vysakh0

This has become all too common with lastpass. I migrated out during their last incident. I wonder how does it keep happening and how do customers still continue.

This resonates a lot. The shift from "was I right?" to "does this actually help people?" changes everything. I've found that the engineers who got promoted fastest weren't always the smartest problem solvers, they were the ones who genuinely cared about the end outcome.

The hardest part is that user focus is sometimes at odds with technical cleanliness. You can ship something inelegant but useful, or elegant but slightly off from what people need. Most orgs mess this up by choosing elegance.

Duckdb is an excellent OLAP db, I have had customers who had s3 data lake of parquet and use databricks or other expensive tool, when they could easily use duckdb.. Given we have cursor/claude code, it is not that hard for lot of use cases, I think the lack of documentation on how duckdb functions -- in terms of how it loads these files etc are some of the reasons companies are not even trying to adopt duckdb. I think blogs like this is a great testament for duckdb's performance!

I'm ready to feed the context again if it gets better result. Is this convenience comes at a cost of better result?

In 2025, many SaaS companies are racing to define their AI strategy. While there are plenty of grand visions of fully autonomous “agentic” products, there’s also a more immediate, practical solution that’s surprisingly powerful: a chatbot-driven user experience.

At Databrain, we’re building a modern business intelligence platform. Anyone who’s ever used tools like Tableau or Power BI knows how complex these systems can become—so much so that companies offer certifications just to confirm you know where to click to accomplish certain tasks.

And it’s not just BI. Many SaaS products are brimming with features that users often struggle to discover. Customers scour documentation or call support just to learn how to perform a seemingly straightforward action. Why should users be forced to memorize new menus and workflows? Why invest so much cognitive effort into navigating a product?

Enter the chatbot-driven UX: Rather than forcing users to master every nook and cranny of your interface, a chat-based system lets them simply tell the AI what they want. The AI can guide them to the correct page, perform the requested action, and allow the user to verify or tweak the outcome in real time. It’s a natural stepping stone on the road to “agentic” interfaces, where the AI does most of the heavy lifting but still leaves room for human oversight.

I recently built a prototype to illustrate this concept. At Databrain, we plan to launch this feature soon as part of our platform’s evolution. We previously tested an “AI data assistant,” but it didn’t fully catch on—mainly because people want to trust the output, and they get concerned when it isn’t 100% accurate. Now, I’m convinced a “co-pilot” approach, where humans remain in control while AI assists in routine tasks, is the right balance. This chatbot-driven UX is our first step in that direction.

Ultimately, the idea is to minimize the user’s cognitive burden and accelerate the path to actionable insights. We’ll share more about our progress at Databrain in the coming days, but I’m excited to see how this approach changes the way people interact with complex SaaS products.

Looks interesting! Even without voice, it would feel great. Btw, I couldn't do any other actions like scroll or click on other links, it would be nice if there is a way to get back to the demo when needed.

It doesn't return the data as pandas dataframes, I think pandas ai would be a better if you're looking into something more specific to pandas and chat with db.

This is interesting! So it autocompletes based on the DB schema and improves a DB admin's workflow?

Just realised there is a key difference based on another comment. Adding the same again here.

I think it is the approach — especially on error where it fixes on its own. In Dravid for eg if you say “create elixir project” if elixir is not installed, it will try to install on its own and if there is architecture like for eg M1 related it will fix those errors and finally creating the elixir project. There is no hand holding required.

I think it is the approach — especially on error where it fixes on its own. In Dravid for eg if you say “create elixir project” if elixir is not installed, it will try to install on its own and if there is architecture like for eg M1 related it will fix those errors and finally creating the elixir project. There is no hand holding required. That’s the main difference

Thank you! I have a section for contribution, I want to add more examples on how one can contribute using the tool, they don’t need to do much. They can have an idea or suggestion and the tool can do the work for them. I want more people to contribute to make it better user experience and solved problem.

@kosolam I haven't extensively used aider.chat to compare. One option that exists in Dravid would be "dev server monitor" part, which listens to the errors as the dev server is starting and then autofixing it. But aider.chat is definitely feature rich with docker, playwright and several things. This (Dravid) tool is a minimal terminal specific coding framework.

@sigoden this is pretty neat!

@reallymental heheh, maybe I thought I need a realiable AI coding assistant like Rahul Dravid :) And I can say I'm so far relying it suited to my workflow.

