9 ms·

Retool AI

248 points by donjh 3y ago

speedz007 3y ago
Looks neat. Do you guys plan to allow the use of custom AI models down the road? Especially for the enterprise use case.
- cuffe 3y ago
  Yes working on adding llama2 and AWS bedrock support right now for open source models. But we also want to let users bring their own models - is there a specific model you're looking for? Who knows longer-term I'd love to help users fine-tune their own models on llama2/gpt-3.5!
  - speedz007 3y ago
    Llama 2 and Bedrock is exactly what we are looking at. I have been playing around with it for a priority enterprise use-case at my org, and this seems promising. We tried using the Retool vectors, but it really struggles to pick up the right context if we dump data without pre-processing it. For example, adding a URL without stripping header/footers/disclaimers/cross links etc. I think adding some steerability to the context selection process is going to be key. I also have to admit that while retool is extremely feature rich - the user-experience is clunky and the learning curve is steep.
    - cuffe 3y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. We're currently working on customization with the url parser and trimming headers/etc makes a lot of sense. If you're able to share more about your use case (jamie AT retool DOT com), happy to get it tuned on your dataset
dominicwhyte 3y ago
We've been using the ChatGPT API from Retool Workflows (for spam detection) and it's been valuable for our business. The built-in vector DB looks interesting
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  How does the spam detection work? Does chat gpt output something that your application can understand, like {isSpam: true}, or does it output a sentence in english?
  - vorticalbox 3y ago
    With functions you can simply teach it to call a function with a score.
  - dominicwhyte 3y ago
    It outputs both - { isLikelySpam: boolean, reason: string } Then we have an inbox app (also made in Retool) that our support team uses to manually review any submissions that are isLikelySpam = true. The <reason> helps to understand why it was flagged. Our use case is for a form builder (https://fillout.com https://fillout.com) but I imagine this type of use case is pretty common for any app that has user-generated content
    - hereonout2 3y ago
      I'm interested in this aspect of llms too, are you simply just passing it some input (email, customer message) and asking chat gpt to decide if it's spam? Do you provide any prior examples of spam / not spam or just rely on the knowledge already embedded within the model? Spam detection is a classic example for classification problems. I guess I'm trying to gauge whether there's an entire suite of traditional problems that llms solve well enough by simply asking a question of the base model. I've found a few areas in my own work where this is the case.
      - dominicwhyte 3y ago
        We give 2-3 examples and find that it works pretty well (few shot fine tuning) but haven't tried actual fine tuning yet so I don't have a 1-1 comparison. We also have other spam filters that are not LLM-based. One of the main benefits of the LLM-based approach is that it's good at catching people who try to avoid detection (e.g. someone purposefully mis-spelling suspicious words like "pa$$word")
cloudecon 3y ago
Nice. Would it be fair to say this is directly competitive with Zapier in terms of creating AI-powered workflows?
- ajhai 3y ago
  Not directly imo. Zapier focus is still on workflow automation and retool is on internal tools. This directly competes with a bunch of startups that recently launched including an open-source project we put out a few weeks back (https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack)
- macklu 3y ago
  (Retool PM here) Our automation product Workflows (https://retool.com/products/workflows/ https://retool.com/products/workflows/) now has an AI actions block so it's easy to build flows with steps like “summarize text” or “classify image”. Our approach is to make it easy to chain different steps together into flows whether those steps are code (JS/Python/SQL), API calls, database queries, or LLM prompts. Zapier is no-code, catering more towards a citizen developer audience, where we’ve built Workflows with professional developers in mind. We typically see customers turn to Workflows when they want scalable self-hosting and more customization options (e.g. complex branching/looping, source control, custom error handling) than what Zapier is offering.
verdverm 3y ago
We hear about Retool here more than once a month, is there a new development we are to learn about today? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retool.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retool.com
- antonyl 3y ago
  It looks like this is a new product they're launching today: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/low-code-platform-retool-makes-it-easier-to-bring-ai-smarts-to-business-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/low-code-platform-retool-m...
- manojlds 3y ago
  This is talking of Retool AI integrations support.
cuffe 3y ago
