Today we will be working on the following application we will be focusing mainly on evolving the UI and improving its functionality I will give you some context and documentation to review first and once your are confidence we will work on evolving the UI code. Review the Overview and then the example project from the documentation to get up to speed. Then i will provide you my current codebase for your review. And finally i will provide you my feature/roadmap to apply your brilliant insights!
High-Level Project Overview
This project aims to create a dynamic and user-friendly web-based interface (Workbench) for your AI-powered coding assistant, currently implemented as a CLI tool. The web UI will leverage the FastHTML library to provide an intuitive and responsive experience.
Core Goals:
1. Seamless CLI Integration: Adapt the existing CLI tool's functionality for web use, allowing users to interact with the assistant through a browser-based interface.
2. Enhanced User Experience: Improve upon the CLI experience by providing real-time updates, streaming responses, interactive UI elements, and enhanced visualizations.
3. Advanced Features: Implement features like project management, variable embedding, and any other capabilities specific to your CLI tool.
Technical Approach:
* The web UI will be built using FastHTML, a Python-centric library for creating server-rendered hypermedia applications.
* FastHTML's FT components will be used for declarative HTML generation, allowing for a clean and efficient development process.
* HTMX will be used to enhance interactivity, enabling dynamic content updates without requiring extensive custom JavaScript.
* WebSockets will be implemented to provide real-time feedback and streaming responses from the CLI tool.
* Existing CLI functions will be modularized and adapted for use in FastHTML routes, creating a seamless integration between the backend and the UI.
Target Audience:
The Workbench UI is designed for developers who want to leverage the power of your AI coding assistant in a more intuitive and user-friendly environment.
Expected Benefits:
* Improved user experience and productivity through a dynamic and interactive interface.
* Enhanced accessibility to the AI coding assistant through a web-based platform.
* Increased efficiency in code generation, editing, and collaboration.
This project will transform your existing CLI tool into a more powerful and versatile web-based application, empowering developers to take their coding to the next level.

Hello friend please take a moment to review this example app so you can learn about a new framework i am using to build my own app after you get a chance to review this example i will show you my own project code and we will work on evolving my project. This first example is just to get you up to speed!:

Full Example #2 - Image Generation App
Let’s create an image generation app. We’d like to wrap a text-to-image model in a nice UI, where the user can type in a prompt and see a generated image appear. We’ll use a model hosted by Replicate to actually generate the images. Let’s start with the homepage, with a form to submit prompts and a div to hold the generated images:

# Main page
@app.get("/")
def get():
inp = Input(id="new-prompt", name="prompt", placeholder="Enter a prompt")
add = Form(Group(inp, Button("Generate")), hx_post="/", target_id='gen-list', hx_swap="afterbegin")
gen_list = Div(id='gen-list')
return Title('Image Generation Demo'), Main(H1('Magic Image Generation'), add, gen_list, cls='container')

Submitting the form will trigger a POST request to /, so next we need to generate an image and add it to the list. One problem: generating images is slow! We’ll start the generation in a separate thread, but this now surfaces a different problem: we want to update the UI right away, but our image will only be ready a few seconds later. This is a common pattern - think about how often you see a loading spinner online. We need a way to return a temporary bit of UI which will eventually be replaced by the final image. Here’s how we might do this:

def generation_preview(id):
if os.path.exists(f"gens/{id}.png"):
return Div(Img(src=f"/gens/{id}.png"), id=f'gen-{id}')
else:
return Div("Generating...", id=f'gen-{id}',
hx_post=f"/generations/{id}",
hx_trigger='every 1s', hx_swap='outerHTML')

@app.post("/generations/{id}")
def get(id:int): return generation_preview(id)

@app.post("/")
def post(prompt:str):
id = len(generations)
generate_and_save(prompt, id)
generations.append(prompt)
clear_input = Input(id="new-prompt", name="prompt", placeholder="Enter a prompt", hx_swap_oob='true')
return generation_preview(id), clear_input

@threaded
def generate_and_save(prompt, id): ...

The form sends the prompt to the / route, which starts the generation in a separate thread then returns two things:

A generation preview element that will be added to the top of the gen-list div (since that is the target_id of the form which triggered the request)
An input field that will replace the form’s input field (that has the same id), using the hx_swap_oob=‘true’ trick. This clears the prompt field so the user can type another prompt.
The generation preview first returns a temporary “Generating…” message, which polls the /generations/{id} route every second. This is done by setting hx_post to the route and hx_trigger to ‘every 1s’. The /generations/{id} route returns the preview element every second until the image is ready, at which point it returns the final image. Since the final image replaces the temporary one (hx_swap=‘outerHTML’), the polling stops running and the generation preview is now complete.

