
Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI - naveensundar
https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/26/dry-io-wants-to-democratize-software-development-using-ai/
======
PostOnce
Again? Can this end with anything other than failure? It'd be nice if it
could, but that seems outside the realm of possibility.

Aside from this never having worked, and being, so far as we can all tell,
incompatible with the level of fine-tuning to everything from the backend to
the pixel positions of the UI that people want, there are very serious
problems with the business model (or absence thereof)

Some telling snippets from the article:

"Everything you build on Dry.io right now is stuck there."

“Later on, we’re going to be making on-premise stuff, so if you want to run it
on a local server or something like that,” Cassimatis promises. “But for now,
yeah, stuck on our platform.”

"Dry.io also has no business model, yet."

~~~
nickcassimatis
Hello. I am the founder of this company. I understand your skepticism. It's
true that it is very difficult to build a fully general dev tool that's 1000x
faster and lets you control everything entirely down the pixel level. We're
not claiming that. We're claiming that for a broad range of software (esp.,
social, messaging, and collaborative software), we can make the development
process orders of magnitude faster. You do lose some customization though.

There is precedent for something like this being possible and valuable.
Mid-90s level web technology was very restrictive, but did make a whole class
of online service much easier to build and deploy than what existed before
that (CompuServe, etc.) You didn't have complete control over every aspect of
display, networking, etc., but the loss in customization/control didn't
prevent it from enabling a lot of very important and valuable projects.

~~~
PostOnce
I appreciate the reply and genuinely hope you succeed, but it seems like an
uphill battle and a hard sell.

For a trivial CRUD app, the dev can just re-use one they already wrote, no
need to learn this layer you've created ... and for a complex CRUD app or
something more complicated than that, you're going to need to write real code
anyway, so who is the customer?

Why would I as a Python, JavaScript, or Ruby webdev learn your layer, which is
at risk of disappearing in a bankruptcy? What will my investment of developer
hours look like in 2 years on your platform, if it's still around?

Is it basically only useful for web stuff?

~~~
jmickey
I believe that you are not the target audience here.

Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)

~~~
onion2k
_Isn 't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer?
:)_

Only within the set of predefined functionality that can be specified in the
dry.io JSON config file. If you want anything outside of that you'll still
need a developer. I guess it's possible dry.io will have thousands of
components that covers 90% of what each and every app does eventually, but
until then most people who try it will bump up against it's limitations _very_
quickly. The hard part will be keeping them on the platform.

~~~
nickcassimatis
It's a reasonable concern.

Many apps we won't be able to handle at first can easily be handled by our
approach with more work.

For some capabilities, we will have ways of filling gaps in the platform. We
have some easy-to-use and fairly flexible hooks where you can add a lot of UI
customization. We've also discussed mechanisms for catching events in dry and
triggering external code developers can write. But that's almost certainly not
going to make v1.

------
mbesto
> Cassimatis believes that Dry.io doesn’t have any competitors.

There is a huge category of providers that do this:

[https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-
enterpris...](https://www.gartner.com/doc/3695317/magic-quadrant-enterprise-
highproductivity-application)

[https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-
plat...](https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/low-code-development-platforms)

I wish tech journalists would do their research.

~~~
sbr464
There were definitely several broad claims made. Without seeing the platform
though, within the context claimed, it’s difficult to include the entire low-
code industry, especially 80%+ of the logos included in the link you
mentioned, being related to an AI driven coding platform, including
Salesforce.

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neya
Cool, regardless of other commenters' advice, I think you should go forward
with this. I run a dev shop and I have done this with Rails and boy, does it
save you a lot of time (and thus, money). But, you should ensure there isn't a
learning curve for your platform. It should be in a UI that's familiar to
someone who is familiar with building their apps manually. Otherwise, it
defeats the purpose. As for worrying about pixel perfect designs, don't worry
about those, they're the easy part. The difficult part will be the parts that
contain the majority of value for a business - the backend. Frontend is as
simple us throwing in a nice UI framework and mixing and matching color
themes. It is good enough and works well for _most_ clients. The ones that
require pixel perfection probably aren't your target audience as it has a lot
to do with the frontend than the backend.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of money in this. I sincerely wish
you luck and hope you succeed.

~~~
nickcassimatis
Thanks. I think that's right. There are a lot of use cases where super-precise
UI control is not necessary. The early web and many blogging platforms are an
example where you can get very far despite some limits on UI customization.

~~~
puranjay
Slightly OT, but on my browser, dry.io is not on https. Big red flag for me.
Chrome shows a 'Not Secure' tag for me, plus there is no favicon.

