatGPT to see how far you can. It's basically like you're pair programming with a junior who knows how to do all the basics but needs a lot of help in review.
Your read that this is going to be a huge mess in the freelance space soon is very accurate, the better the tooling gets the worse it will be.
I’m generally optimistic about generative AI tools but I 100% agree with this. They’d be better off using Wordpress.
Everything looks great. I have tried to generate an app that generates stupid faces. At first it produced an app that generates what looks like random images - coffee tables, nature, people, pens... I have tried fixing it by chatting. It suggested to add an AI routine to make sure I'll be getting stupid faces. It broke itself and started to produce error messages instead of images. I have asked it to fix itself. It has added error handling, better error messages, and stupid face generation success rate bar to the UI, but I have never been able to generate a stupid face. Great idea though, and hopefully some day it will work.
thanks for trying it out! I guess everything is fine in your code and just needed to direct the prompt a bit in the actual code (there is a tab 'code editor'). it's a bit what we're trying to improve. The AI gets 98% of stuff correctly, but for example here it missed to adjust the prompt to output stupid face generation - which literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code.
> literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code
If you know where to look and how the code is structured, or in your case, have developed an AI to generate apps.
I'm extremely skeptical that a layman could debug and produce a polished app solely through AI prompts, but maybe that's not your audience.
yes totally agree with you, it's not our audience even if maybe it's not clear from our website. That's why you've got VS code online integrated in the product => it's for developers
> Find and validate startup ideas: https://www.muckbrass.com/
The first "startup idea" on that page[0] is... an "AI-Powered Startup Idea Generator". I don't know if Singularity is near, but we certainly have attained Circularity.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/H3oNUeB
I think it’s what somebody else just submitted. My idea was on the top of that page for a while after I submitted it.
I'm a huge fan of LLM-based tools, and I use them pretty much daily, but stuff like this concerns me a bit. In any dev process there needs to be a review step somewhere. Someone who understands code well needs to be looking at what the app is doing and making sure it's protecting my data. Someone needs to make sure there isn't a bug that loses the work I put in to creating records with a CRUD operation. They need to be making sure my privacy is respected in a legally compliant way. They need to make sure things are reasonably secure. None of that is guaranteed when you have a dev team, but it is a possibility at least.
Telling Joe Random "describe you app in a prompt and press deploy!" guarantees that isn't happening. This sort of service is great for non-dev people who want to launch something but it's a pretty big threat to my data.
I'm under no illusion that these services are going to be huge, and no doubt someone will sell an app built with one to a service that puts data about me into it. I suspect that means one day an attacker is going to learn something I'd rather they didn't. That sucks.
I wonder how much of this is that LLMs are worse than human developers (they are much more error prone right now) and how much of this is that we want someone to blame. When the elevator operator closes a door on someone fingers that's an honest mistake and/or we can fire them, but when the automated elevator bruises some 12 year olds finger that's a big problem that needs fixed
That's an interesting idea!
I think that the liability will just travel a layer of indirection. So in your example, I would think that the company that made the elevator would still be liable for any harm that their product causes -- if it can be established that it is their fault that a 12 year old's finger got bruised because of a poor design for the elevator.
Disagree partly - once there is monetary alignment to said risk - lets say something like the insurance policy of a Surgeon, there will be a quick alignment. All this indirection is due to lack of actuarial involvement.
In general case, won't it eventually hit the liability diffusers, i.e. insurance? Kid gets paid from an accident insurance, building owner will cover their costs from civil liability insurance, and the elevator designers or installers will get shielded by professional liability insurance.
yall nerd spniping the example and missing the point that ofered it.
the elevator example, the poster was giving chatbots the same excuse for mistakes as a person.
imagine if elevators could just make mistakes and damage people, because well, a human would too, never minda that its very much trivial to design elevators with sensors in the correct place once and then they are accident free! this is the ridiculous world ai apologists must rely on...
