mgummelt

You can't compare the accuracy of speech recognition to LLM task completion rates. A nearly-there yet incomplete solution to a Github issue is still valuable to an engineer who knows how to debug it.

Airtable itself lets you expose simple forms to the public internet.

Then there are dedicated form tools like Fillout that let you build more complex forms that integrate with Airtable.

Plato (https://plato.io) is free for up to five users, then $20/user/month

(Disclaimer: I'm a founder)

I was only there for a few months!

If revenue was stalled, the investors would have written it off and deferred to the founders.

One factor that no one seems to have noticed is that both cofounders, Ravi and Joshua, have already built fairly big companies. Ravi was the co-founder at Heap (he took over my co-founder spot after I left), and Joshua was the CTO at Benchling.

Both of those companies have raised >$100M. After that success, the prospect of continuing to run a middling company in the shadow of Retool isn't very appealing.

Neat. But why did you build this instead of just using Jasper?

> tools in general are a hard sell, maybe an extremely hard sell.

All business software are tools.

> I have yet to see it in practice

I don't know where you work, but automated continuous deployment has been an industry standard for fifteen years.

There are lots of examples in the use cases section of any low-code vendor, but in short, most internal tools are not in the horizontal categories you listed. They're in vertical, industry-specific categories at SES (Software-Enabled Services) companies.

A quick commerce startup, for instance, is unlikely to find an inventory tracking app off-the-shelf that fits their workflow, since existing ERPs are not going to fit their workflow.

Cool. How do you use it to generate the frontend CRUD interfaces?

How do you use ChatGPT to write CRUD apps? Do you mean Github Copilot?

It depends what you mean by CRUD app.

Strictly speaking, the answer to your question is Airtable.

Equals is an actual spreadsheet with read-only access to your warehouse. It's used for analytics and accounting.

Plato is a visual database, similar to Airtable, with read-write (configurable) access to your production database. It's used for operations.

Cool. You might give our app, Plato, a shot as well. It gives you an Airtable-like UI on your database.

https://plato.io

Agreed. So far, building macros (https://www.plato.io/blog/introducing-macros), we've found that if you provide an easy and immediate way to map program elements to their meaning, non-techies can understand pseudocode in the form of linear lists of actions, even with branching/looping via indentation.

Founder of https://plato.io here.

We support concurrent editing, so you see updates from your teammates in realtime, but we just haven't built a frontend for it yet, so you don't get the visual indicators a la Figma of where your teammates are and what they're doing.

Email me if you want to chat more: mgummelt@plato.io

Mostly, yea. It's generated from the sequence of actions the user takes in the UI, with a little bit of inference so we can detect, for example, that a user actually is trying to update the first row in a filtered table, rather than a specific row with a specific ID.

And they can be triggered in lots of different ways (buttons, forms, events), not just keyboard shortcuts.

We're not looking for partnerships right now, but message me and I'm happy to chat about visual programming. Max/MSP is the OG (though we of course are bullish on macros vs. flowcharts).

Definitely, though the semantics of field mappings often only exist in a user's head, so will need to be explicitly defined.

English prompts will no doubt be a big part of Plato, though. We're still figuring out exactly where the line is between English and traditional UIs. Have you read any good analysis on the subject? Here's one that explores the limits of LLMs: https://magrawala.substack.com/p/unpredictable-black-boxes-a...

Shameless plug, but Plato (https://plato.io) is a PG frontend.

Email me if you don't find what you need: mgummelt@plato.io.

We've run some experiments, and the answer is "sort of...sometimes...for some things".

One of our customers, for instance, records macros that upload new users from their Plato tables into their Hubspot CRM, and doing that field mapping is a lot easier in a formal system like a macro than in English.

It seems use cases that can tolerate more ambiguity are more amenable to LLMs, since that's what English is best at.

Ah, this is an overloading of terms. Plato virtual columns are not computed columns. They're new storage.

Not at all :)

Do you have a link or instructions on how to create virtual columns in Django Admin?

Gallery view? Where we're going, we won't need gallery view.

Yes. Subscribe to our email list on our homepage.

You're speaking my language. I think you'll love what we're cooking up. Stay tuned.

Yep, lots of users need on-prem/VPC deployment. It's next on the list. If you subscribe to our email list, you'll be the first to know when it's ready. In the meantime, we can set up an SSH tunnel for you if you email us.

I think low-code and really SaaS itself has made "Shadow IT" here to stay. Gone are the days of centralized IT. The sprawl and integration of disparate computing systems is the new normal.

But many of the engineers we talk with want to provide a self-serve environment for tooling, because it takes a lot of work off their plate that they can redirect to creating products and infrastructure. Data teams provide self-serve sandboxes to their teammates for analytics. We think engineers will come to see the importance of providing tooling sandboxes as well.

The user you're trying to connect with might not be configured in your DB. Want to shoot us a message over Intercom (in the bottom-right)? We can help debug.

Yep, it's a one-to-many autogenerated backlink, helpful for seeing every e.g. purchase for a user.

The lack of backlinks is one of the big frustrations I've had in other DB apps, since "this thing has many of these" is such a common pattern.