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Launch HN: Marblism (YC W24) – Generate full-stack web apps from a prompt

132 points by umussetu 2y ago

Hi HN, We are Cyril & Ulric and are building Marblism (https://marblism.com https://marblism.com), an LLM-based dev platform to generate and iterate on full-stack web apps. Here’s a demo video that goes from a comment on Twitter to a working app in 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TapOPO-Gv20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TapOPO-Gv20. Marblism started when we realized that much of the code we write for web apps is just slightly modified boilerplate: similar login flows, dashboards, API integrations, CRUD operations, etc. While AI tools are helpful, they fall short in delivering a well-architected codebase. The idea of Marblism is to combine the best of both worlds: a solid boilerplate, customized and enhanced with AI. Here's how it works: Generate your app - Describe your product, and the AI will build your data model. We create a NextJS app with auth, custom CRUDs, permissions, payment, emails. The AI then generates your front-end pages. Test and improve your app - Now that your app is set up, use our online workspace to test your app and add more complex features via an AI Chat or directly yourself in the VSCode editor. Go live - Once you’re happy with your app, deploy it in production in one click. Here are some examples of apps generated on Marblism in couple of hours of prompting: Find and validate startup ideas: https://www.muckbrass.com/ https://www.muckbrass.com/ A design system directory: https://awesomedesignsystem.app.io https://awesomedesignsystem.app.io AI-Personalized candle: https://www.scent-a-scene.com/ https://www.scent-a-scene.com/ Marblism currently generates web apps like SaaS, marketplaces, and social networks. It doesn't support Chrome extensions or mobile apps, and it’s not really for small games like Snake/Tetris. The vision is to add more tech stacks later this year and enable people to create their own templates/tech stack that the AI can customize. We’re really excited to share this with you and we'd love to hear your thoughts on the potential directions we can take this product.

