My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.
Have you tried Windmill?
Retool AI
21–30 of 80 posts
Re: Retool AI
#22Nice. Would it be fair to say this is directly competitive with Zapier in terms of creating AI-powered workflows?
(Retool PM here) Our automation product Workflows (https://retool.com/products/workflows/) now has an AI actions block so it's easy to build flows with steps like “summarize text” or “classify image”. Our approach is to make it easy to chain different steps together into flows whether those steps are code (JS/Python/SQL), API calls, database queries, or LLM prompts.
Zapier is no-code, catering more towards a citizen developer audience, where we’ve built Workflows with professional developers in mind. We typically see customers turn to Workflows when they want scalable self-hosting and more customization options (e.g. complex branching/looping, source control, custom error handling) than what Zapier is offering.
Re: Retool AI
#23My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.
Have you tried https://lowdefy.com ?
(Shameless plug, co-founder)
Re: Retool AI
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the spam detection work? Does chat gpt output something that your application can understand, like {isSpam: true}, or does it output a sentence in english?
It outputs both - { isLikelySpam: boolean, reason: string } Then we have an inbox app (also made in Retool) that our support team uses to manually review any submissions that are isLikelySpam = true. The helps to understand why it was flagged. Our use case is for a form builder ( https://fillout.com ) but I imagine this type of use case is pretty common for any app that has user-generated content
I'm interested in this aspect of llms too, are you simply just passing it some input (email, customer message) and asking chat gpt to decide if it's spam? Do you provide any prior examples of spam / not spam or just rely on the knowledge already embedded within the model?
Spam detection is a classic example for classification problems. I guess I'm trying to gauge whether there's an entire suite of traditional problems that llms solve well enough by simply asking a question of the base model. I've found a few areas in my own work where this is the case.
Re: Retool AI
#25My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.
Hey I'm on the team at Retool and this is a place we're spending a lot of time right now. We're still working through the challenge of showing the depth of the IDE while balancing the goal of a lot of new users to maybe just get an admin panel or support dashboard that connects to their existing db or salesforce.
I'd love to hear from you (or anyone else reading this) on how your getting started experience went, particularly if you found yourself wanting to just eject into writing a script or app elsewhere. I love to pair on apps whether it's moving existing code into Retool or starting fresh to see the hurdles. My email is my HN username @retool.com
BTW just sent a twitter DM, thanks again for the feedback.
Re: Retool AI
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It outputs both - { isLikelySpam: boolean, reason: string } Then we have an inbox app (also made in Retool) that our support team uses to manually review any submissions that are isLikelySpam = true. The helps to understand why it was flagged. Our use case is for a form builder ( https://fillout.com ) but I imagine this type of use case is pretty common for any app that has user-generated content
I'm interested in this aspect of llms too, are you simply just passing it some input (email, customer message) and asking chat gpt to decide if it's spam? Do you provide any prior examples of spam / not spam or just rely on the knowledge already embedded within the model? Spam detection is a classic example for classification problems. I guess I'm trying to gauge whether there's an entire suite of traditional problem…
We give 2-3 examples and find that it works pretty well (few shot fine tuning) but haven't tried actual fine tuning yet so I don't have a 1-1 comparison.
We also have other spam filters that are not LLM-based. One of the main benefits of the LLM-based approach is that it's good at catching people who try to avoid detection (e.g. someone purposefully mis-spelling suspicious words like "pa$$word")
Re: Retool AI
#27Hi all, eng who worked on vectors @ Retool here. We’re excited to get HN’s feedback on a new product I’ve been working on: Retool vectors. There’s been a lot of hype around AI, but as I was thinking about what we could launch, there were really very few AI apps that are today _actually_ delivering business value. For example, there are tons of chatbots, summarization bots, etc., but it wasn’t clear how to use them. T…
Congrats on the launch! Definitely felt the pain of building a custom ETL into a vector db for a recent LLM project. Is there a way to use this independently of the Retool UI builder?
Re: Retool AI
#28My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.
Have you tried Windmill?
I love Windmill. I've built some handy internal tools for populating a smoke forecasting app's daily data, some dumb UIs for crud interfaces, and various workers and schedules. I could do it all without windmill, but I actually really like the scaffolding it provides.
Re: Retool AI
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how many projects like this exist, is this just to generate leads for retool sales? Does this actually make money?
When I was building our support chatbot powered by a vectorized DB, I couldn’t actually find a project that helped with syncing Intercom chat data, Discourse community forum data, and web crawling data into a vectorized database. Do you have any suggestions? This was really a “scratch my own itch” product (not something to “generate leads for retool sales”), so genuinely asking out of curiosity! (If there are better…
Not hating, just asking - thanks for the answer! My personal observation is there are a bunch of llm + vectordb solutions, I agree the other integrations are key, but I think we both know they are tractable problems given sufficient motivation. I've also been following some of the push back on vectordb as the best way to solve this kind of problem. Overall, I was hoping to understand what retool stood to gain with this approach and I got the answer :).
Re: Retool AI
#30Hi all, eng who worked on vectors @ Retool here. We’re excited to get HN’s feedback on a new product I’ve been working on: Retool vectors. There’s been a lot of hype around AI, but as I was thinking about what we could launch, there were really very few AI apps that are today _actually_ delivering business value. For example, there are tons of chatbots, summarization bots, etc., but it wasn’t clear how to use them. T…
Congrats on the launch! Definitely felt the pain of building a custom ETL into a vector db for a recent LLM project. Is there a way to use this independently of the Retool UI builder?
Thanks! Yes so under the hood it's all in a postgres DB with a pgvector column + some metadata. If you go to retool database, you can grab the connection string and use the embeddings with your own apps. I'd like to open this up to bring your own database and integrate with other common vector DBs (Chroma, Pinecone, Mongo vector, etc) next