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Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

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Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#31

Post by hungryhobbit »

I knew this would be yet another garbage copycat library the moment I saw "new paradigm" in the title. When I actually looked at the webpage, I found I was not at all wrong.

P.S. I genuinely don't want to hate on the work of motivated devs, creating something useful for the community, and trying to share it. That's a great thing, and we want more of it!

But when some asshat comes in with an ai slop library that's redundant with a dozen other solutions (all of which people actually use in production to solve problems) ... and claims that they are creating new paradigms ... it feels to me like that makes things harder for every real new contribution.

All the stuff we want is signal, and crap like this just adds ego-based noise that blocks the signal.

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#32

Post by wtfdeveloper »

manojlds wrote: post #23
pavlov wrote: post #2

The overuse of blue and purple gradient fills on the landing page is a telltale sign of AI slop. I’m sorry, maybe it’s shallow, but that makes me close the tab.

Don't judge a book by its cover. In this case, a library by its website.

Thanks! We are definitely learning from this post about things to do, is by far not our strong side

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#33

Post by recursive »

seattle_spring wrote: post #28
recursive wrote: post #25

All the field relationships seem to be expressed in strings. This suggests that you might not be able to use auto-complete or build-time syntax or type checking on them. I like the general idea, but that would be a big downside if I'm understanding correctly.

If done properly, autocomplete w/ Typescript and string literals should work just fine.

In that case, it seems that the live demos in stackblitz have not been done properly.

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#34

Post by hungryhobbit »

manojlds wrote: post #23
pavlov wrote: post #2

The overuse of blue and purple gradient fills on the landing page is a telltale sign of AI slop. I’m sorry, maybe it’s shallow, but that makes me close the tab.

Don't judge a book by its cover. In this case, a library by its website.

You should absolutely do that! If a library can't even be arsed to present itself in a reasonable way, how can you possibly trust it to do real work well?

And to be clear, I have a public website created (and designed) by Claude. But the key difference is that I used my brain, and iterated with Claude to make the style not look like AI slop.

Like anything with AI, you can't just fire off a prompt and expect a good anything (code, design, whatever). You have to put effort in ... and all signs show the people behind this library aren't.

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#35

Post by wtfdeveloper »

seattle_spring wrote: post #28
recursive wrote: post #25

All the field relationships seem to be expressed in strings. This suggests that you might not be able to use auto-complete or build-time syntax or type checking on them. I like the general idea, but that would be a big downside if I'm understanding correctly.

If done properly, autocomplete w/ Typescript and string literals should work just fine.

We will indeed explore this approach, would be great to hear your thoughts too! Would you consider sharing some more insight by dropping a comment here? https://github.com/golemui/golemui/issues

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#36

Post by nilirl »

Ok, I love it.

Can you simplify how form dynamism works? I skimmed the docs and saw 'states', but it didn't immediately click how it works.

Do we build a tree of rules outside of the components? Are states attached to each component, bottoms-up, and then the form tree is managed by the library?

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#37

Post by todotask2 »

Why did your release jump from 0.17.0 (2026-06-08) to 1.0 in such a short time?

If I use Tailwind, BEM or Boostrap, how hard it will be to customise? Flowbite have a few pre-made UI.

Shoelace UI is based on Web Components, now that it got bigger:

https://webawesome.com/docs/components/

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#38

Post by hungryhobbit »

wtfdeveloper wrote: post #16
nu11ptr wrote: post #10

As someone just starting out with the JS ecosystem, how does this compare to something like SurveyJs?

Honest caveat, none of us have really used SurveyJS, so correct me if I'm off. Biggest overlap is the JSON-schema idea, which is our first point here: 1. A JSON engine. The form is governed by a JSON definition that you can store in a DB, version, diff, or generate it with LLMs as a validated JSON. 2. We provide also 28 headless components (and growing) that you can style with CSS variables. We offer APIs so you can…

If you don't even know what tools exist in the ecosystem, how can you possibly know that your tool even scratches a new itch ... let alone "creates a new paradigm"?

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#39

Post by wtfdeveloper »

nilirl wrote: post #36

Ok, I love it. Can you simplify how form dynamism works? I skimmed the docs and saw 'states', but it didn't immediately click how it works. Do we build a tree of rules outside of the components? Are states attached to each component, bottoms-up, and then the form tree is managed by the library?

Depending on the DSL you choose (JSON or Programmatic) you declare reactivity slightly different, but pretty much, we have states and inlined expressions.

If states didn't click initially that's fine, you can still cover a lot of ground using inlined expressions: https://golemui.com/dx/features/states/inline-when/

Basically you can nest the states, so you can build a tree of states that way.

Or you can leverage the DX to have fully reactive components.

Re: Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

#40

Post by wtfdeveloper »

todotask2 wrote: post #37

Why did your release jump from 0.17.0 (2026-06-08) to 1.0 in such a short time? If I use Tailwind, BEM or Boostrap, how hard it will be to customise? Flowbite have a few pre-made UI. Shoelace UI is based on Web Components, now that it got bigger: https://webawesome.com/docs/components/

I guess you are implying how mature we are?

If so, I think you can see this on our github commit log:

https://github.com/golemui/golemui/commits/main/?since=2025-...

Note the date! 2025-09-01, that is the date of our first commit, 1962 commits later we published v1.0

So you can see this has been well thought

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