Hi all, eng who worked on vectors @ Retool here. We’re excited to get HN’s feedback on a new product I’ve been working on: Retool vectors. There’s been a lot of hype around AI, but as I was thinking about what we could launch, there were really very few AI apps that are today _actually_ delivering business value. For example, there are tons of chatbots, summarization bots, etc., but it wasn’t clear how to use them. There were bots that we could use for answering support tickets (we use Intercom), but when we tried using them, the results were far worse than expected (it only managed to close ~5% of our tickets, and required substantial human intervention). I then tried building a custom AI chatbot for our support team, powered by a vector database (with previous answers, our docs, and community forum data). In my prototypes, the successful response rate was much higher (around 5 - 7x higher, ~30%). But it was surprisingly hard to build this bot: I needed to stitch together vector databases, custom integrations with Intercom, cronjobs to sync data, etc. That’s why we built Retool Vectors. The idea is that we want to build a vector database that has full ETL from whatever inputs you have (e.g. Intercom, a postgres database, Salesforce, a community forum, a website, etc.). It’s always kept up to date. (We’re still working on some of these features, but I decided to try and launch this week because I just wanted to get feedback from HN, haha.) I think the industry has now settled on vector databases as the best way to provide context to LLMs. I hope that Retool Vectors can be a much easier way of getting data into it. If you have any feedback please let me know!
- beardedwizard 3y ago
  Given how many projects like this exist, is this just to generate leads for retool sales? Does this actually make money?
  - cuffe 3y ago
    When I was building our support chatbot powered by a vectorized DB, I couldn’t actually find a project that helped with syncing Intercom chat data, Discourse community forum data, and web crawling data into a vectorized database. Do you have any suggestions? This was really a “scratch my own itch” product (not something to “generate leads for retool sales”), so genuinely asking out of curiosity! (If there are better products maybe we should kill this project and just recommend people use that instead, haha.) And no, this is definitely not making money. (It’s free after all, so I guess we’re probably losing money on this.) To be honest, as an engineer @ Retool, I work on things because I think they’re cool and could be useful to our customers… not because it has to make my company money.
orliesaurus 3y ago
My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.
- ajhai 3y ago
  Would you mind expanding why it was tough to get started with Retool? We are building https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack, a low-code platform to build LLM apps with a goal of making it easy for non-tech people to leverage LLMs in their workflows. Would love to learn about your experience with retool and incorporate some of that feedback into LLMStack.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- slig 3y ago
  Have you tried Windmill?
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    I love Windmill. I've built some handy internal tools for populating a smoke forecasting app's daily data, some dumb UIs for crud interfaces, and various workers and schedules. I could do it all without windmill, but I actually really like the scaffolding it provides.
  - orliesaurus 3y ago
    No, not yet! Thx for the recc
  - vekker 3y ago
    I don't understand the appeal of these tools. I've tried it, but it's a complete cognitive overload, having to learn some proprietary UI to do simple things. I don't understand why adding for-loops by pointing, clicking and entering some textbox on the side for the expression is easier than simply typing it out. It feels like all these "low code" tools are aimed at a tiny audience of technical people who are somehow technical enough to understand these UIs, but not quite technical enough to quickly roll their scripts and prototypes out the "traditional" way.
ajhai 3y ago
Most of the use cases we are seeing LLMs unlock look trivial in isolation when looked at it from content generation point of view but become super powerful when mixed into workflows. This is evident from all the startups we are seeing lately in this space and LLM integrations into existing products like Zapier, Hubspot and now Retool AI. Granted these are still early days for LLMs, but it looks they are primarily going to revolutionize how knowledge work is done at a scale similar to what computers have done. There are exciting projects coming out every week putting LLMs into the workflows of more and more knowledge workers. open-interpreter is the recent of the bunch. Similar to other workflow automation projects in this space, we started building LLMStack (https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack) with a goal of scaling knowledge work pieplines. Exciting times ahead!
rocauc 3y ago
I'd love a template for: 1. Select internal document sources you want to ingest (Notion/Slab, specific Slack channels, named Google Docs in a folder) 2. Enable Q&A + augmented retrieval in response 3. Serve to end users in a Slack channel at our company
- cuffe 3y ago
  Agree we're working on building this exact flow into the product now. But in the meantime I have a Workflow (our version of a webhook/cron job) that does this internally that I can send it to you if you want. Just ping me at jamie AT Retool DOT com
- ajhai 3y ago
  You can do this with LLMStack. We are adding the datasource handlers to pull data from Google docs etc., Slack integration is built in. More info at https://llmstack.ai/docs/apps/integrations/slack https://llmstack.ai/docs/apps/integrations/slack. Happy to chat if you have questions.
willsmith72 3y ago
