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Dry.io Wants To Democratize Software Development Using AI (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: We've seen companies big and small build everything from AI-driven developer tools to AI-powered developer environments. But what if instead of having AI merely help developers write code, it did all the heavy lifting? Dry.io, a developer playground that helps you write web apps using just a few lines of code, began accepting signups today for its first wave of external testing. The programmable software platform lets you set the parameters of what you want to build, "and the AI takes care of the rest."
I have heard about the death of programming for years. Since the mid 90's people have been telling me that software that can write software better than programmers can is just around the corner. I'm still waiting. Development tools have gotten better and newer languages are certainly easier and faster to develop on, although they don't result in faster code. Right now AI is little more than an industry buzzword. It isn't real yet, not in the way its marketed at least. Don't expect anyone to change this soon.
What's the point of software development anyhow? presumably to solve problems not to develop software.
Douglas Adams proposed the interface of the future would be a desk you work at trying to solve a problem. The computer would observe what you were doing, then write an algorithm to do it for you. At the time he meant this as a joke. But this is infact exactly the sort of problem that so-called Artifical Intelligence is getting good at. It's getting good at recognixing a start on something then completing it. For example deepFakes fills in a face into a removed face. Adobe's eraser removes defects and fills them back in. And combinatorial material ascience is having success in taking in some basic physics and examples of compounds that exhibit desired properties and then suggesting new molecules that might have similar properties.
AI is really crappy at figuring out what to do. It's really good at observing what you think is important then extrapolating that. Thus Douglas Adams desk interface is no long a joke concept.
How hard would it be to have a computer write a sorting algorithm just by watching someone sort numbers? It's plausible.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
People have been touting variations of this concept for decades, and it NEVER pans out.
You know what happens when you let "AI" do the "heavy lifting" of writing code?
You wind up with crap like Dreamweaver's garbage HTML code...
This MAY work for trivial, formulaic crap like CRUD coding, but for the 50% (minimum) of programming that requires coming up with something novel to address a unique situation? It's going to produce nothing but non-performant, fragile, unmaintainable garbage.
They make it sound like that's the easy part.
"Founded in April 2018, Dry.io has not raised any money" - Shouldn't that be kind of a red flag or something?
No, it is not a red flag. Most companies should not need to "raise" (borrow) money to stay in business.
When a company funds growth from their own revenue stream, that is good, not bad.
The dream of businesses since the dawn of programming ... yes, as long as you can fully specify all the branches of logic, the machine can write the code for you!
Of course, it would help if we could devise some sort of symbolic written language to represent the logic, since human languages tend to be imprecise ...
Then the computer could tell you if you got the syntax wrong with the symbolic language or something.
It should only take Marketing a few years to get up to speed with using this. (In the meantime they will stop actually marketing, is that a problem?)
Hurrah, no more pricey programmers!
Boomers lived the high life and are enjoying old age. You'll get none of that AND then old age. Enjoy living your good years in poverty, kid.
Exactly. "Push all the costs onto the next generation" only works once. We won. Millennials lost. We just need to make sure they earn enough to pay for our social security checks.
Kinda funny, kinda not. When My father passed away (part of "The Greatest Generation") he had a startling amount of money willed to me. I wish he had spent more on himself. But he never made more than me - even at my first job.
But when I entered the workforce, I was bombarded by the same thing - those old folks screwed up the world, there's no use in saving for retirement, because you won't be able to retire. The cancer on retirement was inflation then. Same old, same old with inflation and the old folks destroying the world. Whining about no possibility of retirement even back in the early 1970's.
Then he taught me something. "There will always be people claiming you can't save enough for retirement. But you'll be getting old before you know it, and if you haven't saved, your retirement will stink. And you will retire if your employer says so."
So many of my friends, some who made more than me, didn't heed that advice, and still can't retire. Meanwhile, I retired early, on what I was making while working.
If you plan on using SS as anything other than walking around money, you've already lost.
So the best advice I can give millenials is "listening to the people who say you can never retire will guarantee that you won't be able to retire.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.