7 ms·

Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps

215 points by stopachka 6mo ago

ladon86 6mo ago
Looks very nice! I'll give it a spin for prototypes. Would love to check out /docs but it's currently a 404.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Docs should be working now! If anyone else has issues please let us know!
chrysoprace 6mo ago
Is InstantDB no longer about local-first or is the AI angle just a marketing thing?
- dghlsakjg 6mo ago
  This looks like a blog post highlighting that this can be used for vibecoded apps, not necessarily a pivot on the product.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  We built Instant to optimize for two things: We wanted to make a tool that (a) would make it easy to build delightful apps, and that (b) builders would find easy to use. This got us into making things that touch both local-first and AI. On the local-first side, we took on problems like offline-mode, real-time, and optimisitc updates. On the AI side, we built a multi-tenant abstraction, so you can spin up as many apps as you like, and focused on great DX/AX so agents found Instant easy to use too.
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jamest 6mo ago
They actually deliver on the promise of "relational queries && real-time," which is no small feat. Though, their console feels like it didn't get the love that the rest of the infra / website did. Congrats on the 1.0 launch! I'm excited to keep building with Instant.
- stopachka 6mo ago
  Thank you! We spent a lot of time with the demos on the home page, the essays page, and upgrading the docs. We're going to redesign the dashboard in the next few weeks. One interesting observation from our users: though they use the dashboard less in some ways (the AI agents spin up apps and make schema changes for them), we found people use them _more_ in other ways. Instant comes with an Explorer component, which lets you query your data. We found users want to engage with that a lot more.
asdev 6mo ago
I wonder if people really need this. How many people are really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear etc? I'm guessing 99% are CRUD and I doubt that will change. Even if so, would you want to vendor lock into some proprietary technology rather than build with tried and tested open source components?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  For what it's worth, Instant is 100% open source! https://github.com/instantdb/instant https://github.com/instantdb/instant
- stopachka 6mo ago
  > really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear I think there's two surprises about this: 1. If it was easier to make apps multiplayer, I bet more apps would be. For example, I don't see why Linear has to be multiplayer, but other CRUD apps don't. 2. When the abstraction is right, building apps with sync engines is easier than building traditional CRUD apps. The Linear team mentioned this themselves here: https://x.com/artman/status/1558081796914483201 https://x.com/artman/status/1558081796914483201
- risyachka 6mo ago
  Yeah I kinda agree. Considering llms write most of the code today, the need for fancy tech is lower than ever. A good old crud app looks like a perfect fit for ai - its simple, repetitive and ai is great at sql. Go binary for backend and react for frontend - covers 99.9% use cases with basically zero resource usage. 5 usd node will handle 100k mau without breaking a sweat.
  - stopachka 6mo ago
    > 5 usd node will handle 100k mau without breaking a sweat. One problem you may encounter with the 5 usd node: how do you handle multiple projects? You could put them all in one VM, but that set up can get esoteric, and as you look for more isolation, the processes won't fit on such a small machine. With Instant, you can make unlimited projects. Your app also gets a sync engine, which is both good for your users, and at least in our experiments, the AIs prefer building with it. And if you ever want to get off Instant, the whole system is open source. I still resonate with a good Hetzner box though, and it can make sense to self-host or to use more tried-and-true tech. For what it's worth, with Instant you would get a lot more support for easy projects. At least in our benchmarks, AI
ghm2199 6mo ago
For people like me — who are kind of familiar with how react/jetpack compose/flutter like frameworks work — I recall using react-widget/composables which seamlessly update when these register to receive updates to the underlying datamodel. The persistence boundary in these apps was the app/device where it was running. The datamodel was local. You still had to worry about making the data updates to servers and back to get to other devices/apps. Instant crosses that persistence boundary, your app can propagate updates to any one who has subscribed to the abstract datastore — which is on a server somewhere, so you the engineer don't have to write that code. Right? But how is this different/better than things like, i wanna say, vercel/nextjs or the like that host similar infra?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  I would say NextJS focuses a lot more on server-rendering. If you use the app router, the default path is to render as much as you can on the server. This can work great, but you lose some benefits: your pages won't work offline, they won't be real-time, and if you make changes, you'll have to wait for the server to acknowledge them. Instant pushes handles more of the work on the frontend. You make queries directly in your frontend, and Instant handles all the offline caching, the real-time, and the optimistic updates. You can have the best of both worlds though. We have an experimental SSR package, which to our knowledge is the first to combine _both_ SSR and real-time. The way it works: 1. Next SSRs the page 2. But when it loads, Instant picks it up and makes every query reactive. More details here: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/next-ssr https://www.instantdb.com/docs/next-ssr
nharada 6mo ago
This is super cool and exactly what I've been looking for for personal projects I think. I wanna try it out, but the "agent" part could be more seamless. How does my coding agent know how to work this thing? I'd suggest including a skill for this, or if there's already one linking to it on the blog!
