Hello folks, I have been iterating with nocodo for over a decade. My original idea, pre LLM era, was around a Spreadsheet to create an anchor for user's workflow ideas. User would interact with the sheets UX and it would generate relational model.
Since LLMs became good at generating code, I tried a full blown coding agent, similar to opencode, Claude Code, etc. But I keep coming back to one simple point: many people relate to the sheets UX very well. Accountants, freelancers, business owners/managers, etc.
I am building nocodo using the spreadsheets UX. If anyone remembers (or even uses?) MS Access - this is a good reference for me. The high level workflow is saved as a JSON schema by a schema designer agent. Then backend and UI flows are generated as YAML with separate set of agents. And finally actual Actix Web/Rust and Solid/Typescript code will be generated with API types upon an existing template: https://github.com/brainless/rustysolid
This technique should use very few tokens, compared to a regular coding agent and still deliver fantastic results for business/personal productivity apps. The entire setup can run on desktop (Tauri) and on the web (I make money) with hosting of generated apps as my selling point.
Pre-MVP is here: https://app1.nocodo.com/admin/ (there is no auth, but that will be added. But no tracking - all projects visible to everyone)
I am surely sending you an email. I live in a small village (eastern Himalayas, India) after giving up on city life, run a piggery and chicken farm along with ~ 6 hours of software work.
I am intrigued by products like these which gives "hands-on" a new meaning. Being a new farmer-engineer, this is the kind of work I would love to do.
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I think in this era of coding agents, more people feel empowered to build their own workflow automation. But for vast majority of non-technical folks, Claude Code or even Replit are not easy to use solutions. So I am taking inspiration from spreadsheets and using that as the primary UX to build a coding agent.
I keep trying Xilem and then egui or Iced. Xilem needs more widgets out of the box to be easy to build with. Slint is another option. I wonder what cross platform GUI framework (from any language) will finally become as common as Electron based apps or the vast number of native OS apps in Windows or macOS or Linux.
I keep going back to Tauri, which is practical to build desktop apps quickly but still uses HTML, CSS, JS to build the UI. You can use Rust web UI tools but then it is still (system) browser based.
I wish it's that simple. Not all components are LGPL, so when you're doing LGPL and you suddenly need some must-have-but-not-LGPL component,you're in trouble.
I gave it a decent shot, and I wanted to like slint, but I don’t.
It’s not a rust ui system; it’s a declarative ui language that happens to have a rust binding via macros so you can write the custom DSL.
It also has bindings for other languages.
It feels like a bunch of qtquick people got together and implemented a new runtime for qtquick. That might be the direction qt has gone, at the expense of their c++ qtwigets system, but it just feels… “electron app” to me.
If I wanted an electron app, I would just use electron.
If I wanted a non-native ui look and feel, I would use flutter.
Slint has nothing to do with elecron.
There is no browser under the hood so it is much more lightweight.
Slint has native looking widgets.
Slint DSL gets compiled to native code: no need for a runtime interpreter like in QtQuick
Something like GPUI probably, I would be quite happy with it if it wasn't so tied and restricted by the Zed's team (they reject PRs because they're not strictly related to Zed), there's even mobile fork.
Dioxus native would be second, but it's far far far away from being ready.
Not possible to do it via component. I've seen various, like custom user shaders or some silly basics like text justify (which is implemented in cosmic-text crate used by gpui). That's why it was forked.
The only things I don't like about this is a) your binaries will become huge and very slow to compile with optimizations enabled and b) it's dependence on GPUI and its unsure future direction (I'd like to see GPUI thrive outside of Zed but the maintainers have clarified that that's not the goal for now).
This is so cool. I have been in software for about 18 years but in the last few years I grew tired of the city life. My health was already affected by sedentary lifestyle - high blood glucose for many years.
I have been living in villages for about 5 years. I started a pig farm a month back. I have 16 piglets now. I still write software on a daily basis, a mix of client projects and own products. The pig farm needs about 2 hours of cleaning each day. I take care of cleaning. My business partner takes care of feeding.
I plan to grow the pig farm to a capacity of 100 pigs. It is a profitable business with roughly 30% return every 6-7 months. We give the pigs a lot more space and care than I have ever seen in any of those factory-style livestock business videos. With a 100 pigs, I will perhaps spend 5 hours a day in cleaning work - with more tools and employing a couple local folks.
Feel free to check out (links in my bio) or reach out if anyone wants to come and try this out in our little village in north eastern India. The village has large farms, growing all sorts of things.
Thanks! How do you earn or keep yourself afloat? I really like what you guys are doing. And similar orgs. I am personally doing the same, full-time. But I am worried when I will run out of personal savings.
I've been wondering this since they started it, mostly as a concern they stay afloat. Since Daniel does the work of ten, it seems like their value:cost ratio is world-class at the very least.
With the studio release, it seems to like they could be on the path to just bootstrapping a unicorn or a 10x corn or whatever that's called, which is super interesting. Anyway, his refusal to go into details reassures me, sounds like things are fine, and they're shipping. Vai com dios
Daniel is a very impressive guy. Well within the realm of “fund the people not the idea” that YC seems to do. Got a few bucks from them and probably earning from collaborations etc. Odds of them not figuring out a business model seem slim.
Companies have no idea what they are doing, they know they need it, they know they want it, engineers want it, they don’t have it in their ecosystem so this is a perfect opportunity to come in with a professional services play. We got you on inference training/running, your models, all that, just focus on your business. Pair that with huggingface’s storage and it’s a win/win.
Since LLMs became good at generating code, I tried a full blown coding agent, similar to opencode, Claude Code, etc. But I keep coming back to one simple point: many people relate to the sheets UX very well. Accountants, freelancers, business owners/managers, etc.
I am building nocodo using the spreadsheets UX. If anyone remembers (or even uses?) MS Access - this is a good reference for me. The high level workflow is saved as a JSON schema by a schema designer agent. Then backend and UI flows are generated as YAML with separate set of agents. And finally actual Actix Web/Rust and Solid/Typescript code will be generated with API types upon an existing template: https://github.com/brainless/rustysolid
This technique should use very few tokens, compared to a regular coding agent and still deliver fantastic results for business/personal productivity apps. The entire setup can run on desktop (Tauri) and on the web (I make money) with hosting of generated apps as my selling point.
Pre-MVP is here: https://app1.nocodo.com/admin/ (there is no auth, but that will be added. But no tracking - all projects visible to everyone)
Would love to know your thoughts.
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