I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess. I downloaded Xojo 2025 R3 and decided to try out Jade (their ‘integrated’ AI assistant). First, you have to sign up for an anthropic account which is fine, I guess since I’m just kicking the tires.
Wow. I am shocked at how bad it is. It can’t actually see any of your project code unless you copy/paste it into the TextField. Likewise, it can’t actually do anything to your code. We joked about it being Clippy a while back and that’s an unfair comparison to Clippy since it could actually do something for you.
As someone who’s using AI every day in VS Code this is unbelievably bad in comparison. I can’t believe they shipped this.
I think you’d be better off saving it in Text format, opening it in VS Code and having Copilot analyze it. It might not get it right all the time but it would be better, faster, since it could read the entire project.
As somebody which is working with jetBrains Ai and Github CoPilot every day I can imagine what people believe they will get for their money. And I can imagine what people’s need for AI applications helping th developer.
And the best is: I can imagine what XoJo delivers. That’s why I knowed in front of it what will come out. Crap at all. It is the simple try to present Ai for XoJo cause it shall look like a modern language.
The result is like everything they present. But with their language there is a clear fundamental reason why AI is not the right concept. When Copilot began they trained their AI model for long time. With millions of developers. The same on Jetbrains AI site.
XoJo can’t train an AI model with millions of developers. Cause there are only a few developers. And that results in a bad UI experience. Also not elping is their API change in this.
So it is a self made problem of the XoJo guys. They wanted an Ai model to show: hey we have AI assistant for coding. It is like Android. They wanted to present it while this is needed for an XPlat-Software-vendor. At the end they presented something with only a small portion of the functionality it should have. (For example tables with max 1 column which are a list and not a table).
This example exactly shows what XoJo today is: a too small company for all of this platforms and functionalities which is not able to build the stuffs they promise. I guess in 5 years the AI is - may be - trained enough to be usable.
If it WOULD be half-baked then it would be MUCH better - this is “OOOPS - I forgot to turn the oven on … ” level unbaked. This is just unbelievably bad, and they should never have released it in its current state.
Never mind comparisons with other tools, this is even bad by Xojo’s standard.
I watched the 2025 R3 demo and even during the video the AI gave an API 1 answer. I take some solace in our predictions of API 2.0 confusing new users with forum and web responses from old API 1 coming true. Even the LLM’s are confused. And I’m sure that their prompts behind the scenes says use only API 2 unless explicitly told otherwise. Oh well, not my problem.
Trying to give Geoff advice about what anyone else, including actual paying customers might like, is pointless
As long as Geoff is enamoured with it or thinks its a good idea you will get
well we know better than you do what you want
or some variation of that as if they have a statistical model that says what most people want
The reality is Geoff wants it so to heck with everyone else
I keep going back to the fact that they (Xojo) do not use the product like real-world developers do. If they did they’d know BEFORE development starts on how developers want to use it and then code accordingly. Instead, they give us half-baked, ‘minimum viable’ features that don’t work well for real developers.
I woke up really early today and took the new DesktopGrid for a spin. Hooboy. It’s missing some basic features that a real world developer needs. Sure, works great for the simple example projects but doing something really dynamic is a real chore. If I feel like self-flagellating I’ll continue to bang on it when I’m bored. But probably much like DBKit I’ll just give up since I don’t care all that much. I’ve attempted to create my own in the past and it’s not a trivial task in Xojo to make something that works well for thousands of rows when using Containers.
” level unbaked. This is just unbelievably bad, and they should never have released it in its current state.