+1 to Clerky being a great product. Was super useful for us when incorporating and after as well
740 karma · joined February 4, 2013
Email: ^ @gmail
I did another ad-hoc but this time I added "Use guest auth" to the prompt. This way you don't need to enter an email. Full prompt below
Create a habit tracking app where users can create habits, mark daily completions, and visualize streaks. Include features for setting habit frequency (daily/weekly), viewing completion calendars, and tracking overall progress percentages. Use guest auth
Aesthetic version: https://with-aes-guest-auth.vercel.app/
Non-aesthetic version: https://wo-aes-guest-auth.vercel.app/
I'd give the edge to the aesthetic one.
When you do want to get closer to the code, we think Instant provides a nicer abstraction for working with agents and getting deligthful experiences like a sync engine out of the box
But I was curious and just did an adhoc eval.
Here's a version with the aesthetic line included
Here's a version without the line
Everything else is the same. Will let y'all be the judge which is better.
Both where made in one-shot with this prompt:
Create a habit tracking app where users can create habits, mark daily completions, and visualize streaks. Include features for setting habit frequency (daily/weekly), viewing completion calendars, and tracking overall progress percentages.
Instant has evolved quite a bit in the last 18 months. With all the new functionality self-hosting has become a bit more fiddly.
This PR is aimed at making the process for self-hosting even easier.
You can certainly use Instant without AI! We indexed on making the API easy to understand so projects built with Instant are easy to maintain. We also invested in our AX experience since we saw more folks coming to us when trying to build apps with AI
Including Figma! https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
If you give them a little bit of context they can use the platform fully.
Working on making this even easier for folks https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495
Realizing we didn’t highlight this as a use case — but you can use our ephemeral app feature (it’s free) to easily add your own interactive demos into essays!
We’re also working on a PR to make it even easier to deploy
Agreed lots of opportunity for simplification. There’s so much context in this space.
When talking about why sync we mention optimistic updates, multiplayer, and offline mode. To motivate the complexity of sync we talk about websockets, optimistic queues, and IndexedDB. To explain how we work we talk about triples, datalog, and CTEs.
We try to give a clean interface so devs don’t need to worry about this complexity, but yea it’s been an ongoing iteration to make both easier and transparent to understand!
We last updated our website when open sourced back in August 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281
Back then most folks weren't building full-on apps with AI yet.
Since then we've seen a large number of people find us through content on creating apps with AI. We felt our previous messaging didn't speak to that and we thought it was time for a refresh.
We also invested a lot to make the agent experience with Instant a delight!
Stopa also gave an answer here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866
Our thinking was to first get the DX/AX + feature set solid with Instant and then let folks bring their own Postgres
No limit on number of end users for what you build
But pairing Instant with Vercel works great too! We have a tutorial on how you can build an app with Instant and deploy it to vercel here
We wanted to make a tool that (a) would make it easy to build delightful apps, and that (b) builders would find easy to use.
This got us into making things that touch both local-first and AI.
On the local-first side, we took on problems like offline-mode, real-time, and optimisitc updates.
On the AI side, we built a multi-tenant abstraction, so you can spin up as many apps as you like, and focused on great DX/AX so agents found Instant easy to use too.
npx skills add instantdb/skills
Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!
At the end of the poll you can see your own ranking as well as an aggregated results from the crowd.
I went with the choose favorite/least favorite mechanic because it felt like a better experience then just doing head to head.
With ~20 firms that's a lot of pairs you need to go through.
If you do triplets that reduces the pairs, but it was still too many rounds.
By doing min/max four at a time you can efficiently get implied preferences in ~20 rounds. This make it take only about 3-5 minutes to finish the full poll!
Adding a link to buy the books on bookshop in addition to Amazon could be a nice touch too to support local bookstores