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Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB (getadb.com)

39 points by nezaj ↗ HN
Hey HN! We made GETadb.com, so it's easier to get agents to build you full stack apps. You don't need to give them any credentials. Just by loading a GET request, they get access to a database, a sync engine, and abstractions for auth, presence, and streams.

To see what the agent sees, you can load https://getadb.com/new

There's two fun things about how it's implemented:

1. If you curl the home page, it the agent content rather than human content. We do this by detecting the 'Sec-Fetch-Mode' header. It's not perfect, but gets the job done for Claude Code et al.

2. For an agent to spin up an app, they make _two_ fethes. (1) getadb.com/guide tells them to generate a uuid, and fetch (2) getadb.com/provision/<uuid>. We did this, because just about half of the popular web-based app builders cache URLs globally, even if you return no-store headers. To get around this we just instruct the agent to generate unique URLs

You may wonder: Why GET requests, rather than POST requests? It's because then you can build in surprising places. For example, we get meta.ai to build an app inside the artifact preview: https://artifacts.meta.ai/share/a/b80c7412-c3af-4088-b430-78efdfe8ea2d

Under the hood, this is possible because the whole infra is mult-tenant from ground up. We already announced how that works on HN, but if you're curious here's the essay for it: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture

23 comments

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dennisy
This is very cool!

But why do we need this? An agent can just have a local DB using SQLite for example.

debarshri
The agent thing is going a bit out of hand here.
aleda145
I appreciate this part of the agent instructions: `AESTHETICS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. All apps should LOOK AMAZING and have GREAT FUNCTIONALITY!`
wewewedxfgdf
So, give your LLM a URL and tell it to follow the instructions there?

Err, no thanks.

lucb1e
I thought this would be something about getting (downloading?) the Android Debug Bridge tool (adb) until I read further. Might want to capitalize DB as well (GETaDB), at least from my pov
offmycloud
The GET request method is supposed to be safe.

"Request methods are considered 'safe' if their defined semantics are essentially read-only; i.e., the client does not request, and does not expect, any state change on the origin server as a result of applying a safe method to a target resource." -RFC 9110 section 9.2.1

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#name-safe-method...

apsurd
I found https://www.instantdb.com/about very interesting; you built a new database! The triples stuff is cool.

For GETadb, it's a conflicting sell. The people that need "a db solved by AI" and fully abstracted are using app builders no? lovable, v0, manus. The people the are closer to the code and need an instant db would look to sqlite, render, supabase, neon. I'm all for another option, but then there's the realization that instandb is a new kind of db and I need to research into the value-prop vs the initial persona: "just solve my db problem with AI".

disclaimer: I'm a professional developer, doing an honest review. I may play around with it separately, later. So this marketing site did its job!

Retr0id
The biggest problem I see with vibecoded apps attached to a db is that the db is configured with exactly 0 access control (even if whatever backend does support it), and anyone can turn up and SELECT * FROM users, or even DROP TABLE users. How do you mitigate this?
runako
> we get meta.ai to build an app inside the artifact preview

Is this the kind of use case that is seen as valuable?

I joked a while back that LLM-brain was going to have people building bespoke apps on each HTTP request, and people thought I was exaggerating!

RIMR
reading https://www.getadb.com/guide

> Generate a random UUID yourself and use a different UUID each time.

LLMs are terrible at this. If you are relying on this to prevent collisions, it will fail badly.

stopachka
The UUID doesn’t actually affect the response. Every GET request still generates unique credentials each time, no matter what the value is that passes to /provision/<uuid>

We added it to help the app builders that do a lot of caching get unique responses. Turns out even if you set no-store cache headers, some app builders cache the pages. We tested this idea with those app builders and saw that they did generate uuids each time.

danpalmer
> Remember! AESTHETICS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. All apps should LOOK AMAZING

Why are your database instructions giving instructions about the UI design?

stopachka
Instant gives you a database, but it also gives you a sync engine that you can use in the frontend. We included this instruction because you would ideally use this to build an app.
reassess_blind
Is there an easy way to export all data to a format friendly with Postgres?
reassess_blind
I’ve tried this and I like it. I’d like a platform like Instant but with the addition of a web based text editor and Claude Code / Codex terminal (provide own subscription/api key) that lets you create and edit (create previews, then promote to production) the app from the same interface, alongside the managed db.
avinassh
I'd love to learn how the database is built and the sync works