- nezaj 6mo ago
  We do have a skill! npx skills add instantdb/skills Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!
  - LoganDark 6mo ago
    Can I view the source code of this skill / install it manually? I am incredibly not a fan of automated installers for this type of stuff.
    - nezaj 6mo ago
      You can! The skill lives here https://github.com/instantdb/skills https://github.com/instantdb/skills
- stopachka 6mo ago
  Good idea! I went ahead and updated the essay: https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2530 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2530 It should be live in a few minutes.
minantom 6mo ago
how is this better than vercel?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Stopa answers this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711254 But pairing Instant with Vercel works great too! We have a tutorial on how you can build an app with Instant and deploy it to vercel here https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial
ghm2199 6mo ago
One thing I have always wanted to do is cancel an AI Agent executing remotely that I kicked off as it streamed its part by part response(part could words, list of urls or whatever you want the FE to display). A good example is web-researcher agent that searches and fetches web pages remotely and sends it back to the local sub-agent to summarize the results. This is something claude-code in the terminal does not quite provide. In Instant would this be trivial to build? Here is how I built it in a WUI: I sent SSE events from Server -> Client streaming web-search progress, but then the client could update a `x` box on "parent" widget using the `id` from a SSE event using a simple REST call. The `id` could belong to parent web-search or to certain URLs which are being fetched. And then whatever is yielding your SSE lines would check the db would cancel the send(assuming it had not sent all the words already).
- stopachka 6mo ago
  If I understood you correctly: You kick off an agent. It reports work back to the user. The user can click cancel, and the agent gets terminated. You are right, this kind of UX comes very naturally with Instant. If an agent writes data to Instant, it will show up right away to the user. If the user clicks an `X` button, it will propagate to the agent. The basic sync engine would handle a lot of the complexity here. If the data streaming gets more complicated, you may want to use Instant streams. For example, if you want to convey updates character by character, you can use Instant streams as an included service, which does this extremely efficiently. More about the sync engine: https://www.instantdb.com/product/sync https://www.instantdb.com/product/sync More about streams: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/streams https://www.instantdb.com/docs/streams
shay_ker 6mo ago
with a huge multi-tenant database, how do you deal with noisy neighbors? indexes are surely necessary, which impose a non-trivial cost at scale.
- stopachka 6mo ago
  One data structure that helps a lot is the grouped queue. I cover it in the essay here: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture#:~:text=is%20to%20parallelize.-,Grouped%20Queues,-Since%20our%20database https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture#:~:text=is%20t... To summarize: In places where we process throughput, we generally stick a grouped queue and a threadpool that takes from it. The mechanics for this queue make it so that if there's one noisy neighbor, it can't hog all the threads. There's more too (runbooks, rate limiting systems, buffers, isolated instances), but I thought this particular data structure was really fun to share.
jvalencia 6mo ago
How does security and isolation work? If someone else's account is compromised, how do I know I won't be? If instant is compromised, how do I know I won't be?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  If someone else's account is compromised, you would not be, because apps are logically separated. There would be no way for the compromised or uncompromised account to ever see your data. If Instant is compromised, then that's a lot more dangerous. We minimize this risk following security best practices: keeping data encrypted at rest, keeping secrets hashed at creation time, etc.
  - oofbey 6mo ago
    Oh they’re logically separated. Thanks for explaining that. Now I’m certain nothing could possibly go wrong. /s
    - straygarr 6mo ago
      "logically separated" as opposed to "physically separated" (pretty rare in the Cloud world) If you want more details, read their open source codebase or ask them specifically what documentation would boost your confidence, instead of leaving snarky comments.
