krishvs

Really impressive. I'm in the market for such a solution for our internal AI coding systems - how do you compare to the opensource https://huggingface.co/osmosis-ai/Osmosis-Apply-1.7B?

I am assuming your models are not opensource/openweights?

I'm quite bullish about low-code tools now. Especially for building back office systems like ERPs or operational tools. From my experience most failures in such project implementations have been due to mismanagement in the requirement gathering phase and also development happening in silos where the team building has no real understanding of the business process workflows.

But with gpt-3.5 - these tools can really inlock the ability of non technical people to build products. Maybe outsystems should have a gpt chat interface that builds software on its platform directly from the requirements of the end user instead of any intermediate human development team.

Ok.....so you expect the scientists who are working on space systems to better put their efforts to solve a (hypothetical) rape culture?

How do you think their skillsets translate into solving rape culture?

Terrible news. He will be missed. My heart breaks for his wife and kid. RIP Chris.

Having used low-code tools successfully to build ERP systems for the past few years.

I feel low code tools can only really disrupt development once they solve the problem of requirements gathering from customers/ end users and also formally describe change management in low-code as well. As long as there is ambiguity in requirements - code or low code makes no difference.

This is a good point. Most comments about the rewrite in code being easier might actually be because the functional requirements from the business users have already been made clear without the ambiguity that might have arisen when developing from scratch.

Based on your experience would you be comfortable to list a few of the no-code tools to avoid when taking maintainability into account? Would be useful.

Companies in the middle east ( Saudi, Oman etc ) are required to follow very rigid localization + sponsorship rules in both ownership/legal structure as well as in employee hiring.

I am curious to know more on how to plan on automating it. Would be very valuable in the Middle east region if possible.

I was in the Uae for 5 days last week and travelling again tomorrow. For me it looks like pre-covid times - everything is open. Cricket matches in stadiums to dubai expo. They report < 100 cases per day but no one really believes those numbers to be true.

Mask wearing( atleast properly ) was maybe 40-50%. Countries like Oman with lower vaccination rates felt much safer because everyone seemed to take mask wearing much more seriously.

The third point about 2 alphas is a big one. Will save you a lot of heartbreak and headache in the future.

This is an excellent framework to validate a low-code/ full-stack frameworks as ERPs are complex beasts. I would like to also add( especially for opensource low-code frameworks ):

#6 Can it generate pdf and excel reports

#7 Does it support scheduled jobs/tasks

#8 Can you choose to execute logic in the backend ( this does not seem to be the case for retool etc which only support frontend js )

#9 Can I extend with my own js, css and backend libraries

#10 Is it horizontally scalable and stateless

#11 Drag and drop ui builder that is not hard-coded to a single css framework and that generates code that can be modified.

I have not yet found any low-code framework that fits into these benchmarks

Absolutely agree with this point. At the company I work for whenever we create reports its always done twice or thrice - a browser version, a pdf that is printable and an excel version for business users to download and play with.

Waseem seems to have moved onto the accounting/finance world now as the CEO of Pilot. This seems to me to be an even bigger jump than kernel dev to chat software. The variation is amazing!

After seeing the video..its comically bad.

Congrats on the launch!

Having worked on the SMB billing and accounting space for 2 years in India - its a really really tough space to monetise profitably. The market size seems huge from the outside but its a tough nut to crack.

The space is also hyper-competitive now with khatabooks, dukaan etc spending 100s of crores with no revenue.

Its seems like what you are building is a mini-ERP for SMBs in India. If you are touching AP, AR - do you have tally integration? Pretty much every SMBs auditors will ask for it.

All the best!

Wow - the 4 stages of product development seems quite spot on from my experience working on b2b enterprise software products.

No doubt that the Finance team is generally the most powerful entity in shaping a companies direction both internally as well as in your clients organisation. Finance teams love control, are (mostly) completely risk-averse and change averse. The same can also be said about badly run IT teams.

I have seen product/automation implementations being deployed seamlessly in all departments from operations to procurement but completely fail due to the finance teams. In extreme cases I have seen finance teams have so much power that they even override the CEOs decisions to make implementations fail if they feel that they are loosing control or do not like the new process workflow that the implementation brings in.

For digital transformation projects the implementation team needs to speak the language of finance, operations as well as IT. Otherwise the chances of the implementation really succeeding is close to nil.

JVM or python just for the ecosystem. kafka, debezium, workflow engines(camunda), ORMs etc - java libraries might not be as nice to use as ruby gems but some are really rock solid for your use-case.

