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Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

instantdb.com

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Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#11

Post by stopachka »

jamest wrote: post #5

They actually deliver on the promise of "relational queries && real-time," which is no small feat. Though, their console feels like it didn't get the love that the rest of the infra / website did. Congrats on the 1.0 launch! I'm excited to keep building with Instant.

Thank you! We spent a lot of time with the demos on the home page, the essays page, and upgrading the docs.

We're going to redesign the dashboard in the next few weeks.

One interesting observation from our users: though they use the dashboard less in some ways (the AI agents spin up apps and make schema changes for them), we found people use them _more_ in other ways. Instant comes with an Explorer component, which lets you query your data. We found users want to engage with that a lot more.

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#12

Post by nezaj »

nharada wrote: post #10

This is super cool and exactly what I've been looking for for personal projects I think. I wanna try it out, but the "agent" part could be more seamless. How does my coding agent know how to work this thing? I'd suggest including a skill for this, or if there's already one linking to it on the blog!

We do have a skill!

npx skills add instantdb/skills

Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#13

Post by stopachka »

ghm2199 wrote: post #9

For people like me — who are kind of familiar with how react/jetpack compose/flutter like frameworks work — I recall using react-widget/composables which seamlessly update when these register to receive updates to the underlying datamodel. The persistence boundary in these apps was the app/device where it was running. The datamodel was local. You still had to worry about making the data updates to servers and back to…

I would say NextJS focuses a lot more on server-rendering. If you use the app router, the default path is to render as much as you can on the server.

This can work great, but you lose some benefits: your pages won't work offline, they won't be real-time, and if you make changes, you'll have to wait for the server to acknowledge them.

Instant pushes handles more of the work on the frontend. You make queries directly in your frontend, and Instant handles all the offline caching, the real-time, and the optimistic updates.

You can have the best of both worlds though. We have an experimental SSR package, which to our knowledge is the first to combine _both_ SSR and real-time. The way it works:

1. Next SSRs the page

2. But when it loads, Instant picks it up and makes every query reactive.

More details here: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/next-ssr

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#15

Post by nezaj »

chrysoprace wrote: post #3

Is InstantDB no longer about local-first or is the AI angle just a marketing thing?

We built Instant to optimize for two things:

We wanted to make a tool that (a) would make it easy to build delightful apps, and that (b) builders would find easy to use.

This got us into making things that touch both local-first and AI.

On the local-first side, we took on problems like offline-mode, real-time, and optimisitc updates.

On the AI side, we built a multi-tenant abstraction, so you can spin up as many apps as you like, and focused on great DX/AX so agents found Instant easy to use too.

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#16

Post by stopachka »

asdev wrote: post #6

I wonder if people really need this. How many people are really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear etc? I'm guessing 99% are CRUD and I doubt that will change. Even if so, would you want to vendor lock into some proprietary technology rather than build with tried and tested open source components?

> really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear

I think there's two surprises about this:

1. If it was easier to make apps multiplayer, I bet more apps would be. For example, I don't see why Linear has to be multiplayer, but other CRUD apps don't.

2. When the abstraction is right, building apps with sync engines is easier than building traditional CRUD apps. The Linear team mentioned this themselves here: https://x.com/artman/status/1558081796914483201

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#17

Post by LoganDark »

nezaj wrote: post #12
nharada wrote: post #10

This is super cool and exactly what I've been looking for for personal projects I think. I wanna try it out, but the "agent" part could be more seamless. How does my coding agent know how to work this thing? I'd suggest including a skill for this, or if there's already one linking to it on the blog!

We do have a skill! npx skills add instantdb/skills Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!

Can I view the source code of this skill / install it manually? I am incredibly not a fan of automated installers for this type of stuff.

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#18

Post by nezaj »

LoganDark wrote: post #17
nezaj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a skill! npx skills add instantdb/skills Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!

Can I view the source code of this skill / install it manually? I am incredibly not a fan of automated installers for this type of stuff.

You can! The skill lives here

https://github.com/instantdb/skills

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#19

Post by risyachka »

asdev wrote: post #6

I wonder if people really need this. How many people are really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear etc? I'm guessing 99% are CRUD and I doubt that will change. Even if so, would you want to vendor lock into some proprietary technology rather than build with tried and tested open source components?

Yeah I kinda agree. Considering llms write most of the code today, the need for fancy tech is lower than ever. A good old crud app looks like a perfect fit for ai - its simple, repetitive and ai is great at sql. Go binary for backend and react for frontend - covers 99.9% use cases with basically zero resource usage. 5 usd node will handle 100k mau without breaking a sweat.

Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

#20

Post by nezaj »

minantom wrote: post #14

how is this better than vercel?

Stopa answers this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711254

But pairing Instant with Vercel works great too! We have a tutorial on how you can build an app with Instant and deploy it to vercel here

https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial

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