Can someone who's been there tell me how the "Trusted by developers, startups, and Fortune 500s" works? How does Retool (or any company) get another company's logo here?
- vosper 3y ago
  You ask for permission from your contact/champion at the company, or at contract time. You might offer a discount if you’re in contract negotiations. Getting permission is definitely not a sure thing and might require some luck or savvy, or having a champion with clout (director, VP, etc…)
  - cj 3y ago
    It’s also very common for a small team (or individual) at a large company to use a tool, and the tool can plaster that logo on their homepage even if the use case was insignificant. For a lot of companies, logos on homepages is more of an “ask for forgiveness later” type of thing. Not uncommon to do it without permission. It’s also very common for TOS to include the rights to use your company logo for marketing purposes by default.
    - dvdhsu 3y ago
      For us, every single one of the logos we display on https://retool.com https://retool.com has a committed contract with Retool where they agreed to display their logo. (Generally our champion does need to go ask a VP; in return we offer a discount.) 100% of the logos that we show pay us more than $50k a year. (80% of them pay us more than $100k a year, and some % of them pay us more than $1M a year, hah.) We wouldn't want to display their logo otherwise! (Since it'd be misleading, but also because it'd be problematic — if say — Taco Bell engineer came and asked us who exactly is using Retool at Taco Bell.) (Founder at Retool here.)
      - willsmith72 3y ago
        that's awesome. Just a thought, I wonder if users would appreciate knowing that. To me, the reason I asked is I tend to assume the worst (minimal permission, 1 person in the org, no contract, etc...). Maybe just me, but especially so when it's huge names like Amazon or Stripe
tipiirai 3y ago
How is it possible that Retool login page [1] loads 6.4MB of resources? The app.js [2] alone is 4.0M when loaded on local machine. Is this common? [1]: https://app.retool.com/auth/login https://app.retool.com/auth/login [2]: https://retool-edge.com/app.cd90db16bade51faa017.js https://retool-edge.com/app.cd90db16bade51faa017.js
- cuffe 3y ago
  That's a fair concern and something we're working on improving every day! It's fairly common when you consider Retool in the context of other development platforms. VSCode is a 200MB download and is considered small in the desktop space. Even gdocs is ~30MB. For context, these resources are cached on your machine. So you should find that the actual data transferred significantly decreases after the first visit.
  - tipiirai 3y ago
    > something we're working on improving every day! Great to hear that! There is hope to frontend obesity crisis. What actions have you done to slip down the login page to 6MB? How large was it in the beginning? What is the bulk of that file? I mean React framework would span only 0.1% of that room.
    - meowtimemania 3y ago
      I imagine they have a huge task list with a lot of higher priority tasks than reducing the js bundle. Sure it'd be nice, but it's not what users most want.
    - cuffe 3y ago
      I checked in with an engineer who’s focussing on app performance. You're right that this screen should not be 6MB. One part of the bloat is due to our webpack configuration. In lighthouse, you can see that >50% of the app.js file is unused for login. Most of this is actually used for the app after login. We’re working on getting this down significantly but, that being said, the login page isn’t our highest priority. It’s the first thing customers see, but >99% of the time, they’ll already be logged in and navigate straight to the apps page, or a specific Retool app. For these pages, we’ve: 1. re-written our core runtime to avoid excessive message passing with iframes (up to 75% faster page load for slowest apps) 2. parallelized resource fetching with JS execution 3. cached app graph information in IndexedDB 4. tweaked webpack chunking strategy to avoid very small JS/CSS chunks 5. optimized resource fetching to avoid over fetching Hope that’s helpful context. Definitely let me know if you have thoughts/other ideas
wpydcr 3y ago
I would like to know how do you ensure the query accuracy of the vector database?
- cuffe 3y ago
  Today we use a cosine similarity search but we're planning to integrate with more vector databases and allow you to customize the search logic soon. Is there a particular query method you're looking for?
anoy8888 3y ago
Okay. If it is any good , we need to create an open source and free version for the community
- cuffe 3y ago
  Excited to already see some great open source projects in this space (Langchain, Llamaindex, Axilla, etc) many of which we're exploring using for this project. Just to be clear Retool Vectors is completely free (we're even taking on the LLM costs). We put the embeddings in a free postgres DB (and soon other open source vector DB providers) and give you the connection string so you can take it anywhere
gaurangblaze 3y ago
Looks awesome, congrats! Do you provide any integrations for identifying hallucinated outputs and/or showing references with the output (like Bing does)? Such a feature is critical for AI outputs, so it might be nice if it's supported out of the box.
- cuffe 3y ago
  Thanks! Yes agree this is very important. We do show references from Retool Vectors out of the box, so you can see what embeddings were used to generate a response. If it'd be helpful I can walk you through a few internal Q&A bot examples which display references - jamie AT retool DOT com

