vlugovsky

Hello HN community,

Many of you have probably used drag-and-drop builders to create internal tools or dashboards. They’re great for quick prototypes - but as projects grow, the same problems always appear:

1) Performance issues. D&D builders add a lot of runtime overhead. Once you add more screens, logic, or connected data sources, things start to lag - and you have little control over optimization. 2) Limited flexibility. You’re restricted to the vendor’s components and configuration options. Anything custom usually turns into a hack. 3) Design overhead. You still spend a lot of time manually picking components, arranging layouts, and tweaking spacing before even connecting data - and the final result often looks… meh. 4) Maintenance pain. Opening an old project (or one handed off to a new teammate) often means digging around to find where things live. There’s no simple way to reason about structure or reuse.

At UI Bakery, we kept asking ourselves how to fix these issues without losing the speed of a low code builder.

First, we built an AI assistant trained on our docs. Then, about 1.5 years ago, we launched the AI App Generator, which could generate UI Bakery apps from text prompts. That helped, but under the hood it was still drag-and-drop - with all its inherent limits.

That’s when we decided to rethink the foundation entirely. “What’s the most flexible, customizable project model possible?” The answer: code.

So we rebuilt our approach and are now launching UI Bakery AI App Agent - a new way to build secure internal software by chatting.

Key features:

- Data connectors: Connect to SQL, NoSQL, REST APIs, and third-party services. - Speed: Start from a plain-text prompt - AI generates a fully functional app in minutes. - Code ownership: Access and edit the generated React code directly. - Security: RBAC, SSO, SOC 2 compliance, audit logs, and deployment either in our cloud or fully on-prem. - Customization: Use any React component you find online or build your own - it’s all just code.

Who is it for?

- Founders/CTOs automating internal processes. - Developers tired of rebuilding CRUD/admin UIs from scratch. - Enterprise teams needing internal tools with advanced security (on-prem, SSO, RBAC).

We see UI Bakery as the next evolution beyond drag-and-drop builders — from "fast but limited" to "fast, customizable, and secure."

We’d love to hear what the HN crowd thinks: If you’ve used drag-and-drop builders, what’s been your biggest pain scaling or maintaining them? Would you trust AI to generate internal tools that you can later expand like a normal codebase?

Try it here: https://uibakery.io

I've been delving into some data, and it appears that GPT is killing StackOverflow really fast. Here are the numbers of questions for the past five years:

2019 - 1,744,299 2020 - 1,904,694 2021 - 1,445,042 2022 - 1,278,496 2023 - 633,163 (which is a 66% decrease from 2020)

Does anyone think StackOverflow will be able to pivot?

Hi founders!

Yesterday, when we learned that Airplane.dev was shutting down, we decided it might be the time for our first post on HN. We hope to assist Airplane customers in migrating to our platform (https://uibakery.io) to minimize the impact of this unfortunate event.

UI Bakery is a bootstrapped company and has not taken any VC investments. My co-founders and I, all software engineers, funded this business with the profits from our previous software services business. In the early stages of our previous venture, we developed several popular open-source projects (admin dashboard template, Angular UI kit). Thus our client projects often included admin panels, dashboards, and portals. As a result, the idea of building a platform that would allow faster delivery and also support a subscription-based business model was a no-brainer. Eventually, we made the risky decision to fully commit to UI Bakery. After a period of searching for PMF, we built a small and effective team (10 people, growing now), and became profitable.

UI Bakery can help build both internal tools and external-facing apps (in fact, some of our clients embed UI Bakery on public websites). Our users can: - Connect to 30 data sources (SQL and NoSQL, HTTP APIs, and 3rd-party services like Salesforce and Stripe). - Use the Drag and Drop UI builder with 75 components to build responsive web apps based on your data. - Create simple and sophisticated business logic with Actions that can read/write data from data sources on UI interactions and as scheduled jobs/webhooks. - Generate code/SQL with AI code generation and Chat with UI Bakery documentation Assistant to build apps faster

Alongside features similar to competitors, UI Bakery enhances the developer experience with multi-step actions, varied workflows, and multi-page applications. Our pricing is also tailored to be competitive. A distinctive feature is our Shared Permission Groups, enabling unlimited end-user access at a fixed fee for identical permission sets, adding value and scalability.

We believe UI Bakery can be a good alternative to Airplane and other internal tool builders in the current economic environment. Most of these products are VC-funded, and investors are more likely to further invest in AI than low-code platforms. Therefore, their founders may face tough decisions: shut down their business (like internal.io did), sell it (as Airplane did), or buy out shares (a rare move like Gumroad). Previously, I have heard concerns during the demos about our lack of fundraising, but now I believe the tables have turned. Having a bootstrapped and profitable vendor seems like an advantage for a large number of businesses.

Feel free to share your feedback, and let us know what you think about UI Bakery.

Thanks!