Launching gptengineer.app into beta today.
It's like Claude Artifacts, but:
- you can edit the code in your fav IDE (two-way github sync)
- installs npm packages
- automatically picks up build and runtime errors and fixes them
- very fast, built with rust
The full stack capabilities are built on supabase (prefer to not have to handle auth + user data at this point so this is owned by the user)
The seed for this project was an open source experiment, posted about that previously here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422730
Would love feedback if you give it a try!
Within <20 seconds, i was playing it. That was crazy. I then asked it to add better graphics, retro-style. And add a counter displaying the current snake length. And then finally, add a high score tracker after the game ended. Adding the tracker caused an error, and I told it to fix the error. It looked at the logs and fixed it. There is still a bug where the top 10 scores all update at once, but I'm sure if i didn't hit the free credit limit on the site I could ask it to fix that.
I did all of this within ~3 minutes. It works, and while it is very suboptimal (it plays Snake using basic React state code, not ideal lol), the speed of this and how surprised I am reminds me of the first time I talked with ChatGPT 2 years ago. Amazing work.
I don't know if these are shareable, but this is the link I'm using to view the page it built:
So I think it's a valid quick sanity test, like fizz-buzz for human devs.
News in German from a week ago, 180,000 Euros in Government subsidies to develop a modern Snake: https://www.iphone-ticker.de/spielefoerderung-in-der-kritik-...
It's a really saturated market but I wish OP the best of luck.
One feature request would be a search for the existing public projects so that I can use remix to jump start my project.
Two questions:
1) Given the name, is it fair to assume that this uses OpenAI's API as opposed to Anthropic or others?
2) In the initial create prompt, what kind of files are allowed as attachments? What type of files give best results?
I really like the UI/UX, and admit that I am a bit jealous (as langcss.com creator) of how polished it is. I like the way it tells you what files it is working on but doesn't stick a full IDE in your face.
I am not worried this year about AI taking my job - it couldn't manage to capture the camera for my example app. It did get the permissons. Still this isn't useless - it can be easier to debug a non-working app than build from scratch.
So at this point you need a coder! But that will change pretty quickly over the next 2-5 years I am sure.
There is certainly a danger that this kind of app could do a lot of jobs, especially once mistakes are limited so you don't need an Engineer to come fix it. However learning some non technical skills like business analysis is probably wise for most of us :-).
The main issue here is "are there mistakes, in the first place?".
Maybe people will become tolerant to machine mistakes. Engineers make mistakes, but it's expected. And the kinds of mistakes engineers make are human.
Machines make mistakes that look silly. The kind of mistake "an engineer wouldn't make".
So these apps will probably tackle an unserved demand (things not valuable to justify an engineer). Anything else I predict will continue to use engineers - more productive with AI support.
Agree on the timelines here. This is currently a tool.
AI used to always be 5-10 years away. Now AI is here. What's 5-10 years away now is all the reconfigured or reconstructed economic infrastructure around it.
It may be easy to convince me that tools like this can take over development of web apps. It's harder to convince me that, in the timeframe where these tools actually eliminate web app jobs, that we will be worried about our web app building capacity.
The most generalized economic pipeline is (labor + capital) -> production -> welfare. We're obviously going to be reconfiguring a lot of labor, a lot of capital is going buh-bye, much of production will look nothing like it used to, and we haven't even started discussing whose welfare we're going to be maximizing (hopefully it's people in general rather than real estate owners.)
Tools like this can potentially lead to this on absolute steroids (even as less capital is available), insane amounts of experiments around new products, features and businesses. That way we'd discover more valuable software, and need more developers to scale and maintain that stuff. Because the economics do reverse: At some point in a product's life cycle, that dev salary is well within the profit margin, and not really worth saving. Quite different from the experimentation phase where quantity>quality.
Another thing that could happen is that individuals build their own software more, like Excel on steroids. There would still be value in solving problems for users at scale, but this whole experimentation process wouldn't be so breadth-first anymore. And I suppose funding would be pretty dry for companies "just" solving one problem.
"AI" isn't even the biggest factor here, I believe. Tools to quickly run experiments and cheap labour are readily available. It kinda seems the times where every company felt they need to hire as many developers as possible are pretty much over.
In both scenarios, I suppose good times might be ahead for competent developers that can earn a client's/CEO's trust, and/or excel at solving problems automated tools fail at. Bad times might be ahead for anyone who just executes experiments other people came up with. Unfortunately, I fear that's the majority of us. It might just get more painful before our industry normalises after this prolonged phase of non-stop growth. But I do believe it will. Demographic change leading to shrinking work forces in most developed countries should help soften the blow.
Yesterday we had an article about so many half-arsed software in maintenance mode that the world would be ending soon, crumbling under the weight of not-maintained enough software.
So far I've seen LLMs (I pay for GTP 4o btw) very good at producing boilerplate code. Does it help? Heck, yup.
Does it produce even more code needing ever more maintenance? You bet so.
At this rate it looks like we're going to need way more software developers, not less.
I am not a developer (can edit a few lines) but would be a target customer for these. I just wonder how to manage these risks compared to let’s say a CMS.
But yeah if you want your own hosting for some reason you own the code and can take it to a provider like Netlify or Github Pages fairly easily.
Send me an email at viktor@lovable.dev if you have any questions :)
I think the amount of free usage needs to be high enough for people to get a small taste of success at least!
Let me know if you have any input on what we could add, we're iterating super fast on the exactly right form factor.
(Might have to readd the waitlist though if we get too much traffic.)