Small things but important. You might want to fix that

~~~
nickcassimatis
It's a good point. Our actual platform is all https. Our home page is just a
static page. But you're right that it's bad optics for a platform intended to
be privacy friendly to not be using https.

------
marcell
I'm trying to understand how this would actually work. A lot of app
development for a mid-size CRUD app is around encoding business logic and
handling edge cases.

Let's take a specific example. Say I'm writing a software to help manage
weekly CSA (box of veggies) deliveries. Sometimes a driver will miss a
delivery, and in that case, you want three options:

(1) Fully refund the customer for that week

(2) Let them another receive another delivery the next day

(3) Give them company credit

If (2) happens, the driver component needs to receive a notification for the
next day delivery.

Is this in scope of dry.io? If it handles this kind of thing, how?

~~~
nickcassimatis
Yes. We have an event language where you basically can say "IF X happens do
Y".

~~~
IshKebab
Sounds like normal programming...

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mountainofdeath
Where is the AI here? This is yet another line-of-business app generator.
Others include Microsoft PowerApps, Microsoft Access back in the day, etc.

~~~
gamesbrainiac
My point exactly, and furthermore, the whole UI looks very cumbersome. You
still have to understand the software underneath in order to actually build
the application itself.

~~~
harrisreynolds
Yes. I am wondering the same thing. We are currently working on NimbleHQ [1]
which is an app that lets you build apps. And it is pretty cool. But it
doesn't use AI.

Maybe we should say it does to get some press! :-)

[1] [https://www.nimblehq.com/](https://www.nimblehq.com/)

~~~
TheLegace
Hi, I am trying to sign up but I can't get it working on Firefox and
Chrome[1]. Captcha Error
[https://imgur.com/xMHx0xY](https://imgur.com/xMHx0xY)

~~~
harrisreynolds
Wow... that is embarrassing. Fixed.

I recently change the domain from nimblapps.com to nimblehq.com which I think
is much better (but didn't get Recaptcha updated.

Would love any feedback you have. It is early but some cool ideas are in
there.

~~~
TheLegace
I really like the concept and design. Haven't used it fully to grasp how it
works yet, but I did find a few bugs at first glance. I can send you info by
email if you'd like.

~~~
harrisreynolds
Thanks man...def send over any bugs or issues you find. Still needs lots of
polish. The idea though is that you can define your data model and then have a
simple CRUD interface to update your app. The vision is then to start
iterating on making the views more and more customizable as well as start to
introduce conditional workflows to support more true app like functionality.

~~~
harrisreynolds
You can respond to the email address you get the welcome email from after you
sign up.

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kough
In what sense is this AI? You can of course call any computer technology AI in
that it is "artificial" and "intelligent" but this looks a lot like a domain
specific language for describing web apps and not anything that has to do with
any sort of inference.

~~~
nickcassimatis
There is a partial answer to this in another thread, but here is a response to
your specific point:

It depends what you mean by inference. In statistical machine learning and
deep learning, inference means predicting things using large amounts of data.
Philosophers call that inductive inference.

But there is also deductive inference. Given some general knowledge (e.g.,
"All men are mortal") and some facts ("Socrates is a man"), you infer other
facts ("Socrates is Mortal"). There is a huge amount of work in AI that has
developed algorithms that do very complex and powerful versions of this kind
of inference. You can use those to infer from a brief description of what you
want a computer to do what the sequence of actions the computer can take to
achieve that goal. You can use these kinds of methods to generate software
behavior without explicitly programming the behavior in advance.

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ndnxhs
I read the article but didn't watch the video but isn't this essentially code
generation/metaprogramming that we already have? In rails you don't have to
write a fraction of the code that actually runs because its generated for you.

Also the AI part is very worrying. To me this sounds like a programming
language where no one exactly knows what the rules are and every update to the
training model could break everything. Imagine trying to debug an issue when
there is no documentation or any knowledge on what is going on.

~~~
xapata
Artificial intelligence is a superset of, not equivalent to statistical
machine learning.

~~~
bitwize
Ever since expert systems fizzled out and failed to deliver on their promise
in the 80s, AI has been roughly equivalent to statistical machine learning and
its applications. Everything else became just logic that needs statistical
inference in order to work intelligently in a complex setting.

------
JamesAdir
I understand the use of AI is mandatory this days for any startups, but
basically this is Microsoft Access 2019 if it was online. Access once solved
the problem of creating small inhouse applications for departmental use. Since
then a magnitude of online services offered the same solutions, so you don't
need to create anything from scratch now.

I'm sure there is a market for Dry.io solution, just can't estimate how big it
really is.

~~~
nickcassimatis
Like Access, we do aim to make development much easier, and in-house tools are
an obvious first market. However, there are a lot of aspects of Dry (involving
access permission, data tagging, moderation, and more) that aren't all
together in any other platform. These make it easier to build social,
collaborative, and messaging apps much more easily than other approaches.

------
tluyben2
Sounds somewhat like Meteorkitchen from reading that story. My feeling is that
it will have very little to do with AI, but let’s see.

~~~
nickcassimatis
From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very
happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed,
indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.

