It was a wet, cold, and dreary Monday morning. I stared out over my garden with a brew of Yorkshire's finest in hand, pondering what brave new thing to try today.
You see, I like to challenge myself, and while I have significant moral concerns about using AI (aka LLMs), they are a tool that can be described as a game-changer.
So, I thought, let's build a simple web app to make tweaking Firefox—a leading open-source browser and alternative to Chrome—easier, especially for less technically minded users.
Arkenfox's user.js project is a treasure trove of information and has a great community with lots of experience tweaking everything you could want to tweak. For most people, looking at their website will send them running to the warm embrace of Chrome, but it doesn't have to be that way. Let me tell you how I built a web app in one morning, using natural language (aka plain English) and several cups of tea.
The process
During my research, I discovered a tool called Bolt.new from Stackblitz.com. You can use my unique link to get 200,000 tokens to have a play yourself (this is a link that also gives me extra tokens). Although I found the tech bro lingo and approach of the people in the video somewhat off-putting, the tool itself looked great.
Let's start with the app's core premise: As a user, I want to be able to easily select from three categories to set a recommended number of options in the user.js configuration file of Mozzila's Firefox web browser.
The categories are Privacy, Security, and Performance. Mozilla's documentation and the recommendations from the Arkenfox project provide the options.
As a user, I want to be able to see the options selected and override them to generate my user.js configuration. I also want to be able to export and import these settings so I can easily change them in the future.
The interface needs to be adaptive to the user's viewport and conform to the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility guidelines. Depending on their platform, the user should be guided through the process of applying the user.js file and shown concise explanations of what each option will do for them.
I want to be able to deploy the web app on a static web host like Netlify using a git repository as a source. The app's free, open-source license is GNU GPL v.3, and you need to generate a suitably descriptive README file for other developers to use when they fork or contribute code in the future.
Full disclosure: That's what I had hoped would be sufficient, but the reality is that despite well-considered prompts, there was a lot of back and forth!
In my case, I thought a browser extension would be best and hoped I could let it take more heavy lifting.
It was a valuable learning experience for me.
I discovered that all three leading platforms (Linux, Windows and Mac) need different approaches and external user intervention to replace the user.js in the right profile and restart the browser. Who knew ;-)
The flip-side
Let me caveat my experience: Unless you have a solid technical understanding and User Experience design experience, this will be a struggle that puts you right off! Add to that the ethical concerns around how the tool has learned its skills and the cost of using it - both financially and environmentally - and you quickly see the poison in the chalice.
A.I. uses a significant amount of resources, specifically water and energy, which has already led to real issues for communities near data centres in the past year. It will get much worse, especially since the leading service providers like OpenAI vie for dominance.
Will these tools replace human developers and designers?
No, at least not in the near to medium term. The A.I. tool I used from Stackblitz.com - Bolt.net - behaves like a junior dev with a memory issue. It's fun initially, then gradually tails off as you get frustrated, reminding the tool to go back and remember what we just fixed or implemented two steps earlier.
It's a great way to learn new things, and the A.I. tool did a great job commenting and guiding. However, you need to know about the programming languages involved, especially about conflicting packages within them. Otherwise, you will get unstuck fast, as there are problems with the tool imagining or hallucinating things. I asked it a few times to find alternatives to the outdated and insecure packages it was trying to use.
These are growing pains, but the fact remains that unless you already have a good technical understanding of how stuff works in the digital world, these tools will not create a million-dollar app overnight. Even if you could concoct something like our tech bros in their shiny videos, the Real World(tm) eventually will bring them down to earth and remind them that front and back-end developers cannot be easily replaced.
The result
I’m proud that the web app I quickly created one morning to address a specific problem for myself is functional. I’ll let you evaluate the results, which I believe still need some adjustments. Perhaps we can agree to refer to it as a "beta":
user.js Generator
The GitHub repository is at https://github.com/bebraveronline/firefoxconfigurator, and I invite you along to look under the hood. Let me know what you think of it.
Over to you
What's your experience with zero-code development tools? What apps have you created and why? Let me know in the comments below this post 😸