I'm a lazy front end dev, so I built ProtoUI to code for me | Hacker News Reader

I'm a lazy front end dev, so I built ProtoUI to code for me

protoui.dev

11 pointsatriana5 comments

If you're a frontend dev and you use Tailwind then maybe ProtoUI will help you too.

I keep building the same UI components over and over again and every single time I build it from scratch and just tweak the UI a bit.

With ProtoUI I just tell it what kind of component I'm looking for..

"Render a login form with an email and password input and a blue login button"

And voila, couple seconds later I got the UI for it and I can copy and paste the code for it straight to my application to continue coding it.

Is it perfect? Nah.. but it does help me iterate quickly on UI in a visual way before polishing it up in VSCode.

If I’m rebuilding the same components repeatedly, how is this better than copying my existing component markup from my library of components/snippets and making small tweaks as required?

Good question, if you have a library of components you keep around in their own repo.. then with the current feature set of Proto you won't gain much.

If you're like me, I don't keep a library of generic components, so if I wanted to re-use something I've built in the past, I'd first have to go digging through all my old repos to find the piece of code I wanted. The templates feature of Proto allows you to just sign in and pull the code straight from your saved templates (aka, this would be your library of components to use moving forward).

Then, after I found the component I was looking for in one of my old repo's I'd then have to tweak it to fit whatever new design I was building. And in my experience the new design is almost never exactly a match so I end up having to rewrite the markup for the component anyway. Enter ProtoUI's main feature which is just on demand text to UI. You can find one of your old templates and start with that as a base and tweak from there or just start from scratch.

Overall though, I think it's circumstantial and depends on what kind of components you are looking to re-use versus build from scratch.

So this is just a component library? Does it use a LLM to search for components and changes them?

You can use ChatGPT to generate code and modify what it generates. And anything you generate on Proto, you can save as a template for later (which will build up your library of tailwind components over time).

It won't search for components though it will just render what you ask it to render. So if you write "Render a two column layout with image placeholders and a title and subtitle" it will render that and give you the code for it.

Feel free to sign up for one of the free trials and cancel it immediately so you don't get charged. I'm hungry for feedback more than I am for paid users at this point. Would love for you to try it out and let me know what you think.

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