bickett 2y ago
I'm most interested how the product can do at iterating and making a better product overall. Building a website can be kinda hard, but building the *right* website for the market is very hard
altdataseller 2y ago
How did Marblism know what external APIs were available when it generated those search volume charts? (or is it mock data?)
- umussetu 2y ago
  I asked it to integrate with https://dataforseo.com/ https://dataforseo.com/ api which is 10x cheaper than the ahrefs or semrush apis (it's real data)
  - sevmardi 2y ago
    You can also try Bishopi.io APIs which is cheaper than dataforseo :)
    - umussetu 2y ago
      That's cool, could make a good domain-investing app
morgante 2y ago
Did you make Marblism with Marblism?
- umussetu 2y ago
  haha no, the infrastructure we use is a bit intense to be entirely managed by an AI but one day maybe :)
- beardyw 2y ago
  I've been there and the chicken/egg thing doesn't come for free.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  This should be the minimum requirement to launch a system like that
bambax 2y ago
> Find and validate startup ideas: https://www.muckbrass.com/ https://www.muckbrass.com/ The first "startup idea" on that page[0] is... an "AI-Powered Startup Idea Generator". I don't know if Singularity is near, but we certainly have attained Circularity. [0] https://imgur.com/a/H3oNUeB https://imgur.com/a/H3oNUeB
- notpushkin 2y ago
  I think it’s what somebody else just submitted. My idea was on the top of that page for a while after I submitted it.
nicksergeant 2y ago
I hope we can soon teach our robot overlords about web accessibility, because this is pretty rough: https://i.nick.sg/03510726333f4a2b85daf5dd156d6289.png https://i.nick.sg/03510726333f4a2b85daf5dd156d6289.png
- umussetu 2y ago
  indeed! our initial focus was to make it work, shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point
  - ramesh31 2y ago
    >shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point * Laughs in UI Dev * Accessible components are far from an afterthought. LLM generated FE code will never be sufficient without some kind of base component library to pull from for things like selects, inputs, modals, etc. that are hand built and tested.
    - colesantiago 2y ago
      Sounds like a great startup idea I am sure someone will tackle, thanks!
      - lobsterthief 2y ago
        MUI already does this very well
candiddevmike 2y ago
What kind of liability do you take on with the code? Can I sue you if my app gets hacked? I can't find anything around ToS or even a privacy policy.
- umussetu 2y ago
  good question, it's not a no-code tool - we generate code (similar to a cursor or copilot) and we expect people to review the generated codebase. We'll add a section on the documentation like checklist you need to review to make sure there is no security issues. should probably add ToS also yes
  - smt88 2y ago
    You can't have a "security checklist" with multiple Turing-complete languages involved. It's better to give up on security and tell the users that they're generating code at their own risk.
    - candiddevmike 2y ago
      It's probably better to have a "for entertainment purposes only" banner plastered all over the website since it doesn't seem like this startup consulted with lawyers at all over this.
- a2128 2y ago
  The autogenerated app in their demo video comes with fake reviews and falsely claims you can make lists private when they're actually all public. Of course there's also zero GDPR/CCPA compliance on the generated app, there is no privacy policy (not that an AI could really read your mind about what you wanna with user data), no privacy contact and no account deletion, just a faceless AI-generated website. Security-wise I would place no confidence, it even failed to add a check to stop two people from having the same username. Legally this should be treated more like a toy for personal entertainment than anything
- geor9e 2y ago
  There is a joke about YC startups starting as "illegal taxi", "illegal hotel" … It makes sense, since law firms don't bother with lawsuits until the target has deep pockets. There are a thousand ways a startup can fail, and "got sued" in somewhere in that list of worries to focus on, but maybe not near the top at first.
austin-cheney 2y ago
This is exactly what the market predicted. AI to replace full stack developers, and it will overwhelmingly succeed. There are two reasons why this is predictable with high confidence. None of the more accurate predictions rest upon the trendiness of AI, but instead are vested in the current capabilities of the people primed for replacement and prior employment trends. Reason 1. Most, certainly not all, full stack developers are paid far too much for what they deliver. Over the past year I have been seeing many interview referrals for just under $200k even though I live in a very low cost of living area of the US. I have turned all of these down despite currently making far less. The high compensation is not enough to make up for working in a team that has no hope deliver to expectations (more on that in the second point) and is hostile to radical change. Reason 2. Prior employment trends suggest that many employers prioritize hiring and candidate compatibility over ability to deliver. Its a valid business decision that makes sense in the short term, but results in catastrophic debt over the long term. You have to understand that developers are a cost center and not sales people. This means they cost money and do not generate profit, so it makes sense to lower the costs of acquiring these people as much as possible. Starting about a year or two after I started doing full time JavaScript programming in the corporate space employers started looking at solutions to turn developers into commodities because they were spending too much on hiring with disappointing results. I can remember the entire industry trying to do this on both the front end and back end, but the movement received far less penetration on the back end, which was more entrenched. It received overwhelming success on the front end with tool suites like prototype.js and YUI before jQuery formed a dominating cult of personality. Then once Node got popular and the browsers got faster those front end libraries were largely replaced by large MVC frameworks like Angular and React. Before the strong focus on external tool libraries JavaScript developers had to do it all themselves. At that time the browsers were too slow for things like Photopea, but the first large browser apps were already rolling out. These were some really excellent developers, but it was really hard to find people who could perform at that level, and of course the pay was ridiculously low. Moving to these external libraries really opened up hiring to people who could not perform otherwise, and that really lowered the cost of candidate selection. Unfortunately, these external libraries were generally slow and sometimes broke when they were just expected to work, but now you had an entire work force that could not live without them. Reliance upon external tools to keep your job creates insecurity. It limits the availability of design options to what a given set of tools allow, and developer's first priority at work is to retain employment. That insecurity grows over time as applications grow larger, solution delivery slows, developers get further and further more reliant upon solutions in conflict with the desires of the business's profit generators. Its why a lot of people I have talked to over the past year moved on to other things and refuse to go back despite the far higher compensation.
