'Just Have AI Build an App For That' (davidgomes.com) 54
Software engineer David Gomes writes in a blog post: I sometimes need to search for a website that will "convert a PNG to SVG", or "remove page from PDF" or "resize svg". And these apps are... okay. I don't really trust most of them with my data, and also a lot of times they just don't work or have too many ads. So, I've been noticing a trend of people just using AI agents to create full blown apps for these simple use cases.
I decided to try it myself for a "resize SVG" app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I've used it before, it doesn't cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now. It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it'll just go to town and try to build the app. But what's super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).
I decided to try it myself for a "resize SVG" app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I've used it before, it doesn't cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now. It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it'll just go to town and try to build the app. But what's super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).
The original idea behind browser extentions (Score:2)
and also packaging Imagamagick as a web service (Score:5, Informative)
There's dozens (hundreds?) of web services which just repackage Imagemagick and other command line tools and wrap them in a paid WebAPI service.
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There's dozens (hundreds?) of web services which just repackage Imagemagick and other command line tools and wrap them in a paid WebAPI service.
Anyone who works with images that much should have GIMP on their desktop. Unless they (or their employer) are gullible enough to shell out what Adobe wants for Photoshop these days. I can't keep up, but apparently it is getting worse by the month.
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Does gimp have adjustment layers yet?
They're a pretty crucial feature from 1996 that makes gimp a complete non starter for all but the most basic of work.
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XUL was an absolute turd
SVG? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, the whole point of SVG is that it doesn't need resizing.
The file will be exactly the same size after you "rescale" it.
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Indeed. The person from the story seems to not be very smart or competent and not only because he does not seem to know what SVG stands for.
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The person from the story could be... AI!
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Well, in _that_ case, I am impressed at the high level of skill and the genius approach!
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Sometimes the less you know, the more easily impressed you are. The "software engineer" here apparently doesn't know what the S in SVG means.
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Indeed. Utterly pathetic.
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That doesn't mean they don't have a size.
I actually don't know if they do, but EPS files definitely have sizes even though they're similarly scalable.
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Re: SVG? (Score:2)
The submission itself feels like an ad for a paid blog post. Shit, the blog post itself feels like it was written by either an AI or a sales derp. It's funny it talks about going from PNG to SVG (not trivial) and then writing an "app" for scaling an SVG (trivial to the point of "why fucking bother?")
This is exactly the kind of shit "no code" rpa salesmen are known for.
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(Pedant: Unless the "dimensions" in the XML header need less ASCII characters...)
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Not exactly the same. ChatGPT seems to know this. I asked it how to resize an SVG and it suggested I man up, open the file in my text editor, and change the "width" and "height" properties in the svg tag.
Re: SVG? (Score:2)
the data is dimensionless yes, but svg has height and width (or just ratio) attributes in plain text.
resizing an svg is thus very easy. but the point is that the ai "knows" how to use whatever image library to do this, and that might be easier than, say, bothering to look and realize that SVG does indeed have image size attributes. *ahem*
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resizing an svg is thus very easy.
You know, with the accelerated pace towards idiocracy, "very easy" may be to hard for the average IT person...
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As is using the correct 'too' in a sentence.
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I was going to download it to see how big it was. While scrolling through his blog post to see if there was a download link I saw
"Installed flask, flask-sqlalchemy, psychopg2,..."
Uh oh. Scroll to bottom:
So to resize an SVG he needs a whole web host with Python support, a postgres database, and whatever else comes after those
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That's modern software in a nutshell. Kids these days can't write 'hello world' without a framework, an IDE, and a set of libraries to do the 'heavy lifting'.
We're doomed.
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I actually went thru and tested using this guy's app, and yes, it does actually scale viewbox and path coordinates. The output file is not exactly the same. It's totally unnecessary of course to do this, since scaling the width and height is sufficient...
Maybe. I'm not certain if that approach actually works in every use case, e.g. CNC milling.
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We can happily ignore this because it's just another ad.
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My guess is that his AI-generated SVG converter just embedded the PNG source as a bitmap in the SVG instead of vector tracing.
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And you trust that _more_? (Score:2, Insightful)
The mind boggles. Stupid, more stupid, people that rely on LLMs for real work.
I expect we will soon see LLMs code the malware and backdoors right in. Or we already have that and people did not notice.
Re:And you trust that _more_? (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, the article is a shameless ad for that solution.
Replit Agent is only available to customers with a subscription. Not to mention it's "early access", which means you may or may not gain access to it, even if you subscribe.
Their "free" plan has Basic workspace, Basic AI features (whatever that means) and 3 public projects (which, I guess, is very much like Tableau Free: everything you do there is immediately available to everyone, no control over privacy).
Stinks of cash-grab.
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And the picture becomes clear. Thanks for pointing that out. I find I am less and less willing to do actual research on AI crap stories. The wording should have tipped me off though. Far too positive.
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I am interested in such, ahem, "solutions", but that's because I have way too many hobbies.
