Instead of making and maintaining specific, rigid, one-shot starters, like create-react-app, or create-nextjs-app, this is basically create-anything-app where you develop your scaffolding prompt in a tight loop with your smol dev.
Hey there PH! I'm excited to introduce you to smol-developer, an open source tool I created to make prototyping apps frictionless and fun.
As developers, we spend a lot of time setting up configs and boilerplate code to get our projects off the ground. I got tired of all the repetitive setup for new ideas, so I built smol-developer - a scaffolding system that spins up anything from a Chrome extension to a ChatGPT plugin, building up a massive prompt in `prompt.md` that does coherent, human centric whole program synthesis.
I hope you'll give smol-developer a try for your next app or side project. Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions - I'm continually improving and adding features. And of course contributions are always welcome!
The goal of this tool is really to give developers their time and creativity back. Happy building! Let me know what you think - I'd love to see what you create with smol-developer!
thanks for hunting @chrismessina! I just got in a rage of frustration that the first thing all my AI founder friends do after getting funding is turn around and spend most of their time recruiting like the pre-AI founders do. aren't we supposed to be AI believers? I want to at least be able to hand off part of my job to a personal junior developer, and if I don't believe that can be done then I probably shouldn't be in AI. In short I think its better to "build the thing that builds the thing" (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/...) at least for personal productivity, but hey it turned out that many many people were also really interested in this too! I don't want to get people too excited, its just an MVP for now, but I think many people weren't aware that with GPT4 and 100k context windows, this sort of thing is basically almost here.
"your personal junior developer" Sounds accurate!
For me it could be competition, but for a senior dev it's something that's going to make things that might end up taking more time to review than to build from scratch (my feeling).
Nice demo video. It would be nice if the tool could summarize the files it has created and why.
Congrats for the launch and for trending on Hackernews ;)
Great work @swyx, been playing around with Modal the past few days and using smol developer for an example iOS apps – definite has a few quirks (assets packages, assets, adding packages that don't exist) but the potential is insane!
Hope to be jumping in on Github soon :)
Time to become a development outsourcing agency. "I have a unlimited army of junior developers that will work 24/7 around the clock to build your project."
Seriously, huge project. Congrats!
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