mjomaa 2y ago
Congratz on the launch! Like with most boilerplates the focus is too much on the landing page, but less on the actual application. I'd be interested to know if you could integrate my boilerplate https://achromatic.dev https://achromatic.dev somehow into the generation to be able to generate web apps. Would be absolutely fanstastic - endless customizations.
- umussetu 2y ago
  thanks! did you log in on your generated app? that's a good idea, to integrate various boilerplates
  - mjomaa 2y ago
    Yeah I tried out Endura with the beneficiary CRUD demo. What are those generated components based on? Is there a component registry?
    - umussetu 2y ago
      we use ant design at the moment, looking to integrate more UI libraries
TripleChecker 2y ago
Can I use my own existing postgresql database to connect it and generate the UI on top of it? Also, typo on homepage - 'Authentification' (per our error report: https://triplechecker.com/s/t2ryxA/marblism.com?v=M0bXQ https://triplechecker.com/s/t2ryxA/marblism.com?v=M0bXQ)
- umussetu 2y ago
  not at the moment, but it's a good idea yes it's technically possible Fixed! good catch :)
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
Why do i have to choose between light and dark mode? If you can do both, why not support dynamic mode?
- umussetu 2y ago
  we could indeed!
blackhaz 2y ago
Everything looks great. I have tried to generate an app that generates stupid faces. At first it produced an app that generates what looks like random images - coffee tables, nature, people, pens... I have tried fixing it by chatting. It suggested to add an AI routine to make sure I'll be getting stupid faces. It broke itself and started to produce error messages instead of images. I have asked it to fix itself. It has added error handling, better error messages, and stupid face generation success rate bar to the UI, but I have never been able to generate a stupid face. Great idea though, and hopefully some day it will work.
- umussetu 2y ago
  thanks for trying it out! I guess everything is fine in your code and just needed to direct the prompt a bit in the actual code (there is a tab 'code editor'). it's a bit what we're trying to improve. The AI gets 98% of stuff correctly, but for example here it missed to adjust the prompt to output stupid face generation - which literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code.
  - sojournerc 2y ago
    > literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code If you know where to look and how the code is structured, or in your case, have developed an AI to generate apps. I'm extremely skeptical that a layman could debug and produce a polished app solely through AI prompts, but maybe that's not your audience.
    - umussetu 2y ago
      yes totally agree with you, it's not our audience even if maybe it's not clear from our website. That's why you've got VS code online integrated in the product => it's for developers
henning 2y ago
Evaluating startup ideas based on search volume reminds me of the apocryphal Henry Ford quote about "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". VC-backed startups don't succeed by finding an underserved niche and generating a nice, steadily growing profit over time. They are by their nature supposed to either explosively succeed or rapidly die.
noleary 2y ago
This is really cool, guys! One use case that occurs to me is to build personal SaaS apps. It's the sort of thing a lot of people use spreadsheets or Notion for. I just made a simple little app with Marblism to help me keep track of whether I took my medication on a given day. I couldn't tell you why, but I prefer this to little mobile apps and it's less upkeep than the spreadsheets I've tried to make in the past.
- umussetu 2y ago
  thanks! true you could use it like that although I find notion and airtable to do a decent jobs if you really just want a todo list or a crm so unsure if we should dive into that segment
Narhem 2y ago
This seems awesome! Anyone else find this to be kind of scary? The start to Web3.0 AIs making Web 2.0 applications to take over the world.
darepublic 2y ago
Apps like these need to be fast, produce more valid results and also support fine grained control. Maybe I'm wrong but I haven't met an ai solution that offers all of these yet
- umussetu 2y ago
  that's what we are aiming for yep! for now it takes about 10 min to generate an full stack app which I feel it's still decent compared to do it all by yourself
- Narhem 2y ago
  I’d love a tool like this to speed up development and I haven’t used the app but you always have to manually edit things afterwards. The difficulty with web apps is getting people to use them. Cool tool, hope it takes off.
onion2k 2y ago
I'm a huge fan of LLM-based tools, and I use them pretty much daily, but stuff like this concerns me a bit. In any dev process there needs to be a review step somewhere. Someone who understands code well needs to be looking at what the app is doing and making sure it's protecting my data. Someone needs to make sure there isn't a bug that loses the work I put in to creating records with a CRUD operation. They need to be making sure my privacy is respected in a legally compliant way. They need to make sure things are reasonably secure. None of that is guaranteed when you have a dev team, but it is a possibility at least. Telling Joe Random "describe you app in a prompt and press deploy!" guarantees that isn't happening. This sort of service is great for non-dev people who want to launch something but it's a pretty big threat to my data. I'm under no illusion that these services are going to be huge, and no doubt someone will sell an app built with one to a service that puts data about me into it. I suspect that means one day an attacker is going to learn something I'd rather they didn't. That sucks.
- space_fountain 2y ago
  I wonder how much of this is that LLMs are worse than human developers (they are much more error prone right now) and how much of this is that we want someone to blame. When the elevator operator closes a door on someone fingers that's an honest mistake and/or we can fire them, but when the automated elevator bruises some 12 year olds finger that's a big problem that needs fixed
  - curious_cat_163 2y ago