But that being said, anything really - rails/node etc most would work just fine for your use-case

Great article. The table composed by psychologist May Seagoe fits the description of some of my friends and colleagues who I perceive as gifted perfectly.

Looking for some advice.

We have written several microservices primarily for websockets in Elixir. They are great with literal zero maintenance costs..but how do Elixir developers handle the following when going all in:

1. Long running workflows - there do not seem to be popular frameworks like camunda, jbpm, temporal or cadence for elixir

2. Integration libraries - similar to apache camel

3. Inbuilt scripting engines to run user scripts like nashorn, graaljs or groovy

We really enjoy working with rails and would like to go all in into elixir. But the ecosystem of available frameworks seems to always come in the way and makes us choose spring boot or rails.

Very very interesting. Few questions:

Are you onboarding suppliers on your platform with their own supplier portal for collaboration/chat? Or is only catalog data?

Does the RFI, RFQ etc processes happen within the system or outside?

How does your sourcing software integrate with existing supplier selection modules, contracts lifecycle management modules ( for compliance, audit etc) like SAP or Oracle that might already be deployed by the customer?

Is this similar to SAP ariba or coupa but with catalogs predefined?

Low-code: Outsystems, appian, Apex, odoo(not really low-code for the most part)

RPA: robotframework - along with python+java

Also upgrades need to be carefully planned when using low-code tools as we have seen more breaking changes when compared to popular opensource frameworks.

Yes - over the past 2.5 years. We have built products for customers that handle 100s of millions of dollars in transactions using low-code tools along with RPA. While its really great to get started..roadblocks tend be major when compared to opensource frameworks like rails or spring boot.

At some point the low-code became more-code than our usual spring boot/rails approach. Integrations with libraries that the platform does not contain functionality for is a major headache.

I think a sweet spot would be a low-code/no-code platform with minimal abstraction built on top of currently popular web frameworks.

Your story is very similar to mine, except I am currently also working for my family business with no means to escape by just quitting and moving to another company.

Has completely extinguished my love for software/product development. Managing people/clients has made me start hating humanity :). But I don't know what else to do.

I am currently just moving forward, hoping that things become better in the future.

Thanks for sharing! Sounds like you are having a lot of fun!

It seems like Zinc is highly profitable. Now that you are running Assembled - is Zinc on autopilot?

I am also curious to know..why you decided to go for VC funding for Assembled when Zinc could help bootstrap it.

Regarding the SQL builder - Is it a visual editor that allows me to explore my database and create queries?

Also curious to know how you would differentiate your offering from say retool or other low-code builders which also support multiple databases and have chart components?

I am assuming that with screen rights, a company can expose a dashboard built using retool to their customers as well.

Looks great!

How do you sandbox custom js code. Can we choose if it runs on the front-end or server-side?

Most of the low-code opensource builders seems to run it on a sandbox in the frontend using realms..but this is not great if a screen needs to perform calculations that affect financial data like a mini POS, tax calc etc

I think you and the GP comment both have valid points. Being unnecessarily negative gets us nowhere..but I do think for the most part VC funding has made things much much harder for startups that want to bootstrap.

VCs have created a winner takes all mindset. I think this is a net negative to the entire ecosystem.

The costs are 10x more for marketing and sales than it was maybe 10 years ago. Some might say do content marketing, promote on social media etc..these are long term strategies that make zero sense for founders starting from scratch with no following.

The costs for building products have become minuscule but marketing costs have skyrocketed.

I am from India but have lived in the Middle East ( over a decade) and the US( few years ).

I see very little difference among the middle and upper middle class people of these countries nowadays. With globally connected social media everyone thinks they are unique ( maybe rightfully so ). Just because you are born in India or China you are not going to be thankful for whatever life has given to you.

Western values( or is it global ) as far as uniqueness seems to be the dominant thought process atleast in the metros.

I see the problem described in the article among my friends here. Everyone is depressed, anxious or having an existential crisis.

Sounds good but does this scale in the long term? Looks like a resource placing firm.

Not sure about japan, but in India it is expected that on average as an employee you get a 10 to 15% hike year on year primarily due to inflation pressures.

How would this company be able to afford this if they are both reducing prices for customers while simultaneously increasing base salaries. Wouldn't the employees leave after 2 or 3 years as the hikes would not be possible after sometime?

This looks great! Is it possible to capture the demo environment once and then create multiple demo variants by editing ui text or data using a wysiwyg editor later? Since this is a static version?