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Show HN: We've built an AI agent with a dev environment that can build real apps (databutton.com)

20 points by martolini ↗ HN
Hey HN,

Databutton is an AI agent with a full-stack dev environment that it shares with the user, which writes, tests and deploys apps using React as the frontend and FastAPI as the backend.

Today, it's a way for non-professional coders to ship real full-stack apps end-to-end. The agents are leaning on the users quite frequently to give feedback and guide the development journey through prompts, images, etc.

The aspiration is to increase the "autonomy" slowly, but we're built on the philosophy that users should always be able to ship real apps that can be used, even if they have to rely on other tools and LLMs to paste into our code editor.

We're mostly using gpt-4o as the underlying LLM, and we've had a few hundred people helping us test and ship apps over the past few months -- and now we're opening it up for more people to help us make it better by providing feedback and shipping awesome apps.

We'll try to do more updates here on HN as we progress further, as I know there's a lot of talented ai-devs / LLM-devs and enthusiasts here and I'm sure there's plenty of stuff we can learn from y'all.

5 comments

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randomonad
That is great! It seems from the video like you need to know how to code to use it or at least the concepts of API vs front end and so on. Since if it makes a mistake you need intuition on how to fix it. Tools like this really speed things up though. I like that the end result is ejectable (you get code) vs. being locked into some nocode platform.
martolini
yeah you do need to at least want to learn the difference between a UI and an API. None of our customers thus far are coders, though -- but most have worked close to software in some role (like a pm/marketer in a software company)!
meiraleal
It does look good until we get to the generated apps, they look so bad. It gives reason to people complaining that most AI generator apps look like toys rn.

I'd recommend develop a UI/UX library specifically for the app generation that creates good looking components that can be changed with simple flags/properties (changing flex direction, changing to grid, responsive, etc).

martolini
Yeah, we've had a very functional focus so far - only using chakra and tailwind, so you need quite a lot of prompting to make something visually pleasing. I really hope we don't need to develope our own UI/UX lib though as there's so much great out there -- we'll likely lean into a set of good libs (like shadcn, daisy etc) to make it easier to make stunning UI's too.