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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a developer does on Retool is tech debt.

You want to do a quick form to manage an app ? Let's build it on Retool, you will lose control of everything, you can't improve the form, you don't run the form, you can't apply the usual code review, ...

Visual coding is great for people who don't know how to code, but for developer that should be the thing to avoid at all cost. I have seen a company that instead of improving their coding environment they started progressively doing everything on Retool, what is going to happen the day Retool is down ? or increase their price ? or they bring a breaking change ? or ?

Don't get me wrong, I think the product is amazing, but it requires huge discipline, and this is never a good idea to depend on the discipline of people

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Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help:

1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing

2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components.

3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.

The git thing is only for on-prem.

Currently. Elsewhere in this thread the founder said they're aiming to make it available in the cloud as well.

I'd be a lot more comfortable playing with retool once that happens myself, might, by "only ... so far" appears to be the situaiton.

They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it, and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database entry

Hi! I'm an engineer here at Retool. I actually did build just this (a basic diffing logic tool) not long ago. It's currently behind a beta flag, but I opened a PR up this morning to get this to ship to production.

If you're a Retool user you can find it under the Beta section in your org settings. And yes, this is available on our cloud offering

Nice. Yeah you guys have tried to recruit me more than once or twice ;) one thing I would strongly suggest as you roll it out is setting a retention policy and throttling/squashing diffs as you can have users that make lots of edits and it can take up a lot of data and become hard to follow the logs for the end users! Great work coming up with this pragmatic solution, best of luck with the rollout, and congrats to the team!

I disagree, you can definitely improve the stuff you built in retool. As a dev it's saved me a lot of time from having to build non user-facing dashboards, etc that would otherwise take up a lot of time. Instead I was able to spend that time on the core features.

It becomes technical debt if you are focusing on the app, but if you are focusing on the data Retool has very little impact on your debt. You should still be processing and managing data with sql or python version controlled on git. What Retool does is commoditizing front end for building internal enterprise tools and letting you spend the resources and time on the data. The real value add of internal tools is data, UIs can change but the data doesn't. Unfortunately many digital IT projects put high focus on the frontend and they go badly because too little effort is put on the data, I think Retool solves that giving a standard cheap way of building decent looking frontends.

I’ve found the same in our use of it. It’s really hard to audit the code to understand what’s going on and I find myself clicking around trying to get some sense of how things fit together. The interface itself is pretty slow, which I find frustrating.

We’ve also had it explode on us a couple of times in production (on prem) and even reprovisioning it from scratch was a real struggle.

Things may have improved now (I try not to touch it these days) and I wish the team all the best with it. No doubt there are people out there for whom it will work well. But for me personally, I’ll be moving the things we’ve built using it into something else when time permits.

Sorry about these frustrations! Sending you an email to see how we can help :)

100% Agree about any non trivial retool immediately becoming a mountain of tech debt. We use retool extensively and have put a lot of effort into making a workflow that is vaguely manageable, but it's still pretty bad. And once you start using custom components it's even worse. It's also an incredible resource hog.

Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!

That's exactly why we built appsmith. A company's core tech stack should be built on open source technology so you're never held hostage by proprietary software. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Uh man let the guys at Retool relish their moment of glory for a second.

Ahhh so that's what Retool is. Your page does a much better job of explaining what these things are. And it looks like an interesting project - good luck!

Interesting project.

1. How soon will you announce pricing?

2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?

thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6 months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we can attract more contributors :)

I took a look as a potential contributor and noticed from spot checking it seems like bug fixes are getting merged without tests, which deters me from contributing to a project personally. Looks really cool, though!

Josh, thats a fair point. We merged a few fixes recently to quickly get rid of some bugs. We need to get stricter with our automated testing processes.

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