    That's an interesting idea! I think that the liability will just travel a layer of indirection. So in your example, I would think that the company that made the elevator would still be liable for any harm that their product causes -- if it can be established that it is their fault that a 12 year old's finger got bruised because of a poor design for the elevator.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      In general case, won't it eventually hit the liability diffusers, i.e. insurance? Kid gets paid from an accident insurance, building owner will cover their costs from civil liability insurance, and the elevator designers or installers will get shielded by professional liability insurance.
codegeek 2y ago
"We create a NextJS app " Are you considering adding other languages in the future ? I would like to try but not with NextJS. I have a special hate for JavaScript so I try to avoid it as much as possible except for Frontend.
- smt88 2y ago
  TypeScript is one of the few languages (Rust being another) that should be a target of LLM-generated code, just because the static analysis is so strict you'd actually catch a lot of bugs before runtime.
  - maleldil 2y ago
    (Strict) Typed Python isn't that bad either, and LLMs seem to be quite good at generating that, given how popular Python is. Unfortunately, it tends to generate outdated types (e.g. `List` instead of `list`, `Optional[T]` instead of `T | None`, import `Iterable` from `typing` instead of `collections.abc`), so you always need to tell it to use the right one.
    - kdamica 2y ago
      I still use Optional[T] so definitely not just the LLM :)
    - notpushkin 2y ago
      Should be possible to fix automatically though? Something like https://github.com/PyCQA/modernize https://github.com/PyCQA/modernize, but for type hints. Edit: there is pyupgrade which can do this: https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade#pep-585-typing-rewrites https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade#pep-585-typing-rewrite...
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I tried one and it threw this error: Error: Element type is invalid: expected a string (for built-in components) or a class/function (for composite components) but got: undefined. You likely forgot to export your component from the file it's defined in, or you might have mixed up default and named imports. The fact that this whole AI fuzzy controlled thing builds on top of Javascript fuzzy controlled thing is really messy.
cryptoz 2y ago
How do you make modifications to code once it is generated? This is the most interesting part to me - you say there is a chat assistant that can make changes? Does it rewrite the whole file, or how does that work? Do you use git diffs?
colesantiago 2y ago
I am so glad you made this Cyril and Ulric! Tools that gives the power to allow anyone to become a developer or create their own apps without the need to spend $$$ consulting with a developer is amazing I hope we get more startups like yours that lower the barrier to entry for tech for everyone and we get quality software at the same time. This is the best and most exciting time to create and build startups.
welder 2y ago
Many competitors in this space, one that comes to mind is https://www.rapidpages.com/ https://www.rapidpages.com/
indigodaddy 2y ago
So your company controls the app.io domain?
- dockerd 2y ago
  Seems like.
saaspirant 2y ago
Anything similar is there for Django?
- umussetu 2y ago
  not yet! we're gonna add more tech stacks in the future
jatins 2y ago
Congrats on the launch! I evaluated this a while back. While the app is impressive, I couldn't figure our who'd use it. A developer will feel restricted by it, a non-technical person will feel overwhelmed by it since code is at the center of it.
suriya-ganesh 2y ago
I've been using marblism to build a couple of projects over the last 2 weeks. It's an incredible product. Here are my reviews: - The tech stack selection is exceptional. It comes with batteries included, backend, auth, permissions etc. - I love the ability to view the database, auth, in one place. - The LLM itself gets stuck once the APIs and their interactions become slightly complex and deviates from the happy path. (likely because even the starter code is closer 10K lines of code across different files and frameworks) - I wonder if instead being very opinionated, just a cloud LLM environment with a slightly less "fat" template would be optimal. because after all, people who would be twiddling with generated code are going to be developers who can (most likely) decide what they want.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
Freelancers are shuddering in horror (or gasping in delight) at all the work they'll be getting from this in the next few years. Endless numbers of ridiculous Ideas Guys will be showing up at tech meetups with "I got this thing like 90% of the way there, now I just need this little bit done, it'll take a good coder a few hours, right?". Delving into the code base will be a Dantean expedition into the first few rings of Web Dev Hell, replete with LLM hallucinations of API endpoints that would be great if they existed.
- nxicvyvy 2y ago
  The no code space in YouTube is on fire right now with people showing off how to build apps with ai. The tools aren't too bad, I've been building a few things with cursor and ChatGPT to see how far you can. It's basically like you're pair programming with a junior who knows how to do all the basics but needs a lot of help in review. Your read that this is going to be a huge mess in the freelance space soon is very accurate, the better the tooling gets the worse it will be.
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    I’m generally optimistic about generative AI tools but I 100% agree with this. They’d be better off using Wordpress.
- tonyoconnell 2y ago
  I understand what you mean but Test First Development by LLM's will solve lots of problems with hallucinations and soon LLM's will be much better at coding than humans. I am always surprised that so many highly intelligent people don't understand this.
  - spacebacon 2y ago
    Assuming the end goal is to serve humanity. Will a human always be better at using an LLM or will LLM’s eventually be better at using LLM’s to serve humanity?
  - 2y ago
atebyagrue 2y ago
This is great. Created a character generator & editor for my TTRPG group in about 5 minutes. Haven't dug too deep yet, but it created a working baseline that I was hoping for. Thanks! Will definitely be an eye on this. Keep up the good work!
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xs83 2y ago
I like the interface - I will say that it doesnt work when there is an ad-blocker installed (the workspace wont open). When I am into the app it seems the database wasnt generated for items like the authentication system (which I would expect as it is included and mandatory). Still more work needed but overall it looks great and I can see the advanced workings you have put in behind the scenes to make it do what it does.

