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Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

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Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#1

Post by frankgrecojr »

I’m Frank, the Head of AI Engineering at Superblocks. We’re a platform for enterprise developers to build and host mission-critical internal apps.

Today we launched Superblocks AI and are excited to hear feedback from the HN community!

Superblocks AI combines the power of the Superblocks drag-and-drop App Builder with robust AI code generation, code optimization, code explanation, mock data generation, and API call generation across SQL, Python, JavaScript, JSON and HTML.

We built Superblocks AI with the intention to streamline some of the repetitive and often confusing aspects of building internal tools, here’s a brief overview:

Generate Code: LLMs like ChatGPT have quickly become a critical part of developers' lives and we wanted to bring that experience natively into our product. The response is streamed for the best UX, similar to Chat-GPT, and can be modified before use.

Explain Code: Understanding someone else’s code for large internal engineering teams is often a challenge. Highlight code and Superblocks AI offers an explanation that you then have the ability to add as a comment.

Edit Code: You can make alterations to code by highlighting it and choosing prompts like optimize performance, enhance readability, or something custom. We've added an inline code diff view for easy verification of changes.

Generate API Calls: You often want to make an API call but need to spend 30 minutes looking up the documentation and crafting the correct call in Postman. We provided a way for you to give a prompt, and Superblocks AI will generate REST and GraphQL queries for APIs like Stripe, Salesforce, your favorite SaaS provider, and more.

Generate Mock Data: This enables faster UI development by generating mock data for components like tables, charts, grids etc., which can be especially handy during prototyping.

I'd love to hear feedback from the HN community on how you think this feature should evolve over the next few months!

Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps
superblocks.com

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#2

Post by ttul »

Superblocks is cool, but... when I tried building a simple web hook receiver, it totally failed because the sender of the web hook had their own particular notion of how authentication should work. And Superblocks was rigid in its concept of "web hook". There is no way to write arbitrary request handling code to get around this limitation.

As with all low-code / no-code solutions, you can't please all the people all the time. But I felt the design choice in this particular case was overly rigid and with little justification.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#3

Post by frankgrecojr »

ttul wrote: post #2

Superblocks is cool, but... when I tried building a simple web hook receiver, it totally failed because the sender of the web hook had their own particular notion of how authentication should work. And Superblocks was rigid in its concept of "web hook". There is no way to write arbitrary request handling code to get around this limitation. As with all low-code / no-code solutions, you can't please all the people all…

Thanks for your comment! We're always open to product improvement around our Workflows product. I agree there's more features we need to add to service a robust set of web hook use cases.

With that being said, there may be ways to accomplish what you're looking for with the current state of our Workflows feature so feel free to send me a DM on Twitter or Linkedin.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#4

Post by Topfi »

I honestly really like this, both conceptually and from an implementations point of view.

Assisting in the creation of single purpose functions is, in my experience, by far the most reliable use case for LLMs in regard to code creation at this point in time, yet is something I haven't seen many companies really lean into. In fact, the only other example I know of is Cloudflares Workers Workshop [0], which I have been waiting for since May.

What I especially like about the implementation showcased in your demo videos though was the visual component. Some subtle animations, effective use of diff, methods being editable before pasting, it all felt very cohesive and thought through, which is something I can't say about every company utilizing OpenAIs APIs. Seems more like something that can serve a real value add for users, rather than just jumping on LLMs because it's the hot thing this summer.

Really hope more people are experimenting with the "visual implementation" of LLMs, using animations and graphs to communicate LLM outputs has a lot of unused potential currently.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cursor-the-ai-assist...

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#5

Post by frankgrecojr »

Topfi wrote: post #4

I honestly really like this, both conceptually and from an implementations point of view. Assisting in the creation of single purpose functions is, in my experience, by far the most reliable use case for LLMs in regard to code creation at this point in time, yet is something I haven't seen many companies really lean into. In fact, the only other example I know of is Cloudflares Workers Workshop [0], which I have been…

Thanks for the kind words! A lot of thought went into the user experience. You can expect the same level of thought with all of our future AI features.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#8

Post by Kiro »

frankgrecojr wrote: post #7
Kiro wrote: post #6

I thought Superblocks was blockchain company. Is this a pivot?

We have never been a blockchain company. However, I do believe there is one with a similar name.

Not just similar name but the same URL as well: https://twitter.com/getsuperblocks

I presume you bought the domain name from them in that case.

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