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Comment by beshur | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I could not go farther in the video after watching the narrator trying to accurately click on all those inputs, dropdowns etc. simultaneously saying "writing this in code would be annoying".

In my opinion using mouse pointer to click things on screen is annoying when it comes to programming.

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I find mocking things up is better done visually. Whether that’s pen/paper, Illustrator, or a GUI builder like this. I think they serve the same purpose. The only difference is that with this, you’re closer to getting a final asset you can tweak with code. GUI builders have a long history. But the best of them produce code you can commit to git.

But, I guess the real question of usefulness is how good (or sane) the generated code is.

To use an example from a different comment, if it is closer to Dreamweaver, that at least produced workable code. If it is closer to FrontPage… good luck.

FrontPage only has one thing to say to you in response to this insult:  

I find that mocking is best done by product/designers and not engineers, and that the skills to make a wonderful user experience are about as opposite from the skills of being a talented js/typescript/react/redux/devos etc engineer as can be.

When I get a feature to implement in react, I expect the mocks to completed. We do our design work in figma and it's already a wonderful tool for mocking up our react app.

The point of an 'all-in-one' mock and code tool seems strange. Is it to get rid of designers (which is bad because UX/accessibility/design is yet another skill to add ontop of the devops pile that will not be handled at a high level) or is it to get rid of the engineer (so that the product team can create a react app without an expensive coder, which is bad because shit is going to break and no one is going to know how to fix it).

Perhaps this is intended for very small companies (~single person shops) where like it or not you're doing everything so anything that simplifies the process is a value add.

The project looks very cool though, and he can definitely put together a form faster with this tool than I can writing it all out by hand. I wonder how the experience gets when you're in the weeds of custom components, hooks, props and all of the sauce that makes react complicated.

I think it comes down to preference, but ultimately I agree with you. There are a lot of misconceptions about "code", and when people talk about how code is either slow, hard, annoying etc, they're speaking in the abstract and not being specific. At the end of the day, "code" is really just typing what you want instead of dragging around a mouse. It's like saying "I like to use my mouse to copy and paste instead of typing cmd+c cmd+v, it's faster". It doesn't make any sense.

Generally when I watch a code demo I appreciate if the demonstrator doesn't use keyboard shortcuts, because I'm trying to focus on the actions not the way you get to those actions. And having a mouse move around gives you a moment to think about the last thing they said and how it fits with your projects.

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