nezaj

Agreed. It is curious how the agent got nudged to add auth in that one.

I did another ad-hoc but this time I added "Use guest auth" to the prompt. This way you don't need to enter an email. Full prompt below

Create a habit tracking app where users can create habits, mark daily completions, and visualize streaks. Include features for setting habit frequency (daily/weekly), viewing completion calendars, and tracking overall progress percentages. Use guest auth

Aesthetic version: https://with-aes-guest-auth.vercel.app/

Non-aesthetic version: https://wo-aes-guest-auth.vercel.app/

I'd give the edge to the aesthetic one.

When you're experimenting on ideas, it's really nice when time to hello world is near zero. It's also nice when you aren't limited to a certain number of dbs or your projects get paused. This makes it so much more delightful to hack.

When you do want to get closer to the code, we think Instant provides a nicer abstraction for working with agents and getting deligthful experiences like a sync engine out of the box

Funny enough we added this in awhile back when it seemed more conclusive that this does matter.

But I was curious and just did an adhoc eval.

Here's a version with the aesthetic line included

https://with-aes.vercel.app/

Here's a version without the line

https://wo-aes.vercel.app/

Everything else is the same. Will let y'all be the judge which is better.

Both where made in one-shot with this prompt:

Create a habit tracking app where users can create habits, mark daily completions, and visualize streaks. Include features for setting habit frequency (daily/weekly), viewing completion calendars, and tracking overall progress percentages.

Always been able to host it! We’ve had docker compose instructions since open sourcing.

Instant has evolved quite a bit in the last 18 months. With all the new functionality self-hosting has become a bit more fiddly.

This PR is aimed at making the process for self-hosting even easier.

You can use `db.subscribeQuery` on the server to react to react to changes. We plan to add webhooks soon to make this even easier. And yes eventually we'd love to support SDKs in other languages too!

I think Stopa has a great answer here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711803

You can certainly use Instant without AI! We indexed on making the API easy to understand so projects built with Instant are easy to maintain. We also invested in our AX experience since we saw more folks coming to us when trying to build apps with AI

We use LWW on the attribute level which greatly reduces conflicts. There are certainly cases where you'll need a different CRDT but this works great for a lot of use cases.

Including Figma! https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

We've been around long enough that the LLMs already natively know how to use us!

If you give them a little bit of context they can use the platform fully.

PR in progress!

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

You can! Everything is open source and we have instructions on running the server with docker.

Working on making this even easier for folks https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495

Appreciate it! We thought it was a nice touch too and a fun way to highlight the power of Instant!

Realizing we didn’t highlight this as a use case — but you can use our ephemeral app feature (it’s free) to easily add your own interactive demos into essays!

Thank you!

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

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!

Thank you! Awesome work with Zero, been a fan of you since listening to your episode on the local first podcast!

Thank you!

Thank you!

We last updated our website when open sourced back in August 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281

Back then most folks weren't building full-on apps with AI yet.

Since then we've seen a large number of people find us through content on creating apps with AI. We felt our previous messaging didn't speak to that and we thought it was time for a refresh.

We also invested a lot to make the agent experience with Instant a delight!

We think this is an evolution :)

Stopa also gave an answer here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866

Not at the moment but something that we've started exploring!

Our thinking was to first get the DX/AX + feature set solid with Instant and then let folks bring their own Postgres

You can think of this as the number of devs. So if you're working on an app as a team you all can use the dashboard and CLI tools to manage the app.

No limit on number of end users for what you build

Stopa answers this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711254

But pairing Instant with Vercel works great too! We have a tutorial on how you can build an app with Instant and deploy it to vercel here

https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial

You can! The skill lives here

https://github.com/instantdb/skills

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 as you like, and focused on great DX/AX so agents found Instant easy to use too.

We do have a skill!

npx skills add instantdb/skills

Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!

For what it's worth, Instant is 100% open source!

https://github.com/instantdb/instant

Docs should be working now! If anyone else has issues please let us know!

Saw some discussion on twitter on which firms are considered tier 1. Was inspired to make an adaptive poll where users choose their favorite and least favorite firm to get a term sheet from when presented with four choices.

At the end of the poll you can see your own ranking as well as an aggregated results from the crowd.

I went with the choose favorite/least favorite mechanic because it felt like a better experience then just doing head to head.

With ~20 firms that's a lot of pairs you need to go through.

If you do triplets that reduces the pairs, but it was still too many rounds.

By doing min/max four at a time you can efficiently get implied preferences in ~20 rounds. This make it take only about 3-5 minutes to finish the full poll!

Love this. +1 for the Goodreads import! I think it will make it easier for people to try!

Adding a link to buy the books on bookshop in addition to Amazon could be a nice touch too to support local bookstores

We saw it do better at making counter-strike! https://x.com/instant_db/status/1999278134504620363?s=20

You're welcome!