Future Ideas for additional features

[makermelissa]

This is a continuation from #20 and a place to add ideas for new features for the Code Editor.

[makermelissa]

This is from #20 (comment):

This is more of a "way out there" idea and is probably impractical.

A GUI that allowed a person to create a program interface and add code to the widgets kinda like Visual Basic or Hypercard and it generates a CircuitPython program that somebody could download to a device. Maybe something for PyPortal to start with. Maybe it could make use of the displayio layout library and various UI elements we already have done.

[urfdvw]

What is more, add vibe coding ability to this Display UI builder.

[makermelissa]

Could you elaborate? I thought vibe coding was making use of AI to write the code for you.

[s-light]

so you mean a Drag&Drop GUI creator kind of thing?
as fare as i understand the displayio thing is a tree-like very structural thing.
so this should be relative easy to do from that point of view.
for the web-UI for this i think some research for a good fitting library for that kind of template / block-editing thing can give a good start..

i don't think that ai is needed in any way here -
we just need a UI for layout.
and these blocks (from the displayio options)
can easily be translated to code..

just brainstorming:
if the editor generates a class in a separate file myDisplay.py
the API for the main code could be something like:

import myDisplay

my_display = myDisplay()
my_display.values.myValueNameXXX = 42
my_display.values.myValueNameYY = "Hello World!"
my_display.show()

this way you could easily use variable names in the GUI designer and later fill theme with the real data from your application..

or something in this direction that of course nicely fits the current displayio api..

[urfdvw]

Just adding ideas here, not sure what it takes to get there.

There could be a word that you can talk to the editor saying "I want to make a calculator, where top of the screen is the display and bottom are ther buttons bla-bla ..." and displayIO code can be generated there and you can use.
UI work was the work I found benefit the most from vibe coding and usually direct and accurate.
It might take getting a RAG on existing displayIO examples etc which I don't know.

Actually this can be taken even furether not limiting to UI work.
There could be a world you can talk to the microcontroller and saying what you want it to be.
Say, if we prompt engineer telling the LLM the hardware definition of the pins and preferrals, for example of circuit playground, and user says: "Hi Circuit Playground, can you be a traffic light" and it write neo-pixel code to be a traffic light.

The reason I brought this up is I do see small kids talking to my microcontroller demos like that at maker-faire. I mean very small kids who are not old enough to understand for loops. It is possible that this can even lower the barrier for kids to enter the maker world.