132 points by umussetu 2y ago

bickett 2y ago

I'm most interested how the product can do at iterating and making a better product overall. Building a website can be kinda hard, but building the *right* website for the market is very hard

altdataseller 2y ago

How did Marblism know what external APIs were available when it generated those search volume charts? (or is it mock data?)

umussetu 2y ago
I asked it to integrate with https://dataforseo.com/ https://dataforseo.com/ api which is 10x cheaper than the ahrefs or semrush apis (it's real data)
- sevmardi 2y ago
  You can also try Bishopi.io APIs which is cheaper than dataforseo :)
  - umussetu 2y ago
    That's cool, could make a good domain-investing app

morgante 2y ago

Did you make Marblism with Marblism?

umussetu 2y ago
haha no, the infrastructure we use is a bit intense to be entirely managed by an AI but one day maybe :)
beardyw 2y ago
I've been there and the chicken/egg thing doesn't come for free.
meiraleal 2y ago
This should be the minimum requirement to launch a system like that

bambax 2y ago

> Find and validate startup ideas: https://www.muckbrass.com/ https://www.muckbrass.com/ The first "startup idea" on that page[0] is... an "AI-Powered Startup Idea Generator". I don't know if Singularity is near, but we certainly have attained Circularity. [0] https://imgur.com/a/H3oNUeB https://imgur.com/a/H3oNUeB

notpushkin 2y ago
I think it’s what somebody else just submitted. My idea was on the top of that page for a while after I submitted it.

nicksergeant 2y ago

I hope we can soon teach our robot overlords about web accessibility, because this is pretty rough: https://i.nick.sg/03510726333f4a2b85daf5dd156d6289.png https://i.nick.sg/03510726333f4a2b85daf5dd156d6289.png

umussetu 2y ago
indeed! our initial focus was to make it work, shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >shouldn't too hard to make it score well on accessibility - good point * Laughs in UI Dev * Accessible components are far from an afterthought. LLM generated FE code will never be sufficient without some kind of base component library to pull from for things like selects, inputs, modals, etc. that are hand built and tested.
  - colesantiago 2y ago
    Sounds like a great startup idea I am sure someone will tackle, thanks!
    - lobsterthief 2y ago
      MUI already does this very well

candiddevmike 2y ago

What kind of liability do you take on with the code? Can I sue you if my app gets hacked? I can't find anything around ToS or even a privacy policy.

umussetu 2y ago
good question, it's not a no-code tool - we generate code (similar to a cursor or copilot) and we expect people to review the generated codebase. We'll add a section on the documentation like checklist you need to review to make sure there is no security issues. should probably add ToS also yes
- smt88 2y ago
  You can't have a "security checklist" with multiple Turing-complete languages involved. It's better to give up on security and tell the users that they're generating code at their own risk.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    It's probably better to have a "for entertainment purposes only" banner plastered all over the website since it doesn't seem like this startup consulted with lawyers at all over this.
a2128 2y ago
The autogenerated app in their demo video comes with fake reviews and falsely claims you can make lists private when they're actually all public. Of course there's also zero GDPR/CCPA compliance on the generated app, there is no privacy policy (not that an AI could really read your mind about what you wanna with user data), no privacy contact and no account deletion, just a faceless AI-generated website. Security-wise I would place no confidence, it even failed to add a check to stop two people from having the same username. Legally this should be treated more like a toy for personal entertainment than anything
geor9e 2y ago
There is a joke about YC startups starting as "illegal taxi", "illegal hotel" … It makes sense, since law firms don't bother with lawsuits until the target has deep pockets. There are a thousand ways a startup can fail, and "got sued" in somewhere in that list of worries to focus on, but maybe not near the top at first.

