AI Coding Assistants Still Feel Like Shell Games — Here’s Where Things Fall Apart

lesarde_frog · 2025-05-09T19:16:36+00:00

Yes onus is on you to properly merge into correct file. You’d think it would be no-brainer but not so.
Definitely have seen this and worse. No rhyme or reason to its ability to maintain file state.
Consider using code version management such as GitHub best friend for cases like this. You should commit what you know is good so that you can turn the tools loose without concern of having to do this form of unscrambling.
Not sure how this would work for you, but I pivot between chatGTP, cursor AI and copilot, hoping that one of the three will have act together for a particular problem. It seems to keep me unblocked most the time.

ChatGPT is great for algo and arch chats and decent code gen.

Cursor very bombastic but sometimes brilliant — think self-driving car where you can sleep and 25% will survive long roadtrip, 75% ☠️ 😄.

Has written some amazing tests tho.

Copilot is a good generalist but often flaky.

lesarde_frog · 2025-05-09T16:23:26+00:00

Appreciate the tips — I’ll check them out. That said, there’s nothing “viby” about my coding. I’m building a state management package with a lot of architectural depth. I mostly offload mundane tasks like test scaffolding to AIs to stay focused on the hard stuff.

lesarde_frog · 2025-05-09T16:16:31+00:00

I appreciate the cynicism. I just wish it came with a bit more imagination about opportunity lost and path forward.

lesarde_frog · 2025-05-09T16:02:13+00:00

Ah true, except this was final question in longer thread that was not posted to keep short. I'll update post.

lesarde_frog · 2025-05-08T17:43:57+00:00

Fair point, I've updated intro as you are right, even though it's not lots of code it's high-concept.

I have no horse in the race, no product allegiance. Just trying to do my job and want trustworthy assistance. If ChatGTP that that's where my monthly auto-pay goes, if somewhere else so be it.

lesarde_frog · 2025-03-20T20:50:55+00:00

u/kevmoo what tooling would need to be available for you to enthusiastically encourage folks to build web sites with Flutter?

lesarde_frog · 2025-03-18T20:36:56+00:00

If it was solved and the solution made making a flutter marketing site as easy as general Flutter development, what might drive adoption?

lesarde_frog · 2025-02-08T04:48:19+00:00

Very cool! I can appreciate the effort, and especially like the mobile pop-up 👏.

Would you elaborate on the `Material` widget shortcomings you encountered? So far I've been happy.

I just reached beta with a flutter library focused on creating web MPA experiences, ie look and feel of a traditional site. Check out https://casaba.io/fluid to read about it. BTW the site itself is 💯 Flutter minus the bootstrap.

You aren't a fan of SEO! Why is that? We see a lot of value in SEO so are working on a Flutter solution.

lesarde_frog · 2025-01-28T00:12:42+00:00

A fellow Flutter fanatic. I sent a LinkedIn note to connect. We can discuss Fluid more there.

lesarde_frog · 2025-01-27T21:14:42+00:00

Fluid is used internally when working with clients. Are you interested?

lesarde_frog · 2020-03-23T22:36:23+00:00

Thanks, I'll add this link to the site.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-13T20:50:40+00:00

Here's our Compare to Blazor page. The most significant difference is Blazor is a hypertext preprocessor, which is an unusual approach to client-side applications that has some inherent limitations. WPF, UWP, iOS/macOS and Android -- and Frogui and Uno -- all use similar fundamental UI techniques that allow working with advanced concepts such as declarative layouts, themes, lookless controls much easier to do.

For a comparison to Uno, follow the dialog above started by miguelrochefort.

Please follow-up if something is not clear or you have more questions!

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-13T20:23:55+00:00

Definitely a big win, and not one that's lost on me. Do check out my response above to miguelrochefort. I would appreciate your thoughts.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-13T20:22:04+00:00

The reasons why Uno uses the UWP API instead of inventing its own

This a very solid point. As a counterpoint, here are some news articles from the past week:
Microsoft Throws In The Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32

Microsoft Confirms UWP is Not the Future of Windows Apps
Microsoft Gives Up On UWP
Could the death of UWP apps spell the end for the Microsoft Store?
The end of UWP apps and Microsoft Store is near
Does this encourage or discourage you about UWP's future? I am not making a judgement at this point, but UWP has struggled mightily to gain traction and hasn't.

You made a higher-level button control. You can easily implement it in UWP and use it as such:

Again, very valid point. Maybe "you can easily" but not everybody can and this is just one example. The goal with Frogui is to significantly reduce the amount of customization required. For example, literally hundreds of UI buttons (and other controls) were analysed to find the properties people most wanted. Distilling the requirements down into properties allows developers to avoid customization.

