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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

#91

Post by solarkraft »

What a delightful demonstration. The AI hook is brilliant, but under-explained. I expected a paragraph on how to quickly get running with my assistant (edit: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial seems to be that, though it focuses on using the SaaS and creating an account).

It’s fun to see highly reactive apps converging on Triples, Datalog and Clojure. I never got very warm with Clojure and find Datalog a little weird, so Instant‘s abstractions are highly welcome! Surely the InstantQL-Datalog translator will be usable as a separate component, this would be super useful for me.

In general, this sounds like a lot of things done right. It sounds VERY close to just what I wish existed.

I guess I understand the choice of Postgres since this seems to be primarily focused on being SaaS. It might not matter much when the backend is Clojure anyway, but an embedded database like SQLite might make it a little simpler to deploy locally.

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

#92

Post by dewey »

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't using the most popular open source framework + most popular open source database be a much better fit as there's much more training data and you don't lock yourself into yet another framework?

I'd just go with Rails + Postgres and have all the documentation and options open to me.

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

#93

Post by walthamstow »

storus wrote: post #64
IncreasePosts wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if you've got a £5k laptop

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

#94

Post by patwolf »

I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.

One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.

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

#95

Post by stingraycharles »

dewey wrote: post #92

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't using the most popular open source framework + most popular open source database be a much better fit as there's much more training data and you don't lock yourself into yet another framework? I'd just go with Rails + Postgres and have all the documentation and options open to me.

This is exactly it, and people trying to invent these new tools and formats (wasn’t there a “LLM optimized JSON alternative the other day) are seriously not understanding how LLMs are trained a tremendous amount on understanding JSON and XML and standard tools and frameworks.

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

#96

Post by sbochins »

This like many other attempts at this type of thing don’t understand the in distribution vs out of distribution aspect of ml models. Using something the model has the most training on will have the best outcomes. A new handcrafted programming language will perform significantly worse than a poorly thought out programming language that is widely used. Everything is going to revert to the mean as llms continue to progress.

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

#97

Post by bdcravens »

storus wrote: post #28

An 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.

It probably has more to do with the body of knowledge it draws on than the suitability. I assume it burns more tokens to stay vanilla, as more effort is involved in implementing patterns more readily available "off the shelf".

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

#98

Post by scoopdewoop »

Man, its hard not to have a reaction to another BaaS. Every "pricing" page really goes to show that engineering took a backseat to rent-seeking.

There is an incentive to take advantage of users ignorance rather than instruct them. There is no incentive to make self-hosting easy or secure or sustainable.

This is literally $600/month for 250GB of storage with no SLA. Cool "value add" bro.

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

#99

Post by nezaj »

scoopdewoop wrote: post #98

Man, its hard not to have a reaction to another BaaS. Every "pricing" page really goes to show that engineering took a backseat to rent-seeking. There is an incentive to take advantage of users ignorance rather than instruct them. There is no incentive to make self-hosting easy or secure or sustainable. This is literally $600/month for 250GB of storage with no SLA. Cool "value add" bro.

We’re 100% open source and have instructions for getting the server up and running via docker

We’re also working on a PR to make it even easier to deploy

https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495

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