austin-cheney 2y ago

This is exactly what the market predicted. AI to replace full stack developers, and it will overwhelmingly succeed. There are two reasons why this is predictable with high confidence. None of the more accurate predictions rest upon the trendiness of AI, but instead are vested in the current capabilities of the people primed for replacement and prior employment trends. Reason 1. Most, certainly not all, full stack developers are paid far too much for what they deliver. Over the past year I have been seeing many interview referrals for just under $200k even though I live in a very low cost of living area of the US. I have turned all of these down despite currently making far less. The high compensation is not enough to make up for working in a team that has no hope deliver to expectations (more on that in the second point) and is hostile to radical change. Reason 2. Prior employment trends suggest that many employers prioritize hiring and candidate compatibility over ability to deliver. Its a valid business decision that makes sense in the short term, but results in catastrophic debt over the long term. You have to understand that developers are a cost center and not sales people. This means they cost money and do not generate profit, so it makes sense to lower the costs of acquiring these people as much as possible. Starting about a year or two after I started doing full time JavaScript programming in the corporate space employers started looking at solutions to turn developers into commodities because they were spending too much on hiring with disappointing results. I can remember the entire industry trying to do this on both the front end and back end, but the movement received far less penetration on the back end, which was more entrenched. It received overwhelming success on the front end with tool suites like prototype.js and YUI before jQuery formed a dominating cult of personality. Then once Node got popular and the browsers got faster those front end libraries were largely replaced by large MVC frameworks like Angular and React. Before the strong focus on external tool libraries JavaScript developers had to do it all themselves. At that time the browsers were too slow for things like Photopea, but the first large browser apps were already rolling out. These were some really excellent developers, but it was really hard to find people who could perform at that level, and of course the pay was ridiculously low. Moving to these external libraries really opened up hiring to people who could not perform otherwise, and that really lowered the cost of candidate selection. Unfortunately, these external libraries were generally slow and sometimes broke when they were just expected to work, but now you had an entire work force that could not live without them. Reliance upon external tools to keep your job creates insecurity. It limits the availability of design options to what a given set of tools allow, and developer's first priority at work is to retain employment. That insecurity grows over time as applications grow larger, solution delivery slows, developers get further and further more reliant upon solutions in conflict with the desires of the business's profit generators. Its why a lot of people I have talked to over the past year moved on to other things and refuse to go back despite the far higher compensation.

mjomaa 2y ago

Congratz on the launch! Like with most boilerplates the focus is too much on the landing page, but less on the actual application. I'd be interested to know if you could integrate my boilerplate https://achromatic.dev https://achromatic.dev somehow into the generation to be able to generate web apps. Would be absolutely fanstastic - endless customizations.

umussetu 2y ago
thanks! did you log in on your generated app? that's a good idea, to integrate various boilerplates
- mjomaa 2y ago
  Yeah I tried out Endura with the beneficiary CRUD demo. What are those generated components based on? Is there a component registry?
  - umussetu 2y ago
    we use ant design at the moment, looking to integrate more UI libraries

TripleChecker 2y ago

Can I use my own existing postgresql database to connect it and generate the UI on top of it? Also, typo on homepage - 'Authentification' (per our error report: https://triplechecker.com/s/t2ryxA/marblism.com?v=M0bXQ https://triplechecker.com/s/t2ryxA/marblism.com?v=M0bXQ)

umussetu 2y ago
not at the moment, but it's a good idea yes it's technically possible Fixed! good catch :)

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

Why do i have to choose between light and dark mode? If you can do both, why not support dynamic mode?

umussetu 2y ago
we could indeed!

blackhaz 2y ago

Everything looks great. I have tried to generate an app that generates stupid faces. At first it produced an app that generates what looks like random images - coffee tables, nature, people, pens... I have tried fixing it by chatting. It suggested to add an AI routine to make sure I'll be getting stupid faces. It broke itself and started to produce error messages instead of images. I have asked it to fix itself. It has added error handling, better error messages, and stupid face generation success rate bar to the UI, but I have never been able to generate a stupid face. Great idea though, and hopefully some day it will work.

