Reviving my long-dead account to say that I built a perfectly functional small site to help schedule my dungeons and dragons group within about 5 minutes, on my phone, from my bed. If this isn't the future I don't want to go there. Fantastic work.
As someone who's run in software startup circles on the customer support side for years, I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything. Took several minutes even to notice the "save and preview" button to get my "edit this text" edit to work on the code editor. I first tried the "refresh" button on the preview, after realizing it didn't update automatically, but most of the text for the correct button wasn't visible.
Then, when it asked me to make a "val" that did something, I tried looking at the templates, hoping to figure out what they even mean by "a val." The page loaded halfway down the screen and wouldn't scroll, so I gave up and went back to the site to see if the About page would tell me anything useful.
I ended up back here hoping someone in the comments had figured it out, only to find that for some people, it clearly is entirely intuitive, which makes me think the whole platform is just for "other people," people not like me in some important way I haven't identified yet, even though it sounded like it was targeting people who have ideas for projects but don't know how to build them themselves.
Sorry to hear this! We definitely have a lot of work to do to make it more intuitive. If you have 30 minutes, I'd love to do a video call where I walk you through it and take notes on what you find confusing. Hopefully it'd be helpful to us both! I'm steve@val.town, shoot me a note if you're up for a chat
I made it build a function table for editing with authentication and roled based access to the different fields in the table by asking it:
"Build a site with a table that has editable stuff" Yes... I really said "stuff"...
"add authentication"
"add role based access to the different fields in the table"
It took like 5 seconds. The code is unusable for anything enterprise with how poorly it is. Especially the back-end and authentication would have to be completely rewritten and the front-end has no re-usable parts, but it works. It would work for a lot of smaller projects, even ones for tiny scale professional usage.
I'm not sure how a non-developer would deploy it anywhere, but it would be quite easy to get chatGPT (or maybe townie?) to generate a docker-compose file for it. I'm confident a non-developer would be capable of changing the "stuff" into something useful even if they didn't use townie for it. I don't think, everyone, could do it, but I do think a lot of of my very not tech but digitally inclined co-workers would be capable of working with it. I'm not completely sure how they would transform their various data sources into something that could be used by it. So I'm not sure exactly what they would use it for.