248 points by donjh 3y ago

Looks neat. Do you guys plan to allow the use of custom AI models down the road? Especially for the enterprise use case.

cuffe 3y ago
Yes working on adding llama2 and AWS bedrock support right now for open source models. But we also want to let users bring their own models - is there a specific model you're looking for? Who knows longer-term I'd love to help users fine-tune their own models on llama2/gpt-3.5!
- speedz007 3y ago
  Llama 2 and Bedrock is exactly what we are looking at. I have been playing around with it for a priority enterprise use-case at my org, and this seems promising. We tried using the Retool vectors, but it really struggles to pick up the right context if we dump data without pre-processing it. For example, adding a URL without stripping header/footers/disclaimers/cross links etc. I think adding some steerability to the context selection process is going to be key. I also have to admit that while retool is extremely feature rich - the user-experience is clunky and the learning curve is steep.
  - cuffe 3y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. We're currently working on customization with the url parser and trimming headers/etc makes a lot of sense. If you're able to share more about your use case (jamie AT retool DOT com), happy to get it tuned on your dataset

dominicwhyte 3y ago

We've been using the ChatGPT API from Retool Workflows (for spam detection) and it's been valuable for our business. The built-in vector DB looks interesting

meowtimemania 3y ago
How does the spam detection work? Does chat gpt output something that your application can understand, like {isSpam: true}, or does it output a sentence in english?
- vorticalbox 3y ago
  With functions you can simply teach it to call a function with a score.
- dominicwhyte 3y ago
  It outputs both - { isLikelySpam: boolean, reason: string } Then we have an inbox app (also made in Retool) that our support team uses to manually review any submissions that are isLikelySpam = true. The <reason> helps to understand why it was flagged. Our use case is for a form builder (https://fillout.com https://fillout.com) but I imagine this type of use case is pretty common for any app that has user-generated content
  - hereonout2 3y ago
    I'm interested in this aspect of llms too, are you simply just passing it some input (email, customer message) and asking chat gpt to decide if it's spam? Do you provide any prior examples of spam / not spam or just rely on the knowledge already embedded within the model? Spam detection is a classic example for classification problems. I guess I'm trying to gauge whether there's an entire suite of traditional problems that llms solve well enough by simply asking a question of the base model. I've found a few areas in my own work where this is the case.
    - dominicwhyte 3y ago
      We give 2-3 examples and find that it works pretty well (few shot fine tuning) but haven't tried actual fine tuning yet so I don't have a 1-1 comparison. We also have other spam filters that are not LLM-based. One of the main benefits of the LLM-based approach is that it's good at catching people who try to avoid detection (e.g. someone purposefully mis-spelling suspicious words like "pa$$word")

cloudecon 3y ago

Nice. Would it be fair to say this is directly competitive with Zapier in terms of creating AI-powered workflows?

ajhai 3y ago
Not directly imo. Zapier focus is still on workflow automation and retool is on internal tools. This directly competes with a bunch of startups that recently launched including an open-source project we put out a few weeks back (https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack)
macklu 3y ago
