Trying out V0.dev
I've been following Next.js and Vercel's journey since the early days of Zeit Now, and I have to say I've been really impressed overall with the architecture and the dream of a developer UX that's not terrible.
Natural language editing is a feature that's been in the pipeline for a while, and I've been curious to see how it's going to work out. I've been using Cursor for a while now and have been impressed with it's ability to "merge" suggestions from the language model with your actual code. It also seems to be a lot more aware of other areas of your codebase. It does fall a bit flat, though, when it comes to the latest updates of frameworks.
Decided to try out V0.dev today, and I found it somewhat enjoyable! Its biggest strength is that it has training data - i'm assuming in the form of embeddings? - of its own libraries and documentation. It, generally, knew what to do and when. It was particularly accurate at building out structure for multiple files at once, but once a file gets to a certain size it struggles to keep everything coherent. I ran into a few minor issues with stuttering and repeating content, this kind-of-hilarous giant shrug of "idk man the docs say it should work", overall I did enjoy a strictly conversational interface. Once I got situated, I was able to knock out big chunks of the interface pretty quickly while being able to add more detail as I went along.
The only problem I ran into is after the file got to 4-500 lines of complexity, the accuracy dropped severely. I had to keep stopping it and giving it more specific prompts to get it to do what I wanted, or fixing a bunch of small errors manually.
I think for me, the big thing that would make it over the top is if it could do the same kind of thing for an entire project. Pair programming with a chatbot that knows the libraries and frameworks intimately would be a game changer. I'd pay good money for that.
It's still in beta, so I'm sure it'll get better over time. I'm hoping that over time the "code editing" aspects will get a bit more robust to support full projects. It did surprisingly well at scaffolding an application - but after a few files, it started to struggle.
As for the blog editor, there's still a lot of work to be done mostly on the styling-side, it's somewhat surprising that it hit the "ugly but it works" phase. I was hoping to get just a bit more styling opinions, the generations feel a bit like wireframe templates.
Overall, I'm excited to see where this goes. I think there's a lot of potential in the space, and I'm sure we'll be looking at a lot of these kinds of tools in the future.