umussetu 2y ago
thanks for trying it out! I guess everything is fine in your code and just needed to direct the prompt a bit in the actual code (there is a tab 'code editor'). it's a bit what we're trying to improve. The AI gets 98% of stuff correctly, but for example here it missed to adjust the prompt to output stupid face generation - which literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code.
- sojournerc 2y ago
  > literally takes 10 seconds to do in the code If you know where to look and how the code is structured, or in your case, have developed an AI to generate apps. I'm extremely skeptical that a layman could debug and produce a polished app solely through AI prompts, but maybe that's not your audience.
  - umussetu 2y ago
    yes totally agree with you, it's not our audience even if maybe it's not clear from our website. That's why you've got VS code online integrated in the product => it's for developers

henning 2y ago

Evaluating startup ideas based on search volume reminds me of the apocryphal Henry Ford quote about "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". VC-backed startups don't succeed by finding an underserved niche and generating a nice, steadily growing profit over time. They are by their nature supposed to either explosively succeed or rapidly die.

noleary 2y ago

This is really cool, guys! One use case that occurs to me is to build personal SaaS apps. It's the sort of thing a lot of people use spreadsheets or Notion for. I just made a simple little app with Marblism to help me keep track of whether I took my medication on a given day. I couldn't tell you why, but I prefer this to little mobile apps and it's less upkeep than the spreadsheets I've tried to make in the past.

umussetu 2y ago
thanks! true you could use it like that although I find notion and airtable to do a decent jobs if you really just want a todo list or a crm so unsure if we should dive into that segment

Narhem 2y ago

This seems awesome! Anyone else find this to be kind of scary? The start to Web3.0 AIs making Web 2.0 applications to take over the world.

darepublic 2y ago

Apps like these need to be fast, produce more valid results and also support fine grained control. Maybe I'm wrong but I haven't met an ai solution that offers all of these yet

umussetu 2y ago
that's what we are aiming for yep! for now it takes about 10 min to generate an full stack app which I feel it's still decent compared to do it all by yourself
Narhem 2y ago
I’d love a tool like this to speed up development and I haven’t used the app but you always have to manually edit things afterwards. The difficulty with web apps is getting people to use them. Cool tool, hope it takes off.

onion2k 2y ago

I'm a huge fan of LLM-based tools, and I use them pretty much daily, but stuff like this concerns me a bit. In any dev process there needs to be a review step somewhere. Someone who understands code well needs to be looking at what the app is doing and making sure it's protecting my data. Someone needs to make sure there isn't a bug that loses the work I put in to creating records with a CRUD operation. They need to be making sure my privacy is respected in a legally compliant way. They need to make sure things are reasonably secure. None of that is guaranteed when you have a dev team, but it is a possibility at least. Telling Joe Random "describe you app in a prompt and press deploy!" guarantees that isn't happening. This sort of service is great for non-dev people who want to launch something but it's a pretty big threat to my data. I'm under no illusion that these services are going to be huge, and no doubt someone will sell an app built with one to a service that puts data about me into it. I suspect that means one day an attacker is going to learn something I'd rather they didn't. That sucks.

space_fountain 2y ago
I wonder how much of this is that LLMs are worse than human developers (they are much more error prone right now) and how much of this is that we want someone to blame. When the elevator operator closes a door on someone fingers that's an honest mistake and/or we can fire them, but when the automated elevator bruises some 12 year olds finger that's a big problem that needs fixed
- curious_cat_163 2y ago
  That's an interesting idea! I think that the liability will just travel a layer of indirection. So in your example, I would think that the company that made the elevator would still be liable for any harm that their product causes -- if it can be established that it is their fault that a 12 year old's finger got bruised because of a poor design for the elevator.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    In general case, won't it eventually hit the liability diffusers, i.e. insurance? Kid gets paid from an accident insurance, building owner will cover their costs from civil liability insurance, and the elevator designers or installers will get shielded by professional liability insurance.

codegeek 2y ago

"We create a NextJS app " Are you considering adding other languages in the future ? I would like to try but not with NextJS. I have a special hate for JavaScript so I try to avoid it as much as possible except for Frontend.

smt88 2y ago
TypeScript is one of the few languages (Rust being another) that should be a target of LLM-generated code, just because the static analysis is so strict you'd actually catch a lot of bugs before runtime.
- maleldil 2y ago
  (Strict) Typed Python isn't that bad either, and LLMs seem to be quite good at generating that, given how popular Python is. Unfortunately, it tends to generate outdated types (e.g. `List` instead of `list`, `Optional[T]` instead of `T | None`, import `Iterable` from `typing` instead of `collections.abc`), so you always need to tell it to use the right one.
  - kdamica 2y ago
    I still use Optional[T] so definitely not just the LLM :)
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    Should be possible to fix automatically though? Something like https://github.com/PyCQA/modernize https://github.com/PyCQA/modernize, but for type hints. Edit: there is pyupgrade which can do this: https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade#pep-585-typing-rewrites https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade#pep-585-typing-rewrite...

