David Humphrey is a professor and Mozilla-linked developer writing on web tools like Thimble and Bramble, open source teaching, and ChatGPT.
HN commenters link his posts explaining how Thimble and Bramble work, with one recommending the read, and his ChatCraft write-up.
That's great, but as someone who writes a whole bunch of PoC code and demonstrator articles, this is literally the thing I've been waiting all these years for. I don't need "tooling" beyond a good editor with dynamic extensions, which this is: it's just Adobe's "Brackets" code editor, made to run in the browser, with an automatic live server so I can immediately see what's happening instead of having a text editor, terminal, and browser open. I'm a professional web dev, and the _fewer_ tools I need to do what I love, the more I'm going to stick with whoever can offer me that.
It won't let me write node.js style code right now, but then they just completely rewrote this from a pretty simple jsbin-alike (single file, live preview, friendly error reporting, that was it) to a full blown Brackets with an in browser POSIX file system that automatically syncs on file changes. It's both insane and beautiful, and I'm already finding myself firing it up instead of jsbin or jsfiddle or codepen, and having far more fun because I have a full editor under my finger tips.
Reading through http://blog.humphd.org/thimble-and-bramble, which explains the whole thing in a level of detail that doesn't belong on the front page, is fascinating, and might make you acknowledge that there's definitely a place for this kind of thing on the web, and that there are plenty of people who would have loved to have something like this from day one.
I mean, come on: if this is their MVP launch, imagine what…
I'm glad I am not the only one who thought this was complete and total BS. I agree with other commenters that this post is designed to create hype and acquire more funding.
Many people have argued (successfully imo) that AGI is not even possible[1]. LLMs are not even trending in the direction of AGI. They are trending in the direction of annoying spam[2] and making our jobs harder[3]. A brave new world where anyone can generate hallucinated nonsense and feel clever for doing so.
[1] Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4
[2]A sci-fi magazine has cut off submissions after a flood of AI-generated stories https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence
[3]CheatGPT https://blog.humphd.org/cheatgpt/
I don't know how up to date it is, but it looks like there is more about the technology at [1].
[1] http://blog.humphd.org/thimble-and-bramble/
This post helps explain the why and how of thimble really well. Recommended read!
http://blog.humphd.org/thimble-and-bramble/
Here's the post from David Humphrey | who all so worked on the website.
https://blog.humphd.org/chatcraft-org/
Maybe have a look at this Mozilla stuff?
http://blog.humphd.org/thimble-and-bramble/