      - oofbey 6mo ago
        I would argue that saying the accounts are logically separated is a snarky comment. It’s akin to patting the reader on the head and saying “don’t you worry your pretty little head”. Logically separated says nothing. Distinct VMs are logically separated, containers are logically separated, as are storing data in different files which self-modifying PHP code which doesn’t check its inputs tries to keep distinct. It’s basically just saying their engineers do their best but any single bug leaks data. Which is better than saying their engineers don’t even try? Not really. It’s a completely empty statement. Also, for people who actually care about security in the cloud, physically separated is not uncommon. Side channel attacks are real. Dedicated instances are not that hard if you really care about security.
storus 6mo ago
An honest question - why would we need any frameworks at all for vibe coded apps? I can just tell the coding agent to use pure HTML5/Vanilla JS/CSS on the frontend and pure whatever on the backend and it would do it. No need for hundreds/thousands dependencies. For deployment I can ask the coding agent to do the same.
- stopachka 6mo ago
  A few reasons: 1. Unlimited projects: when you spin up traditional backends, you usually use VMs. It's expensive to start many of them. With Instant, you create unlimited projects 2. User experience: traditional CRUD apps work, but they don't feel delightful. I you want to support features like multiplayer, offline mode, or optimistic updates, you'll have to write a lot more custom infra. Instant gives you these out of the box, and the agents find it easier to write than CRUD code 3. Richer features: sometimes you'll want to add more than just a backend. For example, maybe you want to store files, or share cursors, or stream tokens across machines. These often need more bespoke systems (S3, Redis, etc). Instant already comes with these out of the box, and the agents know how to use them. There are a few demo sections in the post that show this off. For example, you can click button and you'll get a backend, without needing to sign up. And in about 25 lines of code, you'll make a real-time todo app.
  - boxedemp 6mo ago
    >multiplayer How does it compare to photon networking? I've been using photon and webrtc mostly. I haven't had any issues, but I'm always interested in finding better solutions!
    - stopachka 6mo ago
      Photon looks interesting! I am not too familiar with it, but from what I understand Photon and WebRTC are for communicating messages between clients. Those messages can be very fast, because they aren't blocked by writes to disk. Instant has two similar services, Presence & Streams. The primary sync engine is more for storing relational data.
rylan-talerico 6mo ago
congrats!
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Thank you!
singpolyma3 6mo ago
Seems like a supabase competitor?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  That's a fair statement! I would say we are similar to supabase in that we offer a relational backend. We are different in two ways: 1. Supabase runs on VMs, so only supports 2 free projects. We built the backend to be multi-tenant, so we can give you unlimited free projects. 2. Supabase doesn't support offline mode or optimistic updates. Instant gives you a sync engine which does.
pugio 6mo ago
Thanks, this might be exactly what I'm looking for. I see you have support for vanilla js and svelte, but it's unclear whether you can get all the same functionality if you don't use React. Is React the only first class citizen in this stack?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  Thank you. > Is React the only first class citizen in this stack? Each system gets the same functionality. We centralize the critical logic for the client SDK in "@instantdb/core". React, Svelte, Tanstack, React Native et al are wrappers around that core library. The one place where it's lacking a bit is the docs. We have specific docs for each library, but a lot of other examples assume React. We are improving this as we speak. For now, the assumption on React is quite light in the docs, so it's relatively straightforward to figure out what needs to happen for the library of your choice.
  - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
    Any thoughts on a potential Tanstack DB integration? I love tanstack's rich front end. Ya'll have quite an amazing system, and I'm wondering if there's any thoughts on how perhaps your pretty substantial front end side might be adapted to tanstack DB. https://github.com/TanStack/db/tree/main/packages https://github.com/TanStack/db/tree/main/packages
sanghyunp 6mo ago
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tayk47999 6mo ago
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truetraveller 6mo ago
Moose here, congrats! This is the real "firebase alternative", not Supabase. Supabase is good, but it's just hosted Postgres + user login. People who are asking "why would I need this" don't get how difficult scalable data storage is with user permissions. Would absolutely recommend this if it's good. Been in this space for ~7 years, and made a high-perf realtime DB as well. Will contact you guys directly. Some concerns for everyone's benefit: 1) Transparency on pricing: This builds confidence. Need to know exactly what I pay for additional egress/ops (read/write). "unlimited" is not sustainable for the provider (you). For example, Firestore has detailed pricing that makes scaling sustainable for them. see https://cloud.google.com/firestore/pricing https://cloud.google.com/firestore/pricing. 2) Transparency on limits: Req/s, max atrributes, max value length, etc. What about querying non-local non-indexed data (e.g. via server-side call), that's costly for you guys. So, what's the limit? 3) Simpler code in the docs/examples overall. Currently, they're not bad, but not great. For example, change the "i" used everywhere to "inst" or "idb". Assume dev is a noob! 4) Change simplify/terminology used. This is probably the most important, but hardest thing. Internally, keep the same triple structure. But dev just cares about tables/key/val. Or tables+rows. Namespaces/entities are confusing. Also, be consistent/clear. For example: "Namespaces are equivalent to "tables" in relational databases"..Perhaps you meant "namespaces are just a list of tables/entities"..slighly different, but far clearer I think? "Attributes are properties associated with namespaces"...I though attributes are associated with entities? Please keep in mind, I am completely new to InstantDB, so need to study the architecture more. 5) Simplify docs BIG TIME. And add an API REFERENCE (super important). Right now, you have: Tutorials, Examples, Recipes, Docs, Essays. These are all essentially "docs". 6) Simplify the "About" section. Should be 1/10th the size. Right now, it's like a fruit salad of docs, and re-iterating the features/benefits. Instead, put pics of both founders. Maybe investor list. Pics of your office?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Thank you for the deep feedback Moose! Agreed lots of opportunity for simplification. There’s so much context in this space. When talking about why sync we mention optimistic updates, multiplayer, and offline mode. To motivate the complexity of sync we talk about websockets, optimistic queues, and IndexedDB. To explain how we work we talk about triples, datalog, and CTEs. We try to give a clean interface so devs don’t need to worry about this complexity, but yea it’s been an ongoing iteration to make both easier and transparent to understand!
owenthejumper 6mo ago
This is basically a fancy Pocketbase / Supabase?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  > Supabase We are similar to supabase in the sense that we support a relational database. We're different in that with us, you get real-time queries, offline mode, and optimistic updates out of the box. > Pocketbase I am not too familiar with Pocketbase.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  We think this is an evolution :) Stopa also gave an answer here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866
zbiggistardust 6mo ago
What's the difference between Instant and Convex?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  I would say: We both offer a real-time queries out of the box. I am not 100% sure, I but think Convex also set up a multi-tenant database; so they can offer a good number of free projects well. The way I would differentiate Instant: With Convex you write your queries as Javascript functions. This means you have to do joins for example imperatively. With Instant, you can write queries declaratively. As of today Convex doesn't work offline, and you have to write optimistic updates manually. Instant can run offline and comes with optimistic updates out of the box. Both Convex and Instant support files out of the box. But with Instant you can write CASCADE delete rules, and you also get other services, like presence and streams.
  - taoh 6mo ago
    Congratulations on your launch! 4 years of work is certainly remarkable perseverance. The sync engine feature looks very interesting to me. There have been quite a few products available on the market today, but none has achieved a dominant share yet. So if this is your main strength, I'd like to see more demos built local first. Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece.
    - stopachka 6mo ago
      Thank you. > Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece. We are thinking about supporting something like "Bring Your Own Postgres", which would allow folks to opt into just the sync engine piece. Right now we focused on the integrated system, because we really wanted to optimize for a delightful developer experience on greenfield projects.
- yoavshai 6mo ago
  For me (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Instant team) the largest difference and a major source of frustration in trying Instant is that you don't have a backend. You get a real-time database with RLS and a sync engine. You don't get to run business logic. You don't get to write queries by name and gain the ability to migrate the schema as long as the query shapes match.
nl 6mo ago
What does "X Team Members per app" mean? Is this the number of users you can have registered or does "Team Member" have special meaning?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  You can think of this as the number of devs. So if you're working on an app as a team you all can use the dashboard and CLI tools to manage the app. No limit on number of end users for what you build
  - nl 6mo ago
    Thanks, that's great. Congrats on the launch.
jgeurts 6mo ago
Is there a way to pair this with an existing (Postgres) database?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Not at the moment but something that we've started exploring! Our thinking was to first get the DX/AX + feature set solid with Instant and then let folks bring their own Postgres
dalmo3 6mo ago
Congrats on the launch! InstantDB is a joy to work with. Granted, I've only ever built small toy projects with it, but it's my go-to. Just so much simpler than anything else I've tried in this space. The core product is so good that the AI emphasis feels weird. Hopefully that's just marketing and not a pivot. Unfortunate if that's what it takes to get funding these days.
