Congrats, Instant team. Genuinely happy for y'all.
Thank you! Awesome work with Zero, been a fan of you since listening to your episode on the local first podcast!
Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
61–70 of 133 posts
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#62Any example more complex in the backend?
Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#63An honest question - why would we need any frameworks at all for vibe coded apps? I can just tell the coding agent to use pure HTML5/Vanilla JS/CSS on the frontend and pure whatever on the backend and it would do it. No need for hundreds/thousands dependencies. For deployment I can ask the coding agent to do the same.
same reasons human do. context and abstraction.
I can get rid of irrelevant abstraction bloat that way and make code perfectly tailored for what is needed. This was traditionally expensive which led to abstraction being packaged in frameworks.
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#64An honest question - why would we need any frameworks at all for vibe coded apps? I can just tell the coding agent to use pure HTML5/Vanilla JS/CSS on the frontend and pure whatever on the backend and it would do it. No need for hundreds/thousands dependencies. For deployment I can ask the coding agent to do the same.
You don't necessarily, but each token costs money for the AI to spit out. And probably more money when that output is used as input later. Delegating to a library makes sense financially.
With local inference on pretty decent local models we have nowadays (Qwen-3.5 and better) it's not much of a concern anymore.
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#65Moose here, congrats! This is the real "firebase alternative", not Supabase. Supabase is good, but it's just hosted Postgres + user login. People who are asking "why would I need this" don't get how difficult scalable data storage is with user permissions. Would absolutely recommend this if it's good. Been in this space for ~7 years, and made a high-perf realtime DB as well. Will contact you guys directly. Some conce…
Thank you for the deep feedback Moose!
Agreed lots of opportunity for simplification. There’s so much context in this space.
When talking about why sync we mention optimistic updates, multiplayer, and offline mode. To motivate the complexity of sync we talk about websockets, optimistic queues, and IndexedDB. To explain how we work we talk about triples, datalog, and CTEs.
We try to give a clean interface so devs don’t need to worry about this complexity, but yea it’s been an ongoing iteration to make both easier and transparent to understand!
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#66Is 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…
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Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few reasons: 1. Unlimited projects: when you spin up traditional backends, you usually use VMs. It's expensive to start many of them. With Instant, you create unlimited projects 2. User experience: traditional CRUD apps work, but they don't feel delightful. I you want to support features like multiplayer, offline mode, or optimistic updates, you'll have to write a lot more custom infra. Instant gives you these out…
>multiplayer How does it compare to photon networking? I've been using photon and webrtc mostly. I haven't had any issues, but I'm always interested in finding better solutions!
Photon looks interesting! I am not too familiar with it, but from what I understand Photon and WebRTC are for communicating messages between clients. Those messages can be very fast, because they aren't blocked by writes to disk. Instant has two similar services, Presence & Streams. The primary sync engine is more for storing relational data.
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#68Any example more complex in the backend? Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?
> Any example more complex in the backend?
The home page has some examples of complex startups that use Instant as their core infra:
https://www.instantdb.com/#:~:text=Startups%20love%20Instant
> Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?
Yes. This may feel foreign, but we think it's one the best ways to do permissions. We were originally inspired by Facebook's EntPrivacy. When you have permissions at the object layer, you can be more confident that _any_ query you write would be allowed.
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#69How does security and isolation work? If someone else's account is compromised, how do I know I won't be? If instant is compromised, how do I know I won't be?
If someone else's account is compromised, you would not be, because apps are logically separated. There would be no way for the compromised or uncompromised account to ever see your data. If Instant is compromised, then that's a lot more dangerous. We minimize this risk following security best practices: keeping data encrypted at rest, keeping secrets hashed at creation time, etc.
Oh they’re logically separated. Thanks for explaining that. Now I’m certain nothing could possibly go wrong.
/s
Re: Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
#70Congrats on the 1.0 milestone!
I had a Show HN that built with Instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 The common request from that thread was to add guest auth, and few months later Instant had it baked in, so it was really easy to add that feature. Great dev experience :)