I'm curious where the pattern will go. My sense is there is a split between cathedrals vs bazaar for approach here, where cathedrals are quite rigid app builders, think framer/wix, while bazaars focus a layer below for more flexibility but less integrated.
“Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.
Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists, researchers and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world. It is part of a wider ecosystem of 44 tools and 154 plugins dedicated to making working with structured data as productive as possible.”
So I imagine we could now load some data in to sqlite, design some HTML also loaded in to the db, and deploy. Although looking at the source, it seems like stored apps are expected to be managed by the plugin itself, but I'm sure there's a way around that
[0] Eg from one of the examples - https://datasette.io/legislators/-/query.json?sql=select+*+f... . If you strip the '.json' you get the html view. For what it's worth there's also a '.csv' version.
I remember writing code in the bad old days to parse HTML tags and allowlist specific attributes. Now browsers have a much better solution baked in.
But it still makes me a bit nervous. Seems like a very small bug could sneak in. This is a good example of where I would reach for Fable to double check the implementation and have a lot of extra tests.
(nit: would be nice if the chat box treated Enter and Shift+Enter the way these other companies have trained my brain, but maybe that is a deliberate choice.)
although I'm coming from a different starting point, it seems like some of our thoughts have aligned. I'm building https://caipi.ai/ as a workspace for agents to build simple data driven apps. The agent edits through MCP and the user gets an interactive app in the browser.
If you're interested picking each others brains around this topic, I'd be psyched to have a chat. gh:pietz.
The design keeps data and presentation together and even maps do not rely on external services.
I have called it Pihka: https://ghentcdh.github.io/Pihka/ https://github.com/GhentCDH/Pihka
It has 119 repositories.
Is this how AI slop looks like in code? Made for the agents, by the agents? Is this separation of concerns or context management with agents as a first class residents and humans merely acting as custodians?
Here the goal is to be a self-assembling harness (akin to pi) but focusing on duplex human-agent interactivity over rendered HTML "apps". To start, it's focused more on the "please review this PR and then generate a one-page report" with the ability to write comments in the actual report that automatically get sent back to the agent. The end goal is closer to offering a substrate for less technical people to be able to build personal applications like
- an interactive wiki maintainer: chat with the agent about an article, pull out sections, append/create concepts in the wiki with the new info - agent code harness: agent tabs to the left, chat in middle, code diffs on the right (like the superset/commander class of apps)
Anyway, I'm really into the "self assembling" class of software where everything is basically just an SDK + Agent. I think we might actually be ushering in a new era of "personal computing" in that it's less friction than ever to personalize your setup to your whims. Anyway, thats the goal I'm reaching for.
It seems many others are coalescing on this idea at the same time, so it must just be in the aether.