Hi HN,<p>Spawn lets you build apps with human language. You can include images, audio and other files in your app just by dragging and dropping.<p>Here's a demo video where I build the game of Snake in 60 seconds: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIqp7cvmE_M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIqp7cvmE_M</a><p>As it’s still in alpha, you may need to regenerate a few times to get the app functioning the way you want. So far I’ve found it’s pretty good at generating simple utilities and games. Over time, as both Spawn and the underlying models improve, it will be able to build more complex software.<p>I have a bunch of ideas for future updates, for example:<p>- Allow users to include wireframes that Spawn will follow as it generates their app.<p>- Android support in Mac, Windows & Linux Spawn desktop app. This way, people can use Spawn to build for both mobile platforms using the same app specifications. Imagine someone living in rural India using their Chromebook to build apps for their Android phone, without needing to learn how to code.<p>- Enable people to build apps that have accounts and backend logic by autogenerating and deploying a backend during app generation.<p>Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I'm interested to see how this goes.<p>I recently used ChatGPT and Claude to help myself build a simple app for my wife. Just listing things and being able to edit them basically. It was VERY frustrating as both models get pretty basic things wrong around the plumbing stuff like configuring SwiftData or CoreData.<p>I tried it with a version of the prompt(s) I used in that project and I got an app that's just a white page.
I just realized that I don't have XCode installed, and I'm hesitant to due to storage etc.<p>Would something like the following be feasible even though accelerometer isn't listed as one of the native capabilities?<p>```
Build an app that uses the accelerometer to measure the g-forces experienced while driving, and uses an audio tone with varying volume to indicate the magnitude of g-forces.<p>Show a large circle on the screen with a single black dot to represent the current g-forces for X and Y. Show a vertical rectangle on the side with a single blue dot to represent the current g-forces in the Z direction.<p>Using a single audio tone, vary the volume of this tone to represent the sum of X, Y, and Z g-force readings. At standstill the audio should be silent.
```<p>I have wanted something like this for a long time for driving to get a better sense of whatever cargo or passengers might be experiencing.
> Over time, as both Spawn and the underlying models improve, it will be able to build more complex software.[^Citation needed]<p>It seems to me that with the transformer model world we now live in, utilities like these are excellent at generating things that appear in many tutorials/posts/etc. However, there's little-to-no evidence that they are able to generate anything truly custom. For instance, any application requiring any significant level of domain-specific knowledge (your last point), and given the model's architectures there's no reason to believe that will occur. What is it that makes you so confident that will become a possibility?
I’d love to have something like this in Xcode. Or alternatively if I could export an xcodeproj file from my Spawn project? I couldn’t imagine developing an entire launchable app in English (at least not yet). But if it could build an MVP that I can then iterate on, that would be awesome!