~~~
banachtarski
Can you speak to what "AI" means in this context?

~~~
nickcassimatis
AI is an element of this in a number of ways. First, though, this is not a
platform for writing AI applications. It's a platform for making it faster to
write messaging, social, collaborate, productivity, etc. apps much faster
than.

One way AI factors in involves finding a core set of primitives that can
describe all software functionality. Programming languages and web frameworks
are more granular than Dry and so they require you to write a lot more code.
Dry has a higher level of abstraction than concepts like arrays, servers,
divs, database tables, etc.

On the other hand, Dry is not just a template system that gives you a
predefined set of application types like messenger, social network, discussion
group, etc. that you can just specify. That's a higher level of abstraction
and can be fairly limiting and brittle.

Dry's abstractions are in at a level that is between those two extremes; it
lets your write a lot of apps without needing to be too granular.

There is research in AI called "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" that
identifies fundamental primitives that can express a wide variety of concepts
and ideas. I've been a researcher in this field my whole career and was a
professor in that area once. We've translated those results into software and
have used them to develop a core set of primitives that let you describe the
behavior of a lot of software.

I know that is all vague, but we'll start to be more precise and concrete over
the next few weeks.

------
TimTheTinker
You have a lot of buzzwords in that headline. I’m not planning to read TA
because the buzzwords made my eyes glaze over.

No offense intended, but I thought someone might appreciate knowing.

~~~
nickcassimatis
So you wanted the headline to be more dry?

~~~
TimTheTinker
I'm just saying I might have read the article if the headline explained using
fewer buzzwords.

[pithy word].io, democratize (that doesn’t mean anything anymore), AI
(everything is AI these days)

Without more descriptive words, it seems to mean simultaneously a whole lot
and not very much.

~~~
nickcassimatis
This isn't a snarky response, but a sincere question: how would you have
titled the article or expressed our mission? It's difficult to come up with
something that's clear and captures our intent while also fitting into a
single sentence. We'll take any help on that we can get.

~~~
TimTheTinker
This is less about the title/headline and more about the overall approach.

I think to gain any attention in today’s environment, you’re going to have to
do more “showing” and less “telling”.

Remember how Ruby On Rails got its amazing dev mindshare? I’d encourage you to
hit archive.org and go back to like 2006 at rubyonrails.org. They had a
compelling demo that was just a simple screen share, but it blew people’s
minds. Their headlines and body copy were also excellent.

EDIT: a couple of links:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060609235209/http://www.rubyon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060609235209/http://www.rubyonrails.org/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060612063620/http://www.rubyon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060612063620/http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts)

~~~
TimTheTinker
Here's a link to the original screencast, if you can get it to load:
[http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mo...](http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov)

If that doesn't work, perhaps you can find a mirror somewhere with that link.

EDIT: Found a copy on Vimeo:
[https://vimeo.com/41708568](https://vimeo.com/41708568)

------
htkibar
There are a couple points to be made on this.

1\. This is less of a "AI" issue, more of a UI/UX for specialized tools issue.
Dreamweaver comes to mind especially; the moment you are trying to get
something that can be flexible and accommodate different needs it is mostly
about learning the tools. Often, the result is that learning the tool itself
is almost harder than learning to code.

2\. Any code that you generate via AI will most probably be crap. A huge part
of coding is making it understandable and easy to touch later on; how can you
do this without AI that has a proper understanding of the worlds (probably on
the level of a AGI).

------
ohiovr
Is the generated code readable?

~~~
nickcassimatis
No. The point is to never have to look at, modify, or understand the
underlying code. So, in this sense, it's not a typical code generation tool
where if you want to tweak something you need to do a lot of work to find the
right place in the code.

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AlotOfReading
An interesting difference between this and "traditional compilers" is that
since it's targeted to user-facing applications and the output is
intentionally hands-off, there are incentives for dry to subvert developers.
Imagine inserting unrequested ads or silently reselling end-user analytics for
extra money. The developer might never even know, let alone be able to fix it.

~~~
nickcassimatis
Yes, any company that's serving a lot of web pages would be tempted to put ads
on their pages. As the article and our website state, we are doing several
things to preserve people's privacy. If we do ever serve ads, you and others
can help us find a way to be super-transparent about it.

~~~
bitwize
That is, until the VCs take over or it goes to private equity, and the new
stockholders say it's much easier to monetize if you're super-opaque about it.

------
stevengraham
Despite the (predictable) skepticism, there are some real enterprise use-cases
for something like this being served by similar "self-serve" tools. I'd be
willing to take a look.

~~~
nickcassimatis
I'd be happy to hear more about these use cases you have in mind, either here
or over email.

------
mlboss
Where is the AI ? I thought it would be some tool which uses program
synthesis.