This works nicely - the user can submit several prompts without having to wait for the first one to generate, and as the images become available they are added to the list. You can see the full code of this version here.

Again, with Style
The app is functional, but can be improved. The next version adds more stylish generation previews, lays out the images in a grid layout that is responsive to different screen sizes, and adds a database to track generations and make them persistent. The database part is very similar to the todo list example, so let’s just quickly look at how we add the nice grid layout. This is what the result looks like:



image.png
Step one was looking around for existing components. The Pico CSS library we’ve been using has a rudimentary grid but recommends using an alternative layout system. One of the options listed was Flexbox.

To use Flexbox you create a “row” with one or more elements. You can specify how wide things should be with a specific syntax in the class name. For example, col-xs-12 means a box that will take up 12 columns (out of 12 total) of the row on extra small screens, col-sm-6 means a column that will take up 6 columns of the row on small screens, and so on. So if you want four columns on large screens you would use col-lg-3 for each item (i.e. each item is using 3 columns out of 12).

<div class="row">
<div class="col-xs-12">
<div class="box">This takes up the full width</div>
</div>
</div>

This was non-intuitive to me. Thankfully ChatGPT et al know web stuff quite well, and we can also experiment in a notebook to test things out:

grid = Html(
Link(rel="stylesheet", href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/flexboxgrid/6.3.1/flexboxgrid.min.css", type="text/css"),
Div(
Div(Div("This takes up the full width", cls="box", style="background-color: #800000;"), cls="col-xs-12"),
Div(Div("This takes up half", cls="box", style="background-color: #008000;"), cls="col-xs-6"),
Div(Div("This takes up half", cls="box", style="background-color: #0000B0;"), cls="col-xs-6"),
cls="row", style="color: #fff;"
)
)
show(grid)

This takes up the full width
This takes up half
This takes up half
Aside: when in doubt with CSS stuff, add a background color or a border so you can see what’s happening!

Translating this into our app, we have a new homepage with a div (class="row") to store the generated images / previews, and a generation_preview function that returns boxes with the appropriate classes and styles to make them appear in the grid. I chose a layout with different numbers of columns for different screen sizes, but you could also just specify the col-xs class if you wanted the same layout on all devices.

gridlink = Link(rel="stylesheet", href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/flexboxgrid/6.3.1/flexboxgrid.min.css", type="text/css")
app = FastHTML(hdrs=(picolink, gridlink))

# Main page
@app.get("/")
def get():
inp = Input(id="new-prompt", name="prompt", placeholder="Enter a prompt")
add = Form(Group(inp, Button("Generate")), hx_post="/", target_id='gen-list', hx_swap="afterbegin")
gen_containers = [generation_preview(g) for g in gens(limit=10)] # Start with last 10
gen_list = Div(*gen_containers[::-1], id='gen-list', cls="row") # flexbox container: class = row
return Title('Image Generation Demo'), Main(H1('Magic Image Generation'), add, gen_list, cls='container')

# Show the image (if available) and prompt for a generation
def generation_preview(g):
grid_cls = "box col-xs-12 col-sm-6 col-md-4 col-lg-3"
image_path = f"{g.folder}/{g.id}.png"
if os.path.exists(image_path):
return Div(Card(
Img(src=image_path, alt="Card image", cls="card-img-top"),
Div(P(B("Prompt: "), g.prompt, cls="card-text"),cls="card-body"),
), id=f'gen-{g.id}', cls=grid_cls)
return Div(f"Generating gen {g.id} with prompt {g.prompt}",
id=f'gen-{g.id}', hx_get=f"/gens/{g.id}",
hx_trigger="every 2s", hx_swap="outerHTML", cls=grid_cls)

You can see the final result in main.py in the image_app_simple example directory, along with info on deploying it (tl;dr don’t!). We’ve also deployed a version that only shows your generations (tied to browser session) and has a credit system to save our bank accounts. You can access that here. Now for the next question: how do we keep track of different users?

Again, with Sessions
At the moment everyone sees all images! How do we keep some sort of unique identifier tied to a user? Before going all the way to setting up users, login pages etc., let’s look at a way to at least limit generations to the user’s session. You could do this manually with cookies. For convenience and security, fasthtml (via Starlette) has a special mechanism for storing small amounts of data in the user’s browser via the session argument to your route. This acts like a dictionary and you can set and get values from it. For example, here we look for a session_id key, and if it doesn’t exist we generate a new one:

@app.get("/")
def get(session):
if 'session_id' not in session: session['session_id'] = str(uuid.uuid4())
return H1(f"Session ID: {session['session_id']}")

Refresh the page a few times - you’ll notice that the session ID remains the same. If you clear your browsing data, you’ll get a new session ID. And if you load the page in a different browser (but not a different tab), you’ll get a new session ID. This will persist within the current browser, letting us use it as a key for our generations. As a bonus, someone can’t spoof this session id by passing it in another way (for example, sending a query parameter). Behind the scenes, the data is stored in a browser cookie but it is signed with a secret key that stops the user or anyone nefarious from being able to tamper with it. The cookie is decoded back into a dictionary by something called a middleware function, which we won’t cover here. All you need to know is that we can use this to store bits of state in the user’s browser.

