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Comments (15)

• gavinray
  Funny story about drag-and-drop:At my very first job, we had a weekly meeting to assign tickets and estimates.Our non-technical PM wrote "drag-and-drop" on a whiteboard, and then my name."Gavin, how long do you think this will take?""All week. At least. Maybe longer?"PM laughed, then realized I wasn't making a joke."What do you mean 'all week'? That's ridiculous, do I need to give this to someone else?""Well, you could, but I wouldn't count on you getting it any sooner."Appalled, he exclaims: "It's just drag-and-drop!"After 10-15 minutes of a room full of engineers trying to explain the difficulty, he gave up with an unhappy "Fine."The phrase "it's just drag-and-drop" became an inside joke for the rest of my time there...
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  btown
  Oh, this is very, very cool, and very, very timely!Paper here: https://declarative-dragging.github.io/D2.pdfIMO one of the remaining gaps of agentic coding is that it's hard for even multimodal LLMs to check interactive motion effects for correctness and "feel." Like, sure, they can take screenshots of a few snapshotted states, but in terms of how things react as underlying nodes move and (potentially) reflow. How do you QA the feel of moving your wrist rapidly in the context of nested zones?The answer is that you avoid the need to: you have a (nearly-provably) correct foundation that ensures that behavior is predictable regardless of state, and just render accordingly.The paper's approach is incredible here: simultaneous optimistic rendering of multiple possible states, and a composable algebra (a small combinator language) over how drop zones and distance are derived - allowing for an extremely high-level interface in practice. Everything feels snappy and right, and the code you write is about as minimal as you can get - though the paper notes that state management is somewhat complex. But this seems solvable!Once this is ported to HTML, it'll become an incredible part of the modern dev toolkit. I'm very excited for what this means.
• sourdecor
  I think this is a really cool project, but I also really appreciate the introduction to Hazel[0].[0]: https://hazel.org/
• O_H_E
  [delayed]
• amelius
  Does this also work when the search space becomes large?I fear this might lead to an exponential blowup.(The examples shown are all tiny)
• kkotak
  Nice work! Good to see that someone is still working on making the Human Computer interface that has been around for while and used extensively in many applications more human. Thank you.
• leecommamichael
  Speculative rendering sounds awfully expensive.
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  disconcision
  an author here (andrew). down to answer questions though it might be a bit until i get to them
• gandreani
  This is revolutionary! I wonder if there's any similar prior art.The Hazel programming env is dope. I can already imagine using it to explain refactorings to new programmers.The twisted tree diagrams is also really neat. Is that a new idea as well? I got the beginnings of an idea where it might be a good diagram to display tangled code paths.
• hermannj314
  It is nice to read a coding article.Very nice work
• gitgud
  Wow that is an elegant way to do it. This could create a renaissance of drag n drop interactions for the web
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  Darky
  Fantastic work! The interactive demos are incredibly satisfying to play with, visually delightful, and genuinely educational.