"Request methods are considered 'safe' if their defined semantics are essentially read-only; i.e., the client does not request, and does not expect, any state change on the origin server as a result of applying a safe method to a target resource."
-RFC 9110 section 9.2.1
In practice many GET requests don't adhere to this spec. For example, when you load a page, your "view" generally changes lots of things on the backend. Those changes come back to you in ways too: for example, consider view counts on Youtube videos or X posts.
> Is this the kind of use case that is seen as valuable?
I think it could be. Consider an argument like this:
It's valuable to ask ChatGPT questions and receive text responses. Some of the responses are more valuable when they don't just return text, but some markup: bolding, adding visualizations etc. Why can't some responses be more valuable if they return little apps?
One place where I've wanted this myself are with using LLMs for long-running goals I have. For example, I do my blood work about once a year, and I use the results to make changes and track. For a long time I had a long chat thread with ChatGPT. Now I have a little app instead.
An extreme version of this starts to turn responses into more and more fully-fledged apps. I did an experiment recently with creating a personal finance app. I found customizing the app to my specific needs made it much more valuable to me then generic personal finance apps, which have much more effort put it, but aren't tailored to my needs [^1]
For GETadb, it's a conflicting sell. The people that need "a db solved by AI" and fully abstracted are using app builders no? lovable, v0, manus. The people the are closer to the code and need an instant db would look to sqlite, render, supabase, neon. I'm all for another option, but then there's the realization that instandb is a new kind of db and I need to research into the value-prop vs the initial persona: "just solve my db problem with AI".
disclaimer: I'm a professional developer, doing an honest review. I may play around with it separately, later. So this marketing site did its job!
One place where a tool like GETadb can be helpful, is when you as a developer wanted to build a quick demonstration. For example one of co-founders Joe saw a tweet about how VCs were ranked. He pointed Instant to an agent, made a quick polling app, and got 600 votes [1].
We hope delightful experiences like that then prod hackers to dive deeper and use Instant for startups.
When you're experimenting on ideas, it's really nice when time to hello world is near zero. It's also nice when you aren't limited to a certain number of dbs or your projects get paused. This makes it so much more delightful to hack.
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
You are right about the activation energy to throw up anything new really comes down to a hosted db that won't rot. My initial experience with supabase was incredible in that sense: any client-side framework I wanted, deployed statically while still integrating with full Postgres, for free!
Problem is supabase rots. And turning that project into anything meaningful is basically undoing everything you got for free up front.
My solution today is sqlite. I'm not diehard typescript so it turns out traditional backend apps like rails running sqlite on tiny/free hardwire is pretty nice.
That said, client-side runtime will always be alluring because it can be deployed statically. So you've got something there that I'll check out.
The biggest problem I see with vibecoded apps attached to a db is that the db is configured with exactly 0 access control (even if whatever backend does support it), and anyone can turn up and SELECT * FROM users, or even DROP TABLE users. How do you mitigate this?
1. For the users table specifically, we have a default rule that says `"view": "auth.id == data.id"`. This way even if the the user (or AI) did not set access controls, user data is protected by default.
2. In the instructions file given to the agent (https://www.getadb.com/provision/new), we specifically mention permissions and how to push them. We found this prods the agent to push perms.
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.
Agreed. It is curious how the agent got nudged to add auth in that one.
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
I thought this would be something about getting (downloading?) the Android Debug Bridge tool (adb) until I read further. Might want to capitalize DB as well (GETaDB), at least from my pov
The GET request method is supposed to be safe.
"Request methods are considered 'safe' if their defined semantics are essentially read-only; i.e., the client does not request, and does not expect, any state change on the origin server as a result of applying a safe method to a target resource." -RFC 9110 section 9.2.1
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#name-safe-method...
Here's my argument:
In practice many GET requests don't adhere to this spec. For example, when you load a page, your "view" generally changes lots of things on the backend. Those changes come back to you in ways too: for example, consider view counts on Youtube videos or X posts.
> we get meta.ai to build an app inside the artifact preview
Is this the kind of use case that is seen as valuable?
I joked a while back that LLM-brain was going to have people building bespoke apps on each HTTP request, and people thought I was exaggerating!
> Is this the kind of use case that is seen as valuable?
I think it could be. Consider an argument like this:
It's valuable to ask ChatGPT questions and receive text responses. Some of the responses are more valuable when they don't just return text, but some markup: bolding, adding visualizations etc. Why can't some responses be more valuable if they return little apps?