In the image app example, we can add a session_id column to our database, and modify our homepage like so:

@app.get("/")
def get(session):
if 'session_id' not in session: session['session_id'] = str(uuid.uuid4())
inp = Input(id="new-prompt", name="prompt", placeholder="Enter a prompt")
add = Form(Group(inp, Button("Generate")), hx_post="/", target_id='gen-list', hx_swap="afterbegin")
gen_containers = [generation_preview(g) for g in gens(limit=10, where=f"session_id == '{session['session_id']}'")]
...

So we check if the session id exists in the session, add one if not, and then limit the generations shown to only those tied to this session id. We filter the database with a where clause - see [TODO link Jeremy’s example for a more reliable way to do this]. The only other change we need to make is to store the session id in the database when a generation is made. You can check out this version here. You could instead write this app without relying on a database at all - simply storing the filenames of the generated images in the session, for example. But this more general approach of linking some kind of unique session identifier to users or data in our tables is a useful general pattern for more complex examples.

Again, with Credits!
Generating images with replicate costs money. So next let’s add a pool of credits that get used up whenever anyone generates an image. To recover our lost funds, we’ll also set up a payment system so that generous users can buy more credits for everyone. You could modify this to let users buy credits tied to their session ID, but at that point you risk having angry customers losing their money after wiping their browser history, and should consider setting up proper account management :)

Taking payments with Stripe is intimidating but very doable. Here’s a tutorial that shows the general principle using Flask. As with other popular tasks in the web-dev world, ChatGPT knows a lot about Stripe - but you should exercise extra caution when writing code that handles money!

For the finished example we add the bare minimum:

A way to create a Stripe checkout session and redirect the user to the session URL
‘Success’ and ‘Cancel’ routes to handle the result of the checkout
A route that listens for a webhook from Stripe to update the number of credits when a payment is made.
In a typical application you’ll want to keep track of which users make payments, catch other kinds of stripe events and so on. This example is more a ‘this is possible, do your own research’ than ‘this is how you do it’. But hopefully it does illustrate the key idea: there is no magic here. Stripe (and many other technologies) relies on sending users to different routes and shuttling data back and forth in requests. And we know how to do that!

More on Routing and Request Parameters
There are a number of ways information can be passed to the server. When you specify arguments to a route, FastHTML will search the request for values with the same name, and convert them to the correct type. In order, it searches

The path parameters
The query parameters
The cookies
The headers
The session
Form data
There are also a few special arguments

request (or any prefix like req): gets the raw Starlette Request object
session (or any prefix like sess): gets the session object
auth
htmx
app
In this section let’s quickly look at some of these in action.

app = FastHTML()
cli = TestClient(app)

Part of the route (path parameters):

@app.get('/user/{nm}')
def (nm:str): return f"Good day to you, {nm}!"

cli.get('/user/jph').text

'Good day to you, jph!'
Matching with a regex:

reg_re_param("imgext", "ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|webm")

@app.get(r'/static/{path:path}{fn}.{ext:imgext}')
def get_img(fn:str, path:str, ext:str): return f"Getting {fn}.{ext} from /{path}"

cli.get('/static/foo/jph.ico').text

'Getting jph.ico from /foo/'
Using an enum (try using a string that isn’t in the enum):

ModelName = str_enum('ModelName', "alexnet", "resnet", "lenet")

@app.get("/models/{nm}")
def model(nm:ModelName): return nm

print(cli.get('/models/alexnet').text)

alexnet
Casting to a Path:

@app.get("/files/{path}")
def txt(path: Path): return path.with_suffix('.txt')

print(cli.get('/files/foo').text)

foo.txt
An integer with a default value:

fake_db = [{"name": "Foo"}, {"name": "Bar"}]

@app.get("/items/")
def read_item(idx:int|None = 0): return fake_db[idx]

print(cli.get('/items/?idx=1').text)

{"name":"Bar"}
print(cli.get('/items/').text)

{"name":"Foo"}
Boolean values (takes anything “truthy” or “falsy”):

@app.get("/booly/")
def booly(coming:bool=True): return 'Coming' if coming else 'Not coming'

print(cli.get('/booly/?coming=true').text)

Coming
print(cli.get('/booly/?coming=no').text)

Not coming
Getting dates:

@app.get("/datie/")
def datie(d:parsed_date): return d

date_str = "17th of May, 2024, 2p"
print(cli.get(f'/datie/?d={date_str}').text)

2024-05-17 14:00:00
Matching a dataclass:

from dataclasses import dataclass, asdict

@dataclass
class Bodie:
a:int;b:str

@app.route("/bodie/{nm}")
def post(nm:str, data:Bodie):
res = asdict(data)
res['nm'] = nm
return res

cli.post('/bodie/me', data=dict(a=1, b='foo')).text

'{"a":1,"b":"foo","nm":"me"}'
Cookies
Cookies can be set via a Starlette Response object, and can be read back by specifying the name:

from datetime import datetime

@app.get("/setcookie")
def setc(req):
now = datetime.now()
res = Response(f'Set to {now}')
res.set_cookie('now', str(now))
return res

cli.get('/setcookie').text

'Set to 2024-07-20 23:14:54.364793'
@app.get("/getcookie")
def getc(now:parsed_date): return f'Cookie was set at time {now.time()}'

cli.get('/getcookie').text

'Cookie was set at time 23:14:54.364793'
User Agent and HX-Request
An argument of user_agent will match the header User-Agent. This holds for special headers like HX-Request (used by HTMX to signal when a request comes from an HTMX request) - the general pattern is that “-” is replaced with “” and strings are turned to lowercase.

@app.get("/ua")
async def ua(user_agent:str): return user_agent

cli.get('/ua', headers={'User-Agent':'FastHTML'}).text

'FastHTML'
@app.get("/hxtest")
def hxtest(htmx): return htmx.request

cli.get('/hxtest', headers={'HX-Request':'1'}).text

'1'
Starlette Requests
If you add an argument called request(or any prefix of that, for example req) it will be populated with the Starlette Request object. This is useful if you want to do your own processing manually. For example, although FastHTML will parse forms for you, you could instead get form data like so:

@app.get("/form")
async def form(request:Request):
form_data = await request.form()
a = form_data.get('a')

See the Starlette docs for more information on the Request object.

Starlette Responses
You can return a Starlette Response object from a route to control the response. For example:

@app.get("/redirect")
def redirect():
return RedirectResponse(url="/")

We used this to set cookies in the previous example. See the Starlette docs for more information on the Response object.

Static Files
We often want to serve static files like images. This is easily done! For common file types (images, CSS etc) we can create a route that returns a Starlette FileResponse like so:

# For images, CSS, etc.
@app.get("/{fname:path}.{ext:static}")
def static(fname: str, ext: str):
return FileResponse(f'{fname}.{ext}')

You can customize it to suit your needs (for example, only serving files in a certain directory). You’ll notice some variant of this route in all our complete examples - even for apps with no static files the browser will typically request a /favicon.ico file, for example, and as the astute among you will have noticed this has sparked a bit of competition between Johno and Jeremy regarding which country flag should serve as the default!

WebSockets
For certain applications such as multiplayer games, websockets can be a powerful feature. Luckily HTMX and FastHTML has you covered! Simply specify that you wish to include the websocket header extension from HTMX:

app = FastHTML(ws_hdr=True)
rt = app.route

With that, you are now able to specify the different websocket specific HTMX goodies. For example, say we have a website we want to setup a websocket, you can simply:

def mk_inp(): return Input(id='msg')

@rt('/')
async def get(request):
cts = Div(
Div(id='notifications'),
Form(mk_inp(), id='form', ws_send=True),
hx_ext='ws', ws_connect='/ws')
return Titled('Websocket Test', cts)

And this will setup a connection on the route /ws along with a form that will send a message to the websocket whenever the form is submitted. Let’s go ahead and handle this route:

@app.ws('/ws')
async def ws(msg:str, send):
await send(Div('Hello ' + msg, id="notifications"))
await sleep(2)
return Div('Goodbye ' + msg, id="notifications"), mk_inp()

One thing you might have noticed is a lack of target id for our websocket trigger for swapping HTML content. This is because HTMX always swaps content with websockets with Out of Band Swaps. Therefore, HTMX will look for the id in the returned HTML content from the server for determining what to swap. To send stuff to the client, you can either use the send parameter or simply return the content or both!

Now, sometimes you might want to perform actions when a client connects or disconnects such as add or remove a user from a player queue. To hook into these events, you can pass your connection or disconnection function to the app.ws decorator:

async def on_connect(send):
print('Connected!')
await send(Div('Hello, you have connected', id="notifications"))

async def on_disconnect(ws):
print('Disconnected!')

@app.ws('/ws', conn=on_connect, disconn=on_disconnect)
async def ws(msg:str, send):
await send(Div('Hello ' + msg, id="notifications"))
await sleep(2)
return Div('Goodbye ' + msg, id="notifications"), mk_inp()