With way too many hobbies comes usage of way too many different software stacks.
This application is proprietary and missing some small functionalities, which I have to fix through... Powershell scripting (since ot's Windows-only).
That application uses YAML.
The other one has some TOML config files.
Yet another thingie only accepts JSON.
That one right there is made with Go.
Look, there's some Python too.
This one communica
what's new here? (Score:1)
A tool to "create full blown apps for these simple use cases"?
Simple use cases that have been done many times before need new, "full blown" apps? Is this progress?
How well does this tool work in creating apps for tasks that have never been done before? How well does this tool do in identifying a need for an app to do a task? This is what a programmer actually does. A "software engineer" does more than turn a crank.
Devaluation of the "engineer" label (Score:3)
Time was, an "engineer" was someone who used engines, but didn't create engines. They shoveled coal into a boiler and watched pressure dials.
This Grimes person seems like an example of the modern-day version of this kind of lower-level labor monkey. "I push the buttons!"
Heck, his patent ignorance about what he's working with (SVGs are inherently resizable, ya dipshit) is vicariously embarrassing. This is no tech expert. Resizing doesn't need a full-blown app — just resize your image dimensions, o
Resizing an SVG... (Score:4, Funny)
Resizing an SVG isn't a thing in the first place. It's a vector graphic - The name MEANS Scaleable Vector Graphic.
The input and output of this program should be identical.
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,p>The input and output of this program should be identical.
Hey, I could write that!
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If you're going to be pedantic, do it right (leaving myself wide open here...)
Resizing an SVG is very much a thing, you simply don't get rasterisation artifacts when you do the resize.
If you're doing it naively, you can simply wrap the graphics in a transform element and adjust the viewsize accordingly. If you're being less naive, you might instead directly change the attributes of various elements as much as possible without using a transform element, e.g. altering font sizes, changing line widths and so o
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Modded down by AI most likely!
Not much of a Software "Engineer" (Score:1)
This story (Score:1)
Regarding the impossible resizing of an SVG file tells you everything you need to know about the author and people who attempt to use AI for such tasks in general.
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Indeed. Well said. One wonders how they manage to tie their shoelaces with an IQ close to absolute zero. Velcro-sneakers, likely.
So many fails (Score:3)
1. Looking for websites to accomplish rudimentary tasks that should be done locally. If you're a software engineer, you should be able to whip up a script for yourself... ImageMagick, Inkscape, pdftoppm, and other similar things exist.
2. Rightfully not trusting the websites, but using them anyway.
3. Throwing more "AI" at the wall for a quick solution, and hoping its furry (beyond fuzzy) logic vomits as intended.
I'm sure there are more fails. I would use any of these scenarios as an interview sieve to eliminate candidates whose first instinct is to find a website or an app that can do it for them.
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I mean, not knowing what vector graphics even is is the biggest fail of all...
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There is soooo much fail here, it must be AI! At least some things are no surprise and dependable.
We still haven't arrived (Score:1)
We'll know we've arrived when AI-generated custom apps come with ads that are tailored specifically to you... ... and they appear in your dreams.
Desktop applications (Score:3)
PNG to SVG? Inkscape can do this. It's kind of a weird thing to do and it's not going to scale up all that well. OP doesn't understand the difference between vector and raster graphics.
Scale an SVG? If you really need to do that, you can use Inkscape.
Remove pages from a PDF? LibreOffice can do this.
This isn't software developer territory either. This is along the lines of MS Office Power User stuff. As a developer, I use pdftk to alter PDFs for routine things, pikepdf for more complex stuff that I need to apply to a large number of documents.
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This isn't software developer territory either. This is along the lines of MS Office Power User stuff.
For very small levels of "power".
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I converted raster images to vector quite a bit when I worked for in print. It does a pretty decent job, especially if you don't need to scale it that much.
It'll take a logo, split it into a few pieces that need maybe a touch of clean up, but usually not, then assign spot colors to the pieces.
Reports differ (Score:2)
There are a few Reddit threads where people report this AI is every bit as good at writing apps as you would expect if you know the state of AI.
In other words, not very good at all.
Dumb Summary, but a real thing (Score:2)
The example is a bit odd (and I have zero interest in checking out that tool which sounds like a slashvertisement) but mini-tools is an interesting LLM application.
I'm doing some Arduino development where I'm networking several boards together and I wanted to monitor the serial output of multiple boards at the same time to see how they were communicating.
I spent 10-15 minutes looking for a tool that could show each board's output in a single window/terminal but didn't find anything, so I went into ChatGPT a
Anyone an expert in the tools to compare? (Score:2)
Sure, OK... SVG shouldn't need to be 'resized'. Maybe they were inventing an issue for the article, or they don't know everything like you all seem to.
And is the solution they were pushing a good one? Is it unique as they claimed?
I haven't had the resources or interest to push myself to try out these AI coding tools, but they seem to be improving (or at least changing).