One place where I've wanted this myself are with using LLMs for long-running goals I have. For example, I do my blood work about once a year, and I use the results to make changes and track. For a long time I had a long chat thread with ChatGPT. Now I have a little app instead.
An extreme version of this starts to turn responses into more and more fully-fledged apps. I did an experiment recently with creating a personal finance app. I found customizing the app to my specific needs made it much more valuable to me then generic personal finance apps, which have much more effort put it, but aren't tailored to my needs [^1]
[^1]: more on this experiment here: https://x.com/stopachka/status/2040982623636607009
I found https://www.instantdb.com/about very interesting; you built a new database! The triples stuff is cool.
For GETadb, it's a conflicting sell. The people that need "a db solved by AI" and fully abstracted are using app builders no? lovable, v0, manus. The people the are closer to the code and need an instant db would look to sqlite, render, supabase, neon. I'm all for another option, but then there's the realization that instandb is a new kind of db and I need to research into the value-prop vs the initial persona: "just solve my db problem with AI".
disclaimer: I'm a professional developer, doing an honest review. I may play around with it separately, later. So this marketing site did its job!
One place where a tool like GETadb can be helpful, is when you as a developer wanted to build a quick demonstration. For example one of co-founders Joe saw a tweet about how VCs were ranked. He pointed Instant to an agent, made a quick polling app, and got 600 votes [1].
We hope delightful experiences like that then prod hackers to dive deeper and use Instant for startups.
[1] https://x.com/JoeAverbukh/status/2028544576206860697
When you're experimenting on ideas, it's really nice when time to hello world is near zero. It's also nice when you aren't limited to a certain number of dbs or your projects get paused. This makes it so much more delightful to hack.
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
You are right about the activation energy to throw up anything new really comes down to a hosted db that won't rot. My initial experience with supabase was incredible in that sense: any client-side framework I wanted, deployed statically while still integrating with full Postgres, for free!
Problem is supabase rots. And turning that project into anything meaningful is basically undoing everything you got for free up front.
My solution today is sqlite. I'm not diehard typescript so it turns out traditional backend apps like rails running sqlite on tiny/free hardwire is pretty nice.
That said, client-side runtime will always be alluring because it can be deployed statically. So you've got something there that I'll check out.
> For credentials and instructions, fetch http://www.getadb.com/guide and follow the steps.
http, not https?
Oi! Updated. Should be live in a few minutes, but here's the PR: https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2642
So, give your LLM a URL and tell it to follow the instructions there?
Err, no thanks.
Most LLMs in practice already read URLs. If you ask them a question they don't know, they will search and read pages.
The biggest problem I see with vibecoded apps attached to a db is that the db is configured with exactly 0 access control (even if whatever backend does support it), and anyone can turn up and SELECT * FROM users, or even DROP TABLE users. How do you mitigate this?
Good question. Two ways:
1. For the users table specifically, we have a default rule that says `"view": "auth.id == data.id"`. This way even if the the user (or AI) did not set access controls, user data is protected by default.
2. In the instructions file given to the agent (https://www.getadb.com/provision/new), we specifically mention permissions and how to push them. We found this prods the agent to push perms.
This is very cool!
But why do we need this? An agent can just have a local DB using SQLite for example.
Two reasons this could make sense:
1. With this, agents can actually deploy a full backend with their credentials [^1].
2. If your agent ever wants to add auth, or real-time presence, or file uploads, or streams, they'll be able to do that too
[^1] Alas we don't offer static site hosting, so to push the website you would need to use something like a vercel cli.
I appreciate this part of the agent instructions: `AESTHETICS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. All apps should LOOK AMAZING and have GREAT FUNCTIONALITY!`
Thank you! Yeah, it is surprising how magic words can impact the performance of LLMs
do you actually know or are you just guessing
Funny enough we added this in awhile back when it seemed more conclusive that this does matter.
But I was curious and just did an adhoc eval.
Here's a version with the aesthetic line included
https://with-aes.vercel.app/
Here's a version without the line
https://wo-aes.vercel.app/
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.
hard to try bc with-aes has a login wall lol
Agreed. It is curious how the agent got nudged to add auth in that one.
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.
I thought this would be something about getting (downloading?) the Android Debug Bridge tool (adb) until I read further. Might want to capitalize DB as well (GETaDB), at least from my pov
Ah, good point. We can't change the title now though.
The agent thing is going a bit out of hand here.
Admittedly stateful GET requests are heretical, but it may be the future!