Show HN: A better visual builder for complex business logic (superblocks.com)
We just launched “Control Blocks”, a visual builder for backend business logic that enables developers to drag and drop “blocks” (conditional, loop, parallel, try/catch, variables etc.) onto a canvas and construct cohesive business logic that reads linearly like code.
The industry's approach to visual builders thus far has primarily been free-form flow diagrams where lines define the “control”. This approach works fine for a small set of blocks. However, as logical complexity increases, it quickly becomes impossible to read and debug. We wanted to take a much different approach that catered to the enterprise developer by retaining the same abstractions as code.
With Control Blocks, developers get a visual programming language that looks, feels, and scales like code. We provide the core primitives that allow you to build visually in Superblocks what you would through code. Some of these primitives, such as our take on parallelism, offer a much simpler abstraction than code. With this approach, operations like debugging and refactoring feel much more “native”. With this as our foundation, we’ve found that it is much easier to design features for testing, tracing, reusability, breakpoints, generative AI, and more.
On the technical side, we used this as an opportunity to improve our core execution engine so that it can provide the performance and reliability needed for enterprise usage. We migrated from TypeScript to Golang and started utilizing V8 for our binding resolution engine.
Read the linked blog and watch the embedded video and let’s have a conversation about your thoughts on our new take on this visual builder.
47 comments
[ 9.8 ms ] story [ 489 ms ] threadThere's something about the ability to drag on a try catch, use a native break block in a loop, etc. that feels very "like code".
Writing the code always ends up being easier and you can build visuals on that if you really need them.
Maybe this is closer to https://bubble.io/? (https://manual.bubble.io/help-guides/logic)
The risk is that the finer grained control stuff is too much like code ('you lost me at "loop" and "condition"', etc.), or not powerful enough to do the tasks that Retool isn't good at, without diving deep into the weeds, and you're not as good as Retool wrt the tasks that Retool excels at.
Definitely cool that you can extend it with code, though I haven't parsed how that works.
[*] https://scratch.mit.edu
Maybe you'd have more than one person setting this up - the engineer could write some of the details with the help of technical docs for the non-techie, but then someone experienced could provide someone less experienced with comments to follow or higher-level descriptions of blocks? E.g. At a high level there could be a human description that says "Load data: While there's more data to fetch ..." or "For each record, relabel fields..." but at a low level, it might say "While len(response) > 0, fetch data" or "Assign object fields x,y,z to response fields a,b,c".
I am excited to experiment with in-product guidance and a/b test copy so that we can make things just as intuitive for those who may not be as technical.
I know, I know. But it was designed for non programmers.
Their syntax in this case is
Perform . . . Times
The language might give some insight by offering a different perspective
The problem comes in the middle phase, after until deployment and before turning it in to code: version control, debugging, collaboration etc is all a nightmare with no/code and so if any experiment gets too big it’s a real pain to deal with.
Also:
> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Unfortunately we require email to signup but have a free trial. Users are able to test end to end in just a few clicks.
- can I self-host the whole suite without any internet connection?
- Are you targeting retool users?
- Are you targeting airflow users?
Superblocks, Retool, and Airflow provide different approach to solve similar problems. We've found that lots of customers prefer Superblocks.
I had i rapid look at the docs and, for what I understand, the agent is "dumb" and need to continuously contact your cloud (similar to github/gitlab ci runners) and also the user interface is on cloud. Correct?
What problem does that solve? I get that there are situations when a programming medium that doesn’t look, feel, and scale like code might be useful, but when the right solution is something that looks, feels, and scales like code, isn't that what is solved by code?
Most of our platform is centered around "integrations". For example, You'd have a visual block for an S3 integration (that would have been previously configured) that you'd use rather than initializing an S3 client in code for example.
We want to meet people where they're at though. If you want to write code, you can do that but if you want to use a more visual approach, you can do that as well.
Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36495680 - June 2023 (62 comments)
Of course, you can, as you point out, post outside Show HN but the same applies - the promotional effect has to be a consequence of interestingness so if you focus on interestingness, you get both and everyone wins.
I wonder if there's a lack of discoverability of HN rules for lots of folks or if I'm just too dense to personally figure it out.
As I've never posted one of these topics myself, is there some process hijacking in place that will divert folks to the specific applicable rules when they preface their subject with specific keywords?
The most important other links are https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, both of which are linked in the footer of every HN page.
Specifically I was wondering where the rules are for things like Tell HN, Ask HN, or Launch HN (which I think is reserved for Y Combinator companies right?).
However in reviewing the guidelines again which you've kindly pulled out of the footer for me, I'm now noticing I should explicitly not be asking you questions here and should instead be asking through the email address. My apologies.
Re Launch HNs - yes, that's for YC startups - here's a link to the instructions I send founders, in case it's of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html.
And while I'm at it, here's what we send them about HN job ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobguide.html.