What do you mean plain English? It means there is no JavaScript. No typescript. No programming language whatsoever. Just plain English in a bunch of .txt files.

See the text-src directory for the source files.

The text files are "compiled" and automatically deployed to https://nie.avoguard.com/.

I wanted to see if I could build a server without writing any code, using only plain English. I wanted to understand how little or how much engineering skills you need to build a working web server.

I wanted to showcase what's possible to people who cannot / do not / do not want to write source code.

No, you can't just ask "build a server". That's too vague. The instructions have to be somewhat specific and guide the model to the proper usage. That means you need to understand the underlying libraries / frameworks to some extent.

As a software engineer, the experience coding in plain text is frustrating. The amount of text required to get precise outputs is significantly higher than writing the same in source code. But that's not the intended purpose. This should not replace programming languages. It should offer a pathway towards programming languages through a natural language.

You can try out the latest build at https://nie.avoguard.com/

On every push to main, the .txt files are automatically built and deployed to https://nie.avoguard.com. If you can't reach the deployment, it's probably because the generated code failed to build. Just try again later.

The endpoints paths are in general unstable (see caveats), but the server should always produce a root / HTML page lists all the endpoints in HTML format, and a /list endpoint that returns a JSON object listing the endpoints (or a JSON array, depending on how it feels that build 😬).

/ - should return a HTML page saying "Hello, AI world!", along with a list of all the endpoints /list - lists all the endpoints /quote - generates a random quote from a list of quotes that are generated at build time /ping - should return "pong"

All of them should be GET endpoints.

Can't reach these endpoints? See caveats.

These endpoints are not explicitly defined, but do frequently appear. /about - returns a short description of the server, or a 404 error /contact - returns a contact information, or a 404 error

Sometimes DELETE and POST endpoints appear.

The server is built using OpenAI API, but could use any other language model. The instructions for the model are written in plain English in a bunch of .txt files in text-src.

The text files are built using a node.js build script in /index.js, which is the only piece of human-authored source code in the project.

You can customize the server by editing the .txt files in text-src.

If you add new files, make sure to add them to the array in /index.js, so they are included in the build. The order of the files in the array is the order in which they are "built".

I'll improve this in the future.

See How to build for instructions on how to build the server.

Every build consumes about 4000 tokens of OpenAI API usage.

Since I'm not using stable generation of the server, every build is a surprise 😱.

With the same input, some builds might fail, some builds will succeed. It's a surprise every time! What a thrill! 🎢 You won't get that with the boring old programming languages 😂

Supply your OpenAPI credentials in the OPENAI_API_KEY environmental variable or in a .env file.

Then run yarn to install build dependencies and yarn build to build the server. The build will output to the dist directory.

If you come up with an interesting idea for a new endpoint, feel free to add a .txt file in the text-src directory and submit a PR.

If you want to improve the build script, feel free to submit a PR, too.

MIT