I'm playing a bit of both sides here. I do think it's interesting that we so automatically feel like the cases are different. I used something old because I think we understand it well and I do think in the elevator case our instincts are pretty justified. The fact that we can add sensors and get near 100% reliability is a big part of why in that case it isn't very reasonable, but ML is statistical. It's not the kind of thing that you fix by adding one more sensor or one more if statement. I think some anti ML people use that to mean it's unworkable, but I'd hate to hold off on replacing drivers for example just because the kind of errors that a robo taxi makes feel more like in theory they would have been avoidable with better training while we just go and forgive drivers for letting their mind wander for a second
Everything is statistical. The explicitly defined systems are understandable and understood, but can also be brittle[0]; they do make it easier to put probabilities on failure scenarios, but those probabilities are never 0. ML systems are more like real people. They're unpredictable and prone to failures, fixing any one of which often creating a problem elsewhere - but with enough fixing, you can push the probability of failure down to a number low enough that you no longer care.
Compare: probabilistic methods of primality checking (which is where I first understood this idea). Theoretically, they can give you the wrong result sometimes; in practice, they're constructed in such a way that you can push the probability of error to arbitrarily low levels.
See also: random UUIDs, hashing algorithms - all are prone to collisions, but have knobs you can turn to push the probability of collision to somewhere around "not before heat death of the universe" or thereabouts.
This is the kind of approach we'll need with ML methods: accepting they can be randomly wrong, but developing them in ways that allow us to control the probability of error.
--
[0] - In theory, you can ensure your operating envelope is large enough to cover pretty much anything that could reasonably go wrong; in practice, having a clear-cut operating envelope also creates a pressure to shrink it to save money (it can be a lot of money), which involves eroding what "reasonably" means.
I also feel this way but I am confused why people would want this. Generating from a prompt is still introducing a human step. Why would anyone want something so basic and bland. Then again, I think about the food industry. Fast food sucks but the predictability is really attractive to a lot of people. People like familiar too. It is interesting to watch it unfold.
I take it you never worked at a cheap/local/small software shop, usually associated with an advertising agency.
because I would rather those fill-in-the-blank-forced-prompts that just add form fields and obviously broken business logic to a generic template they curate.
And the market for these tools suddenly appears before me.
The software world is way bigger than most of us realize.
What kind of liability do you take on with the code? Can I sue you if my app gets hacked?
I can't find anything around ToS or even a privacy policy.
There is a joke about YC startups starting as "illegal taxi", "illegal hotel" … It makes sense, since law firms don't bother with lawsuits until the target has deep pockets. There are a thousand ways a startup can fail, and "got sued" in somewhere in that list of worries to focus on, but maybe not near the top at first.
You'll find plenty of experienced people in the industry that tell you not to worry about the law. Either, the company is too small for it to matter, or it is large enough to afford lawyers and lobbyists.
Given the acceptability of "saying the quiet part out loud" anymore, I'm sure you could find a famous tech guy expressing such sentiments.
Though, I'm sure those same people will throw a fit if they end up on the losing side of AI generated startups. Imagine an AI prompt that replaces and entire Oracle cluster with a self-hosted postgres one for a fraction of the cost.
The autogenerated app in their demo video comes with fake reviews and falsely claims you can make lists private when they're actually all public. Of course there's also zero GDPR/CCPA compliance on the generated app, there is no privacy policy (not that an AI could really read your mind about what you wanna with user data), no privacy contact and no account deletion, just a faceless AI-generated website. Security-wise I would place no confidence, it even failed to add a check to stop two people from having the same username. Legally this should be treated more like a toy for personal entertainment than anything
good question, it's not a no-code tool - we generate code (similar to a cursor or copilot) and we expect people to review the generated codebase. We'll add a section on the documentation like checklist you need to review to make sure there is no security issues. should probably add ToS also yes
You can't have a "security checklist" with multiple Turing-complete languages involved.
It's better to give up on security and tell the users that they're generating code at their own risk.
