Hacker News Reader

I have heard about Appsmith but never used it myself. Anybody have used Appsmith for this purpose and can share personal experience?

View on HN

It’s fine for quick prototyping and internal applications.

What you do not like in it? Can you suggest better alternatives?

I haven’t used it for a while as I stopped using low code tools since ChatGPT’s release, but I remember:

- the final application is a bit slow to load, there is a lot of code.

- it uses mongodb internally. I don’t like having mongodb on my stacks.

- the docker and kubernetes deployments were not following best practices. They ran everything, even mongodb and redis, in a stateful container with a process manager inside the container.

- version controlling the apps wasn’t trivial.

- some features weren’t open source so I had to quickly hack them again.

I found retool, proprietary, to be better if you can afford it.

How do you use ChatGPT to write CRUD apps? Do you mean Github Copilot?

I use them both. I use ChatGPT to do the big parts like the SQL schema and some boilerplate. It works better in Python with fastAPI than Rust with Axum though.

Cool. How do you use it to generate the frontend CRUD interfaces?

I go with React and use GitHub copilot more but ChatGPT can do the big or more advanced components. It’s a lot of manual work still.

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com