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

I tried one and it threw this error: Error: Element type is invalid: expected a string (for built-in components) or a class/function (for composite components) but got: undefined. You likely forgot to export your component from the file it's defined in, or you might have mixed up default and named imports. The fact that this whole AI fuzzy controlled thing builds on top of Javascript fuzzy controlled thing is really messy.

cryptoz 2y ago

How do you make modifications to code once it is generated? This is the most interesting part to me - you say there is a chat assistant that can make changes? Does it rewrite the whole file, or how does that work? Do you use git diffs?

colesantiago 2y ago

I am so glad you made this Cyril and Ulric! Tools that gives the power to allow anyone to become a developer or create their own apps without the need to spend $$$ consulting with a developer is amazing I hope we get more startups like yours that lower the barrier to entry for tech for everyone and we get quality software at the same time. This is the best and most exciting time to create and build startups.

welder 2y ago

Many competitors in this space, one that comes to mind is https://www.rapidpages.com/ https://www.rapidpages.com/

indigodaddy 2y ago

So your company controls the app.io domain?

dockerd 2y ago
Seems like.

saaspirant 2y ago

Anything similar is there for Django?

umussetu 2y ago
not yet! we're gonna add more tech stacks in the future

jatins 2y ago

Congrats on the launch! I evaluated this a while back. While the app is impressive, I couldn't figure our who'd use it. A developer will feel restricted by it, a non-technical person will feel overwhelmed by it since code is at the center of it.

suriya-ganesh 2y ago

I've been using marblism to build a couple of projects over the last 2 weeks. It's an incredible product. Here are my reviews: - The tech stack selection is exceptional. It comes with batteries included, backend, auth, permissions etc. - I love the ability to view the database, auth, in one place. - The LLM itself gets stuck once the APIs and their interactions become slightly complex and deviates from the happy path. (likely because even the starter code is closer 10K lines of code across different files and frameworks) - I wonder if instead being very opinionated, just a cloud LLM environment with a slightly less "fat" template would be optimal. because after all, people who would be twiddling with generated code are going to be developers who can (most likely) decide what they want.

marcus_holmes 2y ago

Freelancers are shuddering in horror (or gasping in delight) at all the work they'll be getting from this in the next few years. Endless numbers of ridiculous Ideas Guys will be showing up at tech meetups with "I got this thing like 90% of the way there, now I just need this little bit done, it'll take a good coder a few hours, right?". Delving into the code base will be a Dantean expedition into the first few rings of Web Dev Hell, replete with LLM hallucinations of API endpoints that would be great if they existed.

nxicvyvy 2y ago
The no code space in YouTube is on fire right now with people showing off how to build apps with ai. The tools aren't too bad, I've been building a few things with cursor and ChatGPT to see how far you can. It's basically like you're pair programming with a junior who knows how to do all the basics but needs a lot of help in review. Your read that this is going to be a huge mess in the freelance space soon is very accurate, the better the tooling gets the worse it will be.
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  I’m generally optimistic about generative AI tools but I 100% agree with this. They’d be better off using Wordpress.
tonyoconnell 2y ago
I understand what you mean but Test First Development by LLM's will solve lots of problems with hallucinations and soon LLM's will be much better at coding than humans. I am always surprised that so many highly intelligent people don't understand this.
- spacebacon 2y ago
  Assuming the end goal is to serve humanity. Will a human always be better at using an LLM or will LLM’s eventually be better at using LLM’s to serve humanity?
- 2y ago

atebyagrue 2y ago

This is great. Created a character generator & editor for my TTRPG group in about 5 minutes. Haven't dug too deep yet, but it created a working baseline that I was hoping for. Thanks! Will definitely be an eye on this. Keep up the good work!

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xs83 2y ago

I like the interface - I will say that it doesnt work when there is an ad-blocker installed (the workspace wont open). When I am into the app it seems the database wasnt generated for items like the authentication system (which I would expect as it is included and mandatory). Still more work needed but overall it looks great and I can see the advanced workings you have put in behind the scenes to make it do what it does.