It's probably better to have a "for entertainment purposes only" banner plastered all over the website since it doesn't seem like this startup consulted with lawyers at all over this.
I hope we can soon teach our robot overlords about web accessibility, because this is pretty rough: https://i.nick.sg/03510726333f4a2b85daf5dd156d6289.png
indeed! our initial focus was to make it work, shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point
>shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point
* Laughs in UI Dev *
Accessible components are far from an afterthought. LLM generated FE code will never be sufficient without some kind of base component library to pull from for things like selects, inputs, modals, etc. that are hand built and tested.
Sounds like a great startup idea I am sure someone will tackle, thanks!
MUI already does this very well
I like the interface - I will say that it doesnt work when there is an ad-blocker installed (the workspace wont open).
When I am into the app it seems the database wasnt generated for items like the authentication system (which I would expect as it is included and mandatory).
Still more work needed but overall it looks great and I can see the advanced workings you have put in behind the scenes to make it do what it does.
I've been using marblism to build a couple of projects over the last 2 weeks. It's an incredible product.
Here are my reviews:
- The tech stack selection is exceptional. It comes with batteries included, backend, auth, permissions etc.
- I love the ability to view the database, auth, in one place.
- The LLM itself gets stuck once the APIs and their interactions become slightly complex and deviates from the happy path. (likely because even the starter code is closer 10K lines of code across different files and frameworks)
- I wonder if instead being very opinionated, just a cloud LLM environment with a slightly less "fat" template would be optimal. because after all, people who would be twiddling with generated code are going to be developers who can (most likely) decide what they want.
This is really cool, guys!
One use case that occurs to me is to build personal SaaS apps. It's the sort of thing a lot of people use spreadsheets or Notion for.
I just made a simple little app with Marblism to help me keep track of whether I took my medication on a given day.
I couldn't tell you why, but I prefer this to little mobile apps and it's less upkeep than the spreadsheets I've tried to make in the past.
thanks! true you could use it like that although I find notion and airtable to do a decent jobs if you really just want a todo list or a crm so unsure if we should dive into that segment
Can I use my own existing postgresql database to connect it and generate the UI on top of it?
Also, typo on homepage - 'Authentification' (per our error report: https://triplechecker.com/s/t2ryxA/marblism.com?v=M0bXQ)
not at the moment, but it's a good idea yes it's technically possible Fixed! good catch :)
This is great. Created a character generator & editor for my TTRPG group in about 5 minutes. Haven't dug too deep yet, but it created a working baseline that I was hoping for. Thanks! Will definitely be an eye on this. Keep up the good work!
Evaluating startup ideas based on search volume reminds me of the apocryphal Henry Ford quote about "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". VC-backed startups don't succeed by finding an underserved niche and generating a nice, steadily growing profit over time. They are by their nature supposed to either explosively succeed or rapidly die.
Congrats on the launch!
I evaluated this a while back. While the app is impressive, I couldn't figure our who'd use it. A developer will feel restricted by it, a non-technical person will feel overwhelmed by it since code is at the center of it.
Why do i have to choose between light and dark mode? If you can do both, why not support dynamic mode?
we could indeed!
Did you make Marblism with Marblism?
I've been there and the chicken/egg thing doesn't come for free.
This should be the minimum requirement to launch a system like that
haha no, the infrastructure we use is a bit intense to be entirely managed by an AI but one day maybe :)
"We create a NextJS app "
Are you considering adding other languages in the future ? I would like to try but not with NextJS. I have a special hate for JavaScript so I try to avoid it as much as possible except for Frontend.
TypeScript is one of the few languages (Rust being another) that should be a target of LLM-generated code, just because the static analysis is so strict you'd actually catch a lot of bugs before runtime.
(Strict) Typed Python isn't that bad either, and LLMs seem to be quite good at generating that, given how popular Python is.
Unfortunately, it tends to generate outdated types (e.g. `List` instead of `list`, `Optional[T]` instead of `T | None`, import `Iterable` from `typing` instead of `collections.abc`), so you always need to tell it to use the right one.