@CGamesPlay

Metadata: For a fresh project that is initiated by this tool, it creates a base metadata file (drd.json in this case) and updates as and when there is new changes. For a new project, you can run a command `drd --i` which would initialise a metadata based on recursively checking each file content (multiple LLM calls).

Once the metadata file is created, for the subsequent questions it referes metdadata file for the releveant files and loads those file's content into context. For eg, i ask "can you refactor query's main", it would look for "src/query/main.py" and load the content into the context and then respond.

"dev server monitor": I have tried with scenarios when the module doesn't exists, and it installs and rewrites the modules, type error it fixes. It does all the fix each time and does the restart. I may be biased, it seems to work most of the times I tried. Even during the time if its fix is not correct, it gets it in the next attempt. Need to test in more scenarios.

Actually the main command if you try "drd 'create a sample elixir proj'" it will run into error coz elixir doesn't exist and it will try to install and recursively heal until it figures out similar to restart. I thought this is a great usecase, and I have been using this to create some other python projects. Thanks for pointing out "dev server monitor" could be a killer feature!!

Btw, this is tweet thread with videos attached for each example https://x.com/vysakh0/status/1811790449016779261

For the last two weeks I have been using Claude extensively for my coding experiments.

Made this CLI tool to automate it. And to fix errors by sending it back to the claude api. Also included the vision API to build based on images.

I built this using this tool itself partly.

Probably OpenDevin, Agents is the future, maybe even Cursor like autocomplete, for now I find this approach useful.

Added some examples in the README. Would love some feedback, this is my first python library that I published.

I think they are referring to this http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-... in the blogpost

I've not used phoenix yet, but looks like it has.

https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir#authentication

(Also see framework components of that page)

Great! Looking forward for the talk.

I was just searching around and was surprised to find there are lot, like a lot of libraries already that could potentially save more time

https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

Nice blog post, it was concise and to the point!

Saw this tweet[1] yesterday

"DHH just admitted he stole ideas from #elixir and @elixirphoenix to create ActionCable @railsconf"

Seems like elixirphoenix is on a right path! This tempted me to look into elixir and phoenix.

My Question: How do you think phoenix can save time for a web developer or a team of web developer?

Most of the time, I hear people talking about how fast their language or framework is. I think at the end of the day, all that matters is a tool that saves time (of frustration and redundancy) without any side effects. And you just wrote about one of the pain points -- deployment.

[1] https://twitter.com/kblake/status/590523627965059073

I have been using GNOME for almost all of my computing years, and even till now.

This news is shocking and outrageous.

This is very sad :( that a community project like GNOME is subject to such a threat.

This is really useful and fun to use. At first I din understand how to solve the problem, then realized the plate is related to the puzzle. Great work!

Since medium also depends on Twitter, his page is no longer available. I checked @N_is_stolen page, it is fresh. So, all his posts in medium is gone, just because there is a change in username?

Totally agree with you. When you said about the Facebook clone part, I had to nod my head even more faster :) coz I once built one, blogging it side by side http://vysakh.quora.com/Making-a-Facebook-clone-using-Rails-...

I just tried to play around with showterm. Why does it have a different theme? When I use Vim with solarized theme, showterm shows it in a different ugly way. http://showterm.io/15104fd85863532b74150 Am i doing something wrong?

Nice template, looks like an opinionated one . I see you have used ".env" file. I read somewhere when opensourcing apps its better to have all the env variables in .env, instead of using gem like https://github.com/laserlemon/figaro.

Also there is rails_composer https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-composer/ with many options to select css framework, servers, testing tools.

Use anything other than Rails

Seriously ? Anything?

Django and Nodejs is better than Rails

Why Django is better? The author seems to hook on to the concurrency aspect of nodejs(for what it was made) and compare with Rails.

Does the author know there are projects like JRuby, Rubinus, there are multi-threaded servers like puma?

One thing is very clear, the author is either writing articles for attention or does not like Rails' popularity. Classic link baiting! He has written 3 blog posts in total, all for the popularity.

Is it only me or anyone else facing issue installing the gem? Getting this error

ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::UnknownHostError) no such name (https://rubygems.org/gems/actionpack-4.0.0.gem)

Edit: Now it is working :)

This is one of the best needed extension. Also this gets user some idea on how each site treats users.

OP was talking about "Chef" a server configuration tool http://www.opscode.com/chef/