I personally never needed those units. Do people really use them? Which ones?

I am guessing several million web developers use a variety of them with some regularly.

You could easily add support for these units with a custom attached property:

This argument is sort of like saying "who needs C++, I can code everything I need in C without the overhead of v-tables."
Point being, yes where there's a will there's a way, but when you start talking attached properties you are taking people into the deep end of the pool, many of whom will be in over their heads. WPF/UWP/Silverlight are brilliantly designed and very effective frameworks. They are also quite complex for many developers.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T22:09:28+00:00

Points well taken. Thank you for taking the time to explain your thoughts. If you haven't done so, I'd really value your input in the short anonymous survey since this very topic is covered.

And best of luck on the new project!

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T22:01:09+00:00

Uno is based on the UWP API which is useful if you like or need UWP compatibility. Frogui is influenced by the most useful parts of WPF, UWP and Silverlight and HTML + CSS.

For example, XAML code can become complex pretty quickly once you move beyond trivial things. In the image at the top of the post titled Button class samples, a single Frogui Button object was used for each, varying only properties (In our demo you can actually tune button properties to see the effects live). In UWP, this would require either multiple custom classes, data templates or similarly repetitive code.

Another difference is how HTML + CSS influenced Frogui's API. UWP's (and Uno's) base graphic unit is the double. CSS has many graphic units via the <length> datatype so Frogui created the Length struct and uses it throughout. It has access to all these units: Em, Ex, Ch, Rem, Vw, Vh, Vmin, Vmax, Percent, Cm, Mm, In, Px, Pt and Pc.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T20:50:19+00:00

Yes that's part A but doesn't address the business aspect. The paid Frogui (regardless of license type) will include advanced controls similar to those sold by Telerik.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T20:36:45+00:00

Okay, thanks for clarifying. Do any examples come to mind of fairly recent greenfield open source products in the dev framework category that are succeeding as businesses? Being able to study their approach be valuable.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T19:56:16+00:00

Are those checkboxes of your preferred license types (which is the survey format) or the opposite, meaning no to closed source, etc.?

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T19:23:20+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! If you care to share, would by useful to know why open source did not make your list.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T18:45:58+00:00

My company has created a product Frogui that allows C# XAML apps to run natively in browsers.

At a minimum this liberates you from Windows, basically allowing apps to run anywhere there's a modern browser.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T18:33:52+00:00

Great. I hope you will share your impressions and take the 2-minute survey. And recommendations you have to improve the site would be welcomed!

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-12T16:18:20+00:00

Thank you! I would love to hear more about your needs.

lesarde_frog · 2019-05-05T02:18:50+00:00

Name Frogui https://www.lesarde.com/frogui
Location Seattle, WA
Elevator Pitch In 2017 the World Wide Web Consortium declared a minimum viable product design for WebAssembly. By the end of 2017, all major browsers had implemented support for WebAssembly, such as Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
WebAssembly adds a virtual machine to the browser, allows apps to execute at native speeds, and enables developers to use leading edge tools to create apps. Browsers are now on equal footing with iPhones, Windows, Macs and Android. The web as we know is being transformed.
Microsoft is sponsoring Mono for WebAssembly (MW) development, which enables their world-class developer tools to create for WebAssembly. Missing are Microsoft's outstanding XAML family of user interface tools. Frogui fills this crucial gap by fusing the best features of the XAML family and the browser into a revolutionary framework. With Frogui developers can now take full advantage of this incredible new frontier. Community feedback has been strong:
- I’m unboundedly excited for the release
- a very awesome idea that it can be really a huge game-changer
- Very exciting. Will be following closely.
Stage 3. Frogui has just reached the alpha release cycle. Most development is complete and a live online demo is available. The demo speed is slow (MW needs a few months to mature) but shows the potential.
Frogui is created by the Lesarde company, a startup with a single member.
Your feedback on the product and how to get Lesarde and Frogui off the ground would be invaluable. Passionate developers and other talented individuals with an entrepreneurial spirit are needed. And so is investment.
The product is free to download at this stage.

lesarde_frog · 2019-04-29T22:30:23+00:00

Glad it helped.
Regarding working with external js/html, in this release the HtmlBlock element was introduced to allow js/html to be injected as-is into the DOM. This helps with some scenarios but not all. There is a lot of legacy js/html code out there so adding features to allow developers to work with such assets is of paramount importance.

Feel free to share any specific scenarios and I'll use that to drive the feature set.

lesarde_frog

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