Should be possible to fix automatically though? Something like https://github.com/PyCQA/modernize, but for type hints.
Edit: there is pyupgrade which can do this: https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade#pep-585-typing-rewrite...
I still use Optional[T] so definitely not just the LLM :)
I'm most interested how the product can do at iterating and making a better product overall. Building a website can be kinda hard, but building the *right* website for the market is very hard
Many competitors in this space, one that comes to mind is https://www.rapidpages.com/
Apps like these need to be fast, produce more valid results and also support fine grained control. Maybe I'm wrong but I haven't met an ai solution that offers all of these yet
I’d love a tool like this to speed up development and I haven’t used the app but you always have to manually edit things afterwards. The difficulty with web apps is getting people to use them.
Cool tool, hope it takes off.
that's what we are aiming for yep! for now it takes about 10 min to generate an full stack app which I feel it's still decent compared to do it all by yourself
How did Marblism know what external APIs were available when it generated those search volume charts? (or is it mock data?)
I asked it to integrate with https://dataforseo.com/ api which is 10x cheaper than the ahrefs or semrush apis (it's real data)
You can also try Bishopi.io APIs which is cheaper than dataforseo :)
That's cool, could make a good domain-investing app
Congratz on the launch!
Like with most boilerplates the focus is too much on the landing page, but less on the actual application.
I'd be interested to know if you could integrate my boilerplate https://achromatic.dev somehow into the generation to be able to generate web apps. Would be absolutely fanstastic - endless customizations.
thanks! did you log in on your generated app? that's a good idea, to integrate various boilerplates
Yeah I tried out Endura with the beneficiary CRUD demo.
What are those generated components based on? Is there a component registry?
we use ant design at the moment, looking to integrate more UI libraries
So your company controls the app.io domain?
Seems like.
Anything similar is there for Django?
not yet! we're gonna add more tech stacks in the future
I tried one and it threw this error:
Error: Element type is invalid: expected a string (for built-in components) or a class/function (for composite components) but got: undefined. You likely forgot to export your component from the file it's defined in, or you might have mixed up default and named imports.
The fact that this whole AI fuzzy controlled thing builds on top of Javascript fuzzy controlled thing is really messy.
How do you make modifications to code once it is generated? This is the most interesting part to me - you say there is a chat assistant that can make changes? Does it rewrite the whole file, or how does that work? Do you use git diffs?
This is exactly what the market predicted. AI to replace full stack developers, and it will overwhelmingly succeed.
There are two reasons why this is predictable with high confidence. None of the more accurate predictions rest upon the trendiness of AI, but instead are vested in the current capabilities of the people primed for replacement and prior employment trends.
Reason 1. Most, certainly not all, full stack developers are paid far too much for what they deliver. Over the past year I have been seeing many interview referrals for just under $200k even though I live in a very low cost of living area of the US. I have turned all of these down despite currently making far less. The high compensation is not enough to make up for working in a team that has no hope deliver to expectations (more on that in the second point) and is hostile to radical change.
Reason 2. Prior employment trends suggest that many employers prioritize hiring and candidate compatibility over ability to deliver. Its a valid business decision that makes sense in the short term, but results in catastrophic debt over the long term. You have to understand that developers are a cost center and not sales people. This means they cost money and do not generate profit, so it makes sense to lower the costs of acquiring these people as much as possible.
Starting about a year or two after I started doing full time JavaScript programming in the corporate space employers started looking at solutions to turn developers into commodities because they were spending too much on hiring with disappointing results. I can remember the entire industry trying to do this on both the front end and back end, but the movement received far less penetration on the back end, which was more entrenched. It received overwhelming success on the front end with tool suites like prototype.js and YUI before jQuery formed a dominating cult of personality. Then once Node got popular and the browsers got faster those front end libraries were largely replaced by large MVC frameworks like Angular and React.
