HACKER Q&A
📣 ex-aws-dude

Has anyone shipped a self-modifying application with LLMs?


In the past the model for software would typically be to ship a fixed application and then if users need some custom functionality, they would need to install a plugin or create their own.

For non technical users they would have to find an existing plugin or maybe it doesn't exist so they are stuck.

But I can't help but think what why wouldn't for example an application just have a prompt box that builds an extension dynamically on the fly.

Obviously it would be "use at your own risk" and YMMV

Have any companies or applications actually done something like this?

I think modifying the real source code would get out of hand but perhaps just generating extensions that have access to a sand boxed set of safer APIs.

  👤 dana321 Accepted Answer ✓
I've been pondering having some kind of environment that the language model can just modify the application in real time while it is running.

I asked chatgpt and it said hot reloading in a browser, but thats not what i'm talking about. I'm meaning realtime high performance desktop applications that the user can prompt to change the app in realtime while it is running.

The closest thing i saw to this was something called VibeOS, but thats a whole operating system.

👤 fragmede
Arguably that's what BI tools like Tableau and Looker do. Or advanced uses of Excel, which an LLM can help with. The user has data and wants to slice it up and see it in a specific way and have some knobs to play with it to figure out answers to questions as a data scientist.