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1 points·by mgummelt·3 years ago·0 comments

Macros: Automate Apps with Record and Replay

plato.io
13 points·by mgummelt·3 years ago·8 comments

comments

mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
You can't compare the accuracy of speech recognition to LLM task completion rates. A nearly-there yet incomplete solution to a Github issue is still valuable to an engineer who knows how to debug it.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
Airtable itself lets you expose simple forms to the public internet.

Then there are dedicated form tools like Fillout that let you build more complex forms that integrate with Airtable.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
Plato (https://plato.io) is free for up to five users, then $20/user/month

(Disclaimer: I'm a founder)
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
I was only there for a few months!
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
If revenue was stalled, the investors would have written it off and deferred to the founders.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
One factor that no one seems to have noticed is that both cofounders, Ravi and Joshua, have already built fairly big companies. Ravi was the co-founder at Heap (he took over my co-founder spot after I left), and Joshua was the CTO at Benchling.

Both of those companies have raised >$100M. After that success, the prospect of continuing to run a middling company in the shadow of Retool isn't very appealing.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
Neat. But why did you build this instead of just using Jasper?
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
> tools in general are a hard sell, maybe an extremely hard sell.

All business software are tools.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
> I have yet to see it in practice

I don't know where you work, but automated continuous deployment has been an industry standard for fifteen years.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
There are lots of examples in the use cases section of any low-code vendor, but in short, most internal tools are not in the horizontal categories you listed. They're in vertical, industry-specific categories at SES (Software-Enabled Services) companies.

A quick commerce startup, for instance, is unlikely to find an inventory tracking app off-the-shelf that fits their workflow, since existing ERPs are not going to fit their workflow.
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
Cool. How do you use it to generate the frontend CRUD interfaces?
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
How do you use ChatGPT to write CRUD apps? Do you mean Github Copilot?
mgummelt
·2 years ago·discuss
It depends what you mean by CRUD app.

Strictly speaking, the answer to your question is Airtable.
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
Equals is an actual spreadsheet with read-only access to your warehouse. It's used for analytics and accounting.

Plato is a visual database, similar to Airtable, with read-write (configurable) access to your production database. It's used for operations.
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
Cool. You might give our app, Plato, a shot as well. It gives you an Airtable-like UI on your database.

https://plato.io
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
Agreed. So far, building macros (https://www.plato.io/blog/introducing-macros), we've found that if you provide an easy and immediate way to map program elements to their meaning, non-techies can understand pseudocode in the form of linear lists of actions, even with branching/looping via indentation.
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
Founder of https://plato.io here.

We support concurrent editing, so you see updates from your teammates in realtime, but we just haven't built a frontend for it yet, so you don't get the visual indicators a la Figma of where your teammates are and what they're doing.

Email me if you want to chat more: [email protected]
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
Mostly, yea. It's generated from the sequence of actions the user takes in the UI, with a little bit of inference so we can detect, for example, that a user actually is trying to update the first row in a filtered table, rather than a specific row with a specific ID.

And they can be triggered in lots of different ways (buttons, forms, events), not just keyboard shortcuts.
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
We're not looking for partnerships right now, but message me and I'm happy to chat about visual programming. Max/MSP is the OG (though we of course are bullish on macros vs. flowcharts).
mgummelt
·3 years ago·discuss
Definitely, though the semantics of field mappings often only exist in a user's head, so will need to be explicitly defined.

English prompts will no doubt be a big part of Plato, though. We're still figuring out exactly where the line is between English and traditional UIs. Have you read any good analysis on the subject? Here's one that explores the limits of LLMs: https://magrawala.substack.com/p/unpredictable-black-boxes-a...