Before the strong focus on external tool libraries JavaScript developers had to do it all themselves. At that time the browsers were too slow for things like Photopea, but the first large browser apps were already rolling out. These were some really excellent developers, but it was really hard to find people who could perform at that level, and of course the pay was ridiculously low. Moving to these external libraries really opened up hiring to people who could not perform otherwise, and that really lowered the cost of candidate selection. Unfortunately, these external libraries were generally slow and sometimes broke when they were just expected to work, but now you had an entire work force that could not live without them.
Reliance upon external tools to keep your job creates insecurity. It limits the availability of design options to what a given set of tools allow, and developer's first priority at work is to retain employment. That insecurity grows over time as applications grow larger, solution delivery slows, developers get further and further more reliant upon solutions in conflict with the desires of the business's profit generators. Its why a lot of people I have talked to over the past year moved on to other things and refuse to go back despite the far higher compensation.
I agree with this. Businesses aren't big on spending for overhead and that's exactly how software and R&D gets taxed in 2024. If you spend 200k on software and only break even you get taxed on 200k (meaning you're fucked).
https://leyton.com/us/insights/articles/senate-blocks-tax-re...
This tool may be the solution for businesses struggling with 174...Replace developers with calculus and machine learning.
> You have to understand that developers are a cost center and not sales people
What definition of cost center are you using? If a developer makes a widget that generates my company more money, they’re not a cost center.
> Starting about a year or two after I started doing full time JavaScript programming in the corporate space employers started looking at solutions to turn developers into commodities because they were spending too much on hiring with disappointing results
This has been the case in tech since…forever? What can be automated is, with the end result being more tech work for a broader market. If the market is finally at capacity (or AI is capable of doing everything a human dev does, but then most white collar jobs are gone) then dev jobs are gone. Otherwise, it’s just new tools that enable more work to get done.
although there is a lot of truth in your analysis I think developers don't just output code but "think"/solve problems. And problem solving is not a common skills , it's interesting to see what non-technical people VS developers prompt on marblism. Like you would be surprised how many people struggle with the concept of an if condition.
So developers are definitely not dead but will be empowered by the new tools and maybe their work will shift from solving problems+writing code to only solving problems.
Perhaps, but this isn't about non-developers or developers in general. This is targeting "full stack" developers, the overwhelming majority of which cannot write original software. If a tool provides a business the ability to replace a developer that cannot solve problems on their own, without some tech stack and colossal framework, it pays for itself immediately. That's why it is inevitable.
> the overwhelming majority of which cannot write original software
Usually a client or employer does not want write original software. I can code in C++/Rust/$LANGUAGE and am able to write you a high performance backend for some very specific, custom use case, but in 99% of the cases that isn't necessary because the underlying business is either 1) too generic or small to need something like this or 2) doesn't want the hassle of having to maintain something in-house.
Most companies that hire typical web/full stack devs value speed over anything else for the nth crud app they churn out. But I also don't see the value in these companies either.
In my 15 years of doing that work most of the time employers couldn't tell if a solution were original or not unless it was something they specifically requested. Even then most of the original work was in context of original content messaging, user interaction, and the measurements there of.
Where employers in the past really cared is in the speed of delivery. Typically speed of delivery was faster using a framework solution only if the exact solution were already written and available as an extension. In absolutely every other case software originally written in house was always faster to deliver back to the business. This is because with original software the developers are not limited by prior existing conventions. It always comes down to the prior experience and confidence of a given set of developers.
The business knows this before assigning the tasks to the development team, and that awareness (more than anything else) determines the opportunities for developers to identify their own speed of delivery. Most development teams are entirely unaware of just how thoroughly their performance is measured from a business perspective. That should be painfully obvious, because developers only cost money, and those costs go straight to the bottom line.
> This is targeting "full stack" developers, the overwhelming majority of which cannot write original software
Does this mean they just copy paste solutions? Otherwise I’m not sure how they’re writing anything but (albeit it might be very similar to code written at some other point in time, but do that often enough and you turn into an AWS service).
