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Comment by orliesaurus | Hacker News Reader

My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.

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Hey I'm on the team at Retool and this is a place we're spending a lot of time right now. We're still working through the challenge of showing the depth of the IDE while balancing the goal of a lot of new users to maybe just get an admin panel or support dashboard that connects to their existing db or salesforce.

I'd love to hear from you (or anyone else reading this) on how your getting started experience went, particularly if you found yourself wanting to just eject into writing a script or app elsewhere. I love to pair on apps whether it's moving existing code into Retool or starting fresh to see the hurdles. My email is my HN username @retool.com

BTW just sent a twitter DM, thanks again for the feedback.

Check out the Noteable plugin for ChatGPT to see where this could go

I recently discovered this combination and my mind was blown a bit.

The key part to me is ChatGPT --> Code --> Execute in real world (not sandboxed) --> achieve whatever you want out there via APIs.

I am eager to learn about how this works and maybe look to replicate or push for similar connectivity with other code execution / notebook environments (say Amazon Sagemaker)

If anyone can link me to disccussion groups, active communities or github projects that are toying with these ideas -- I would love to dive in.

Have you tried https://lowdefy.com ? (Shameless plug, co-founder)

Just went through the docs, I love it already.

I might actually use it in the next couple of months! I bookmarked it!

Awsome! With Lowdefy we tried to build a low-code framework that works like code. We’ve developed a schema in which to define applications and we’ve built all kinds of apps for enterprise customers. Massive, advanced CRM systems, call centre solutions, ticketing systems, a light MRP, all kinds of survey apps and so many dashboards. Even our docs and our website are Lowdefy apps!

Give Lowdefy a try and reach out it you have any questions or want to see what is possible :) (We need to invest a lot more into content and examples, bootstapping is a grind!)

https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

I'm also bootstrapping so I feel you, will reach out to you via email or something ;)

looks promising, will check later

Founder @ https://airplane.dev here - putting in a shameless plug for Airplane, where you _do_ write code from scratch. :) I think it depends on the builder and use case, and it's not a fit for everything, but our users like / need to manage their tooling as code and are more productive for it.

The people who use retool and never coded will not realize that it would have been much easier if they just learn to code . If they build anything slightly complex, they are essentially programming with the more difficult and slow UI

Would you mind expanding why it was tough to get started with Retool?

We are building https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack, a low-code platform to build LLM apps with a goal of making it easy for non-tech people to leverage LLMs in their workflows. Would love to learn about your experience with retool and incorporate some of that feedback into LLMStack.

Have you tried Windmill?

I love Windmill. I've built some handy internal tools for populating a smoke forecasting app's daily data, some dumb UIs for crud interfaces, and various workers and schedules. I could do it all without windmill, but I actually really like the scaffolding it provides.

No, not yet! Thx for the recc

I don't understand the appeal of these tools. I've tried it, but it's a complete cognitive overload, having to learn some proprietary UI to do simple things. I don't understand why adding for-loops by pointing, clicking and entering some textbox on the side for the expression is easier than simply typing it out.

It feels like all these "low code" tools are aimed at a tiny audience of technical people who are somehow technical enough to understand these UIs, but not quite technical enough to quickly roll their scripts and prototypes out the "traditional" way.

If you use Windmill's flows, you get a lot of stuff done for you, for instance caching in each step (and in the whole Flow), concurrency, retries, mocking, suspend/approval. You can also mix and match different languages (in one step you can use Python, another you can use TypeScript, etc). Afterwards, you can trigger your script/flow via POSTs, cron, via a auto-generated UI or via a custom UI.

They also have a problematic pricing model that punishes you for having a high number of users.

We changed our pricing earlier this year to be a lot more affordable for use cases with high end user counts (https://retool.com/blog/pricing-v2/). Let me know if that works better for you?

If you’re looking for external apps, check out portals (https://retool.com/products/portals) that has custom volume discounts for many, many users

I mean, let's be serious for a second, MS PowerApps, an Enterprise tool every CIO knows by now is potentially cheaper than Retool's unknown Enterprise price: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

There is not much to talk about, I don't see it, maybe Retool is targeting a different ICP. I don't see how a CIO would go for Retool when they can reach for PowerApps which is also potentially cheaper. PowerApps also integrates with the rest of the MS stack.

I am not saying I like it, I prefer Slack over MS Teams too, but Retool is a very hard pitch right now for Enterprise, and I don't see AI driving any points in that discussion.

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