- stopachka 6mo ago
  Thank you for the kind words. > AI emphasis It's not quite marketing or a pivot. We've just noticed that most of our users are coding with AI, and really optimized for that too.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Thank you! We last updated our website when open sourced back in August 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281 Back then most folks weren't building full-on apps with AI yet. Since then we've seen a large number of people find us through content on creating apps with AI. We felt our previous messaging didn't speak to that and we thought it was time for a refresh. We also invested a lot to make the agent experience with Instant a delight!
aboodman 6mo ago
Congrats, Instant team. Genuinely happy for y'all.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Thank you! Awesome work with Zero, been a fan of you since listening to your episode on the local first podcast!
d0100 6mo ago
Any example more complex in the backend? Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?
- stopachka 6mo ago
  > Any example more complex in the backend? The home page has some examples of complex startups that use Instant as their core infra: https://www.instantdb.com/#:~:text=Startups%20love%20Instant https://www.instantdb.com/#:~:text=Startups%20love%20Instant > Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security? Yes. This may feel foreign, but we think it's one the best ways to do permissions. We were originally inspired by Facebook's EntPrivacy. When you have permissions at the object layer, you can be more confident that _any_ query you write would be allowed.
kenrick95 6mo ago
Congrats on the 1.0 milestone! I had a Show HN that built with Instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 The common request from that thread was to add guest auth, and few months later Instant had it baked in, so it was really easy to add that feature. Great dev experience :)
- stopachka 6mo ago
  Brightened reading this, and the whole team was rooting you on for your Show HN!
seyz 6mo ago
Nice launch! It reminds me a lot RootCX (https://github.com/RootCX/RootCX https://github.com/RootCX/RootCX)
satvikpendem 6mo ago
Conflict resolution for real time simultaneous updates, how do you resolve them? I use a CRDT for solving precisely this problem but seems like most multiplayer database services don't actually handle this correctly, using last write wins instead.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  We use LWW on the attribute level which greatly reduces conflicts. There are certainly cases where you'll need a different CRDT but this works great for a lot of use cases. Including Figma! https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
mohsen1 6mo ago
Congratulations on this launch. Stepan and his cofounder have been working on this for years and great to see it being launched finally. I should be building something fun with this. Sending you guys lots of love and best of luck!
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Thank you!
2001zhaozhao 6mo ago
Wow, the demo-in-a-blogpost is really impressive.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  Appreciate it! We thought it was a nice touch too and a fun way to highlight the power of Instant! Realizing we didn’t highlight this as a use case — but you can use our ephemeral app feature (it’s free) to easily add your own interactive demos into essays!
tarcon 6mo ago
Do we really have no way to build this in a single programming language and base database? IndexDB, Postgres, Javascript, Typescript, Clojure. Not bad, but not much more attractive than the usual technology zoo any startup seems to end up with.
mentalgear 6mo ago
No e2e encryption and no p2p is a deal breaker for me.
marsven_422 6mo ago
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vincnetas 6mo ago
Can i selfhost?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  You can! Everything is open source and we have instructions on running the server with docker. Working on making this even easier for folks https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495
rambrrest 6mo ago
Sounds backward to me - why would you need a backend for AI coded apps - if you create a new backend - you also have to 'teach' the LLM how to use it - how do you imagine doing that ?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  We've been around long enough that the LLMs already natively know how to use us! If you give them a little bit of context they can use the platform fully.
rock_artist 6mo ago
Apologies if it's due to lack of understanding from my end. But why is it 'for AI-coded'? Don't get me wrong, as I look for some simple backend for an app I plan it does look another awesome alternative. But what I'm not understanding is, what makes it 'ai-coded' focused? And least, vs. other backends, it seems to be TS focused. do you have plans to have some drop-in bindings for (native) mobile platforms?
solarkraft 6mo ago
What a delightful demonstration. The AI hook is brilliant, but under-explained. I expected a paragraph on how to quickly get running with my assistant