Have you even written an original essay, article, or research thesis? Those thoughts are entirely of your creation or finding from evidence as well as the organization thereof. Original software is no different in that you are writing both the solutions and the architecture.
It sounds like this originality should be slow and of great challenge. It isn’t. With practice the words just appear in the correct order as fast as they are typed.
In the overwhelming majority of full stack jobs that level of originality does not exist. Most of these jobs, and the developers filling them, are utterly reliant upon large tool sets of prior formulated architectures. These large frameworks rob the developers of the practice necessary to become faster in their solution delivery and cripple their ability to consider answers of their own design.
As an example consider state management. That is an astonishingly simple problem to solve, essentially saving a result of modification for later artifact generation. With these large frameworks, however, the solution becomes a complex science to compensate for modularity considerations introduced by the frameworks that do not otherwise exist. For developers that have never written an original application without one of these large frameworks the simplicity of the solution is almost impossible to fathom, thus resulting in solutions of complexity outside their control and no ability for consideration of alternatives.
That you think full-stack developers such as myself are routinely earning "just under $200k" (but please feel free to reach out to me if you need an experienced dev and think that's a fair price to pay) yet "cost money and do not generate profit" seems to speak of a skewed perspective and/or experience, I think. I mean, if that were true, then what would be the point in hiring a web developer in the first place? Some sort of weird nepotistic makework scheme? Again, if that's your perspective…
In my world, clients come to me with a web site and a problem (or no web site and the problem of "I don't have a web site"), we agree on contract terms, and I solve their problem. If I do a good job at it (and I want to do a good job at it, because solving problems and making clients happy feels good while failing at that feels really bad), the client finds value in my work and they will come back to me the next time they have another problem that needs solving. It's that simple. Nobody's hiring me because of "candidate compatibility" and then throwing a bunch of money at me to do nothing.
At least in the short term, I'm not too worried about AI taking my job, because, as stated elsewhere, it's not yet good enough to do more than the least complex of tasks, and as one tries to get it to do more complex things, the odds that it will hit a brick wall due to a bug it can't code its way around or a creative understanding it can't unravel increase - so these sorts of tools might actually end up creating more work for more experienced professionals like myself (although I don't necessarily look forward to the days where I'm regularly being hired to unravel a plate of ChatGPT spaghetti). But even more than that, I feel like a good deal of the value I provide is in being able to talk to a client about what they want the site to do, how it will earn them money, and foresee potential problems or offer better solutions based on my experience - to answer questions that they didn't think to ask, and ask questions of my own to make sure we're on the same page on things. A client just giving me a description of what they want built followed by me just building it? That never happens. There's always discussion and back-and-forth to nail down details and make sure the site is as good as it possibly can be. So long as clients see the value in that, and until AI can do that sort of thing, I'm not sweating it.
The only purpose of software is automation, which is elimination of labor. Eliminating labor reduces expenses. While that is certainly valuable as it contributes toward profit it is not sales. Sales make money.
As a general rule profit is 10% of revenue and revenue is 10% of sales. Sales are the money paid by outside parties. Revenue is money left over after spending associated with sale acquisitions, for example after: marketing, merchandising, and advertising. Profit is money left over after accounting for internal expenses.
As such software never directly contributes toward sales unless software is a product directly sold to an outside party. The developers responsible for that software are virtually never responsible for sales generation even when that software product is directly sold to outside parties. The exception occurs when developers introduce a solution to a business problem into that software product and that solution becomes a direct point of merchandising.
As for the current capabilities of AI the LLM approach does not seem capable of writing original software. Most full stack developers are not writing original software though. The LLMs are already writing superior output with use of large frameworks to the extent that they can generate more efficient products and write the documentation sufficient to teach humans the approach to these large frameworks. Whether you should be worried then becomes a consideration of your employer’s perception of software authorship.