(Retool PM here) Our automation product Workflows (https://retool.com/products/workflows/ https://retool.com/products/workflows/) now has an AI actions block so it's easy to build flows with steps like “summarize text” or “classify image”. Our approach is to make it easy to chain different steps together into flows whether those steps are code (JS/Python/SQL), API calls, database queries, or LLM prompts. Zapier is no-code, catering more towards a citizen developer audience, where we’ve built Workflows with professional developers in mind. We typically see customers turn to Workflows when they want scalable self-hosting and more customization options (e.g. complex branching/looping, source control, custom error handling) than what Zapier is offering.

verdverm 3y ago

We hear about Retool here more than once a month, is there a new development we are to learn about today? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retool.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retool.com

antonyl 3y ago
It looks like this is a new product they're launching today: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/low-code-platform-retool-makes-it-easier-to-bring-ai-smarts-to-business-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/low-code-platform-retool-m...
manojlds 3y ago
This is talking of Retool AI integrations support.

cuffe 3y ago

Hi all, eng who worked on vectors @ Retool here. We’re excited to get HN’s feedback on a new product I’ve been working on: Retool vectors. There’s been a lot of hype around AI, but as I was thinking about what we could launch, there were really very few AI apps that are today _actually_ delivering business value. For example, there are tons of chatbots, summarization bots, etc., but it wasn’t clear how to use them. There were bots that we could use for answering support tickets (we use Intercom), but when we tried using them, the results were far worse than expected (it only managed to close ~5% of our tickets, and required substantial human intervention). I then tried building a custom AI chatbot for our support team, powered by a vector database (with previous answers, our docs, and community forum data). In my prototypes, the successful response rate was much higher (around 5 - 7x higher, ~30%). But it was surprisingly hard to build this bot: I needed to stitch together vector databases, custom integrations with Intercom, cronjobs to sync data, etc. That’s why we built Retool Vectors. The idea is that we want to build a vector database that has full ETL from whatever inputs you have (e.g. Intercom, a postgres database, Salesforce, a community forum, a website, etc.). It’s always kept up to date. (We’re still working on some of these features, but I decided to try and launch this week because I just wanted to get feedback from HN, haha.) I think the industry has now settled on vector databases as the best way to provide context to LLMs. I hope that Retool Vectors can be a much easier way of getting data into it. If you have any feedback please let me know!

beardedwizard 3y ago
Given how many projects like this exist, is this just to generate leads for retool sales? Does this actually make money?
- cuffe 3y ago
  When I was building our support chatbot powered by a vectorized DB, I couldn’t actually find a project that helped with syncing Intercom chat data, Discourse community forum data, and web crawling data into a vectorized database. Do you have any suggestions? This was really a “scratch my own itch” product (not something to “generate leads for retool sales”), so genuinely asking out of curiosity! (If there are better products maybe we should kill this project and just recommend people use that instead, haha.) And no, this is definitely not making money. (It’s free after all, so I guess we’re probably losing money on this.) To be honest, as an engineer @ Retool, I work on things because I think they’re cool and could be useful to our customers… not because it has to make my company money.

