I work in a typical web app company which does accounting/banking etc.
A couple of days ago I was sitting in a meeting of 10-15 devs, discussing our AI agents. People were raising issues and brainstorming ways around the problems with AI. How to make the AI better.
Our devs were occupied doing AI things, not accounting/banking things.
If the time savings were as promised, we should have been 3 devs (with the remaining devs replaced by 7-10 AI agents) discussing accounting/banking.
If Gas Town succeeds, it will just be the next toy we play with instead of doing our jobs.
Isn't that fun though? We get paid to fuck around. People say AI is putting devs out of jobs, I say we're getting paid to play with them and see if there's any value there. This is no different from the dev tools boom of the ZIRP era: I remember having several sprints worth of work just integrating the latest dev tool whose sales team won our execs over.
Playing with new toys is part of doing my job. In my shop, we call them "ooh shiny"'s. Most devs are in the same boat, but I feel bad for those that aren't.
I really don't get the point. An LLM can easily, flexibly, and masterfully track commented hierarchal yaml todo lists without breaking a sweat, with zero lines of code.
It's like writing a 275k line C++ program just to printf("You are absolutely correct!") when ChatGPT can do that for you with a one line prompt in just one shot.
Anyone using beads should switch to something else that isn't insane. If you like beads, https://github.com/hmans/beans works the same (not my project), just that its serdes is markdown files with front matter, in a dot folder. Like every sane solution. No daemons, no sync branches. I cannot guarantee the project at all, but at least its better than beads. Or make your own; this is one example of one such project.
I've kept almost every bit of scrap PLA I've had from printing. You can melt it into silicon molds, grind it up and feed it into a pellet extruder, pass it on to those who recycle it into filament (like https://erikaprintsshop.wordpress.com/), or for the hard-core DIYers, create your own filament recycling operation. (Though more approachable commercial options are starting to come to market (https://crowdfunding.creality.com/)
That ship sailed a long time ago, as Microsoft has offered Linux VMs in Azure for 14 years, and today, about 2/3 of VMs running there are Linux. In the public cloud era, owning the infrastructure and customer base is far more important than licenses.
It looks good, but I'll be honest, it's hard for me to consider $299/$799 if I can buy a beautiful theme off of somewhere like ThemeForest for $20 or $30 and toss it into an LLM to get the files parsed into components and templates.
That's fair. Probably not a good fit for you then. I wanted to keep the human element alive where I could with this project and I know AI will likely take all our jobs, so be it. It's solving a need for me when it comes to building ideas quickly so I figured maybe others would benefit. I'm a product designer by day and love building front-ends so it's also a passion project.
For sure, and I definitely like the visual eye of designers, which is why I'm referring to designs created by humans (and to be honest, LLMs do an amazing job of creating decent looking designs).
I guess the bigger question is even ignoring the LLM angle is why this project is worth 10-30x than another design also created by a human. I feel like the Ruby gem and integration is worth a premium, but I'm not sure that the premium matches what you're charging. I've purchased third party themes and paid someone on Upwork to "Railsify" them, leaving me with ownership of the code, and I'm pretty sure I paid less than you're charging for the team level. (I hope you don't take this as a personal attack on your business model, and simply an analysis of X vs Y)
Hello fellow Houstonian! As someone who has used Stimulus and Hotwire since the early days of Rails 7, I don't really agree that it's 10-30x, because I wouldn't compare it to some $30 theme. Having Rails-ified components (and themes) saves a lot of time so this would more than pay for itself within a few hours of consulting work on a project in the USA. I've worked on projects that had talented designers, but I also know the feeling of being a solo dev who doesn't want to figure out how to make it look and behave nicely, so for someone like that it's extra awesome!
I hear you. I'd say the value prop is drop-in integration and customization with Rails, time-saving design (useful for 0-1 or early-stage ideas for non-design-savvy folks), and fewer headaches compared to adapting other components or themes in the wild into a Rails app.
No matter what you choose, there's work to be done to adapt to each app's use case, branding, copywriting, etc. Rails UI definitely isn't "complete" and is a constant work in progress, hence the subscription model.
Whether that's valuable to you is definitely up to you. Some folks don't want to be beholden to an AI for design and prefer a ready-made human-engineered system to refer back to and evolve as their app does.
I use this project for my own stuff. That's why I originally built it; however, I'm biased and am deeply on the Rails bandwagon. Ultimately, it saves me a bunch of time, which to me is the most valuable thing there is.
You don’t even need to do that anymore. It’s capable of visiting those sites and just copying the components look and feel. Try it. Ask it to make a template based on a theme you found and show it the link to the demo and BaM! You got something similar.
It's really weird to me how people on this site used to have a much bigger problem with ripping off other people's designs and work, but the minute it became turnkey it was like, "sorry art nerd guess you starve now roll coal".
It wasn't that many years ago when startups or open source software were being built on the back of stealing others' art: Napster, Mega, Bit Torrent, etc. Not everyone, but forums like this were filled with apologists claiming it was the fault of those rights owners for not making their content available cheaper.
I don't anything about Mega, but BitTorrent was not designed for stealing other's art. That's an unfair claim to make.
Yes, Napster was specifically started for sharing files people didn't have the rights to share, but I still don't think it's a fair comparison because nobody sharing files on Napster ever tried to claim it was their music they were sharing. If people were taking Metallica's music and recording their own versions of it that were 99% identical and then claiming they were the original artist, that would be a closer analogy. Napster also didn't receive the massive PR campaigns, huge institutional investment, the government blind-eye-turning, etc. that AI is enjoying today. Napster was also successfully sued for promoting copyright infringement.
For sure. I was just trying to frame the conversation in the context of "done for you", and to implement all of the features in a given theme or UI framework would be a time investment, even if it's not "hard".
It's probably the lazy way, but I found that after I understood just a few primitives (basics of sketching, extruding, constraints, and getting down some of the vocabulary) I can tell ChatGPT what I want to do (and often including screenshots) and it does a pretty spectacular job of filling in the blanks for me.
You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.
Even in boring development jobs. For example, one of my first development jobs was for a large hospital, building an intranet app to make nurse rounds more efficient so they didn't have to hire as many.
Fear over what it means if it works.
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