I take incredible exception to what you are saying. What you are saying might be broadly correct for software as a whole, but not at all for web sites; most commercial web sites exist to drive sales, through advertising and promotion of products for sale if not actually selling the products. The largest client I've had for the past six years or so is a web site that makes revenue through advertising and subscription/premium account sales, so improving the site such that it draws in visitors, entices them to stick around and view ads, and encourages them towards ponying up for a premium account for access to more features is the motivation behind everything I do on it. Everything I do on that site is for the purpose of generating revenue. Another site I'm currently building is just a straight-up e-commerce site for specialized products. One I worked on in the past was a credit provider that specialized in loans for medical professionals and encouraged them to take on loans which in turn made the company profit in the form of interest. One major project I worked on early in my career was for a local newspaper that sold advertising and newspaper subscriptions. I could go on.
As for "original software," how are you defining that? Is software only original if it doesn't use any pre-existing frameworks? Okay, is it all right if I use a pre-existing programming language with a pre-existing standard library, or do I need to build my own? Is it all right if I host on a pre-existing VPS provider, or do I need to start my own hosting company? Can I host in pre-existing datacenters or do I need to build my own? Can I use pre-existing server hardware, or… At the end of the day all programmers who are getting anything practical done are using pre-existing tools at some level to solve their problems, often building new tools along the way. If I use the right tools for the job, build what my client wants, and keep end user experience in mind as much as possible (and I always do), then what's the problem?
Are you actually a web developer? Are you not passionate about it?
I was a full time JavaScript developer for 15 years. I still write personal software, but the corporate world killed my spirit for doing this for employment. I blame the exceptionally high insecurity of my prior developer peers, the extraordinary lengths businesses will go to in order to avoid correcting for that, and the diminishing expectations that follow. I will not go back to that. My own bias though is irrelevant to my comments here though as the identified trends and business terms apply the same irrespective of any such bias. Its all about the numbers.
As for advertising that is what's considered transactional revenue, or revenue generated upon the traffic from some other unrelated engagement. Nobody goes looking for advertisements intentionally. They just happen to appear on a site a user visits and eyeballs on that site thus generate revenue in consideration of some contracted term.
Transactional revenue is interesting because it generally has very low associated expenses which all associated revenue is far more closer aligned to profit. It is also insidious in that it tends to get in the way of what users actually want and will over time tank an associated product/brand unless the product/brand is so compelling that it drives substantial repeat traffic. That is the fundamental distinction between media and e-commerce. In media they can throw as many advertisements at you as they want because repeat traffic is deterministic and you are the product. With e-commerce, on the other hand, there exists actual products users must purchase. That purchase process is called conversion and over time advertisements erode the frequency of conversion. As conversion tanks over time users have less reason to access the associated website and so then advertising revenue also tanks.
With regards to sales and revenue developers still have no role in that relationship even in respective to advertisements and transactional revenue. Sales are literally money paid by an outside party directly to your business. Transactional revenue is indirect so it does not qualify as a sale. Even if it did quality the sales people are the ones negotiating the corresponding contracts and revenue terms, which is still not the developer.
I once wrote an advertising pop under for Travelocity from the homepage. The change in presence increased ad click-through impressions upon that placement from 0.3% to approx 14% at approximately 1.1 million page impressions per day. That is a massive revenue boost, but the customers hated it. Part of the massive traffic increase was change of visibility and part of it was content intentionally shifting low quality traffic off site. Stuff like that really killed the business.
> Its all about the numbers.
It is all about the numbers you like, it seems. Developers sell too, a good % of successful software is created and marketed by a single person. It seems like you can't or couldn't sell while developing. Your achievement was to be a cost center for 15 years and it shaped your vision of the whole profession.
I am so glad you made this Cyril and Ulric!
Tools that gives the power to allow anyone to become a developer or create their own apps without the need to spend $$$ consulting with a developer is amazing
I hope we get more startups like yours that lower the barrier to entry for tech for everyone and we get quality software at the same time.
This is the best and most exciting time to create and build startups.
This seems awesome! Anyone else find this to be kind of scary?
The start to Web3.0 AIs making Web 2.0 applications to take over the world.