Replacing homepage demo media with looping HTML and CSS

(stepshots.com)

15 points | by hauju 1 day ago

5 comments

  • docheinestages 38 minutes ago
    I strongly recommend not doing this. When I see a mockup demo on a homepage, it signals one or more of the following to me:

    - there is no product built yet, just a potentially one-shotted idea

    - the creators are insecure or untruthful about what their product could do, hence faking it with a demo

    - lack of effort to create real screenshots and walkthroughs of the product

    • makoto12 2 minutes ago
      This isn't a product though, it's just showing off an interesting idea, and telling you how to do it yourself
    • senordevnyc 29 minutes ago
      It signifies none of this to me. I routinely see these on websites with mature existing products.
  • paulhallett 1 hour ago
    This is super cool but I feel like I could just build this myself with an LLM agent, so I get worried about the value proposition for services that try to charge for this. I guess really what you're paying for is some time saving and so that you don't have to burn your own tokens to build it?
    • senordevnyc 1 hour ago
      As far as I can tell, this isn’t a product, and the page has a prompt to have your own coding agent generate these. Stepshots is a bigger product that offers interactive demos, which the page contrasts with these.
      • ShinyLeftPad 45 minutes ago
        Well you could have your LLM just generate that prompt then couldn't you?
        • senordevnyc 30 minutes ago
          Sure, but the prompt he’s sharing seems useful, and you can just copy paste it off the page. Not sure what your point is…
  • camillomiller 1 hour ago
    I absolutely love how LLM are incredible tools for this kind of applications. And yet, everytime I see this, to me it's clear how the labs are doomed. These are the use cases we see, and kinda feel they're worth the hype. But in the end it's all superfluous add-ons we wouldn't have bothered with in the past and be fine anyway. The reason we had never done something like this it's because the cost/benefit ratio was off.

    Here is where I think the entire financial contraption falls apart. Because the moment the cost of doing this stuff becomes again financially comparable to the mental/resources cost we needed to program it manually (and therefore refrain from doing it), we will start just... not doing it anymore.

    If we instead will be able to still do it, it will mean that the cost of this has stayed as low as now (or gotten to free due to open models), and that will spell doom for the financials of the services enabling the LLMs to do this.

    It's a catch22 for Anthropic and OpenAI, and either way they're dead in the water (financially, again, because their products as tools are indeed incredible. yet, they don't create enough value).

    This, and the fact that other really value-adding breakthroughs that would justify the trillion dollar bet they're still making are nowhere to be found, except in the doomsday predictions of the AI-psychotic.

    • SftwareRenderer 28 minutes ago
      It seems like their long term bet is that people who use LLMs to build in the niceties and extra polish will attract more customers, and the race to do this increases overall usage. As if they're saying "subscribe or your competition will eat your lunch".

      And until the cost of running LLMs exceeds the cost of someone's salary, people will continue their subscriptions.

      But they do more than enable the superfluous add-ons, and have been inserting themselves as being mission critical in securing software. "Subscribe. Or else!"

  • hauju 1 day ago
    [flagged]
  • basitanwer 1 hour ago
    [dead]