I’m very impressed with Caffeine Ai. But I’m thinking it’s not the type of app to do a live demo with. Some of Dominic’s live demos took long, through no fault of his own. There were also bugs. Other influencers that demo Ai building apps speed through the parts where AI is building and processing.
In the future, I hope Dominic just shows a pre-recorded video or just images showing just the prompts and the final product. He can even show the functionality of the final product since it’s already up. That’s how the Caffeine event in SF ended with the hackathon winners, and it was great!
I appreciate it because it was the real product. It’s bugged, but if he didn’t show it, those that used it would tell about it and then we’d think they were just highlighting things for marketing.
It was the real product, so yes that one instance where the cart button didn’t work is now telling us that it still is an alpha. And we should all know that LLM vibe coding isn’t perfect right now wherever you look. The fact that they use such state of the art solutions right now called from a canister means that they’re really not that far behind.
But with the second prompt Dom went all the way to the checkout screen hosted on Stripe. An ICP canister building an e-store all the way with working Stripe integration immediately empowers all sorts of dropshippers and other small businesses to use this tech for their own purposes.
We didn’t even talk about the winners. They built entire apps made to solve real problems. Who thought about their drinking water? Or tracking road problems that can notify government officials? That’s where the real value is, and it transcends the tech for having these problems solved, and Caffeine is built for that kind of stuff.
So, I’m happy with the output. Sure he found bugs in front of the crowd, but it’s real, grounded, and it is what it is - an alpha that has ways to improve using the LLM base and the higher reasoning/output testing. Also, user data isn’t lost between versions even after failed attempts. So it’s definitely a WIP that already has highly practical applications we can’t even fully list here.
I think it also depends on the event or stage. I get there are times where you’d want to show everything, and I also see times when you would want to show just the best parts.
For instance, if you wanted to market this to a non-technical group who are potential buyers, it wouldn’t be good optics showing all the bugs and the time taken to complete a product (assuming it’s longer than 10 seconds lets say) during a marketing event. I don’t want to see all the geeky details, the bugs, the different files, etc.. Just show me the prompts and good end result.
Demo needs to be tailored based on the event and target audience.
Live demos across all tech and software industries are notorious for having glitches and things not going 100% smoothly, it the nature of a live demo, especially one in Alpha. Feels authentic. A button not working is really not a bug deal at all. I use AI every day at work to develop software and 50% is throw away or iterated over.
