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Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

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Re: Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

#21

Post by namanyayg »

jeswin wrote: post #20
namanyayg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our solution to that age old problem is to scope each new feature into its independent "app", which is sandboxed and walled off from the main source code

Built something like this, but mostly just read-only. Handling writes seemed harder (and a maintenance issue), so we didn't.

Yep, even our use cases are 80% read-only, and the rest where we write is very constrained and guardrailed.

Giving non-technical users the freedom to create new backend objects is definitely scary and not worth it imo!

What did you build, any links?

Re: Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

#22

Post by rachidsahde »

This is a very interesting idea, but I think the hardest part is not generating the workflows/apps — it’s making them safe. If the AI can read customer data and generate apps on top of APIs, prompt injection, cross-tenant data leaks, over-permissioned API calls, and generated-code bugs become serious risks.

Re: Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

#26

Post by namanyayg »

eddy-sekorti wrote: post #25

Hmm great, All these on the fly generated apps also needs some adult supervision to ensure secuirty and compliance. So you need to consider including some builtin security guardrails. But overall this is a nice idea.

Yup! That's one of the biggest things we build while shipping this for a Series B SaaS. It's invisible but one of the hardest technical challenges.

We've got guardrails before any code is generated and we put three layers of validation after the feature is ready to make sure it's using the correct data and it's functioning for the use case that the customer asks for.

Re: Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

#27

Post by namanyayg »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #24

What if software shipped with a software engineer? https://manuel.kiessling.net/2025/11/04/what-if-software-shi...

Nice article. That's basically what we do. We also make the created code saveable and shareable so they can reuse what they've already built

Re: Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

#29

Post by ManuelKiessling »

namanyayg wrote: post #27
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #24

What if software shipped with a software engineer? https://manuel.kiessling.net/2025/11/04/what-if-software-shi...

Nice article. That's basically what we do. We also make the created code saveable and shareable so they can reuse what they've already built

I think the main difference, and the angle that makes your approach much more feasible, is that what users of your solution build fully lives „outside“ the core application that they build against, right?

While my approach is that users would modify the core application itself (even if initially in a sandboxed copy), which would be a lot more powerful, but also a lot more complex, with many more hard questions that would need to be answered, like how to deal with data and security and so on.

Re: Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder

#30

Post by namanyayg »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #29
namanyayg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice article. That's basically what we do. We also make the created code saveable and shareable so they can reuse what they've already built

I think the main difference, and the angle that makes your approach much more feasible, is that what users of your solution build fully lives „outside“ the core application that they build against, right? While my approach is that users would modify the core application itself (even if initially in a sandboxed copy), which would be a lot more powerful, but also a lot more complex, with many more hard questions that w…

very true! we sandbox and keep it independent of the main codebase, which makes it easier to build and share new features.
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