orliesaurus 3y ago

My personal opinion (besides this constant flux of Retool product announcements) is that I truly tried and gave Retool a chance... but man, it was tough to get started, I rather just code from scratch with some boilerplate.

ajhai 3y ago
Would you mind expanding why it was tough to get started with Retool? We are building https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack, a low-code platform to build LLM apps with a goal of making it easy for non-tech people to leverage LLMs in their workflows. Would love to learn about your experience with retool and incorporate some of that feedback into LLMStack.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
slig 3y ago
Have you tried Windmill?
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  I love Windmill. I've built some handy internal tools for populating a smoke forecasting app's daily data, some dumb UIs for crud interfaces, and various workers and schedules. I could do it all without windmill, but I actually really like the scaffolding it provides.
- orliesaurus 3y ago
  No, not yet! Thx for the recc
- vekker 3y ago
  I don't understand the appeal of these tools. I've tried it, but it's a complete cognitive overload, having to learn some proprietary UI to do simple things. I don't understand why adding for-loops by pointing, clicking and entering some textbox on the side for the expression is easier than simply typing it out. It feels like all these "low code" tools are aimed at a tiny audience of technical people who are somehow technical enough to understand these UIs, but not quite technical enough to quickly roll their scripts and prototypes out the "traditional" way.

ajhai 3y ago

Most of the use cases we are seeing LLMs unlock look trivial in isolation when looked at it from content generation point of view but become super powerful when mixed into workflows. This is evident from all the startups we are seeing lately in this space and LLM integrations into existing products like Zapier, Hubspot and now Retool AI. Granted these are still early days for LLMs, but it looks they are primarily going to revolutionize how knowledge work is done at a scale similar to what computers have done. There are exciting projects coming out every week putting LLMs into the workflows of more and more knowledge workers. open-interpreter is the recent of the bunch. Similar to other workflow automation projects in this space, we started building LLMStack (https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack) with a goal of scaling knowledge work pieplines. Exciting times ahead!

rocauc 3y ago

I'd love a template for: 1. Select internal document sources you want to ingest (Notion/Slab, specific Slack channels, named Google Docs in a folder) 2. Enable Q&A + augmented retrieval in response 3. Serve to end users in a Slack channel at our company

cuffe 3y ago
Agree we're working on building this exact flow into the product now. But in the meantime I have a Workflow (our version of a webhook/cron job) that does this internally that I can send it to you if you want. Just ping me at jamie AT Retool DOT com
ajhai 3y ago
You can do this with LLMStack. We are adding the datasource handlers to pull data from Google docs etc., Slack integration is built in. More info at https://llmstack.ai/docs/apps/integrations/slack https://llmstack.ai/docs/apps/integrations/slack. Happy to chat if you have questions.

willsmith72 3y ago

Can someone who's been there tell me how the "Trusted by developers, startups, and Fortune 500s" works? How does Retool (or any company) get another company's logo here?

vosper 3y ago
You ask for permission from your contact/champion at the company, or at contract time. You might offer a discount if you’re in contract negotiations. Getting permission is definitely not a sure thing and might require some luck or savvy, or having a champion with clout (director, VP, etc…)
- cj 3y ago
  It’s also very common for a small team (or individual) at a large company to use a tool, and the tool can plaster that logo on their homepage even if the use case was insignificant. For a lot of companies, logos on homepages is more of an “ask for forgiveness later” type of thing. Not uncommon to do it without permission. It’s also very common for TOS to include the rights to use your company logo for marketing purposes by default.
  - dvdhsu 3y ago
    For us, every single one of the logos we display on https://retool.com https://retool.com has a committed contract with Retool where they agreed to display their logo. (Generally our champion does need to go ask a VP; in return we offer a discount.) 100% of the logos that we show pay us more than $50k a year. (80% of them pay us more than $100k a year, and some % of them pay us more than $1M a year, hah.) We wouldn't want to display their logo otherwise! (Since it'd be misleading, but also because it'd be problematic — if say — Taco Bell engineer came and asked us who exactly is using Retool at Taco Bell.) (Founder at Retool here.)
    - willsmith72 3y ago
      that's awesome. Just a thought, I wonder if users would appreciate knowing that. To me, the reason I asked is I tend to assume the worst (minimal permission, 1 person in the org, no contract, etc...). Maybe just me, but especially so when it's huge names like Amazon or Stripe

tipiirai 3y ago

How is it possible that Retool login page [1] loads 6.4MB of resources? The app.js [2] alone is 4.0M when loaded on local machine. Is this common? [1]: https://app.retool.com/auth/login https://app.retool.com/auth/login [2]: https://retool-edge.com/app.cd90db16bade51faa017.js https://retool-edge.com/app.cd90db16bade51faa017.js

cuffe 3y ago
That's a fair concern and something we're working on improving every day! It's fairly common when you consider Retool in the context of other development platforms. VSCode is a 200MB download and is considered small in the desktop space. Even gdocs is ~30MB. For context, these resources are cached on your machine. So you should find that the actual data transferred significantly decreases after the first visit.
- tipiirai 3y ago
  > something we're working on improving every day! Great to hear that! There is hope to frontend obesity crisis. What actions have you done to slip down the login page to 6MB? How large was it in the beginning? What is the bulk of that file? I mean React framework would span only 0.1% of that room.
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    I imagine they have a huge task list with a lot of higher priority tasks than reducing the js bundle. Sure it'd be nice, but it's not what users most want.
  - cuffe 3y ago
    I checked in with an engineer who’s focussing on app performance. You're right that this screen should not be 6MB. One part of the bloat is due to our webpack configuration. In lighthouse, you can see that >50% of the app.js file is unused for login. Most of this is actually used for the app after login. We’re working on getting this down significantly but, that being said, the login page isn’t our highest priority. It’s the first thing customers see, but >99% of the time, they’ll already be logged in and navigate straight to the apps page, or a specific Retool app. For these pages, we’ve: 1. re-written our core runtime to avoid excessive message passing with iframes (up to 75% faster page load for slowest apps) 2. parallelized resource fetching with JS execution 3. cached app graph information in IndexedDB 4. tweaked webpack chunking strategy to avoid very small JS/CSS chunks 5. optimized resource fetching to avoid over fetching Hope that’s helpful context. Definitely let me know if you have thoughts/other ideas

wpydcr 3y ago

I would like to know how do you ensure the query accuracy of the vector database?

cuffe 3y ago
Today we use a cosine similarity search but we're planning to integrate with more vector databases and allow you to customize the search logic soon. Is there a particular query method you're looking for?

anoy8888 3y ago

Okay. If it is any good , we need to create an open source and free version for the community

cuffe 3y ago
Excited to already see some great open source projects in this space (Langchain, Llamaindex, Axilla, etc) many of which we're exploring using for this project. Just to be clear Retool Vectors is completely free (we're even taking on the LLM costs). We put the embeddings in a free postgres DB (and soon other open source vector DB providers) and give you the connection string so you can take it anywhere

gaurangblaze 3y ago

Looks awesome, congrats! Do you provide any integrations for identifying hallucinated outputs and/or showing references with the output (like Bing does)? Such a feature is critical for AI outputs, so it might be nice if it's supported out of the box.

cuffe 3y ago
Thanks! Yes agree this is very important. We do show references from Retool Vectors out of the box, so you can see what embeddings were used to generate a response. If it'd be helpful I can walk you through a few internal Q&A bot examples which display references - jamie AT retool DOT com