the things that AI is able to do are incredible, but hype levels are just totally detached from reality.
But it can already do that. Isn't that the whole "one-shotting" thing?
The problem is, of course, that it won't be optimized, maintainable or have anyone responsible you can point to if something with it goes wrong. It almost certainly (unless you carefully prompted it to) won't have a test suite, which means any changes (even fixes) to it are risky.
So it's basically a working mockup generator.
I am so, so tired of "semi-technical" youtubers showing off new models with one-shots. The vast majority of actual devs who use this stuff need it to work over long-term context windows and over multiple iterations.
If you come at the problem from the direction of "I draw a user interface; you guess what it's supposed to do and wire it up for me", then all you need to solve that problem (to a first-order approximation) is some plain-old 1970s "AI" heuristics.
The buzz around current AI coding prompting seems to be solely generated by the fact that while prototyping tools require you to at least have some training as a designer (i.e. understanding the problem you're solving on the level of inputs and outputs), these tools allow people with no experience in programming or design to get results. (Mainly by doing for UIs what genAI image/video tools do for art: interpolating the average of many ingested examples of how a designer would respond to a client request for X, with no regard for the designer's personal style†.)
† Unless prompted to have such regard... but if you know enough to tell the AI how to design everything, then you may as well just design everything. Just as, if you know art well enough to prompt an AI into developing a unique art style, then you likely know art well enough to just make that same art yourself with less effort than it takes to prompt and re-prompt and patch-erase-infill-prompt the AI into drawing what you want.
you might produce something that looks usable at first, but the actual application functionality will be significantly broken in most ways. it maybe works enough to do a demo for your video, but it won't work enough to actually distribute to end-users. and of course, as you say, it's not testable or maintainable in any way, so fixing what's broken is a bigger project than just writing it properly in the first place.
Remember the hype isn’t just “wow it’s so cool and amazing and useful”, it’s also “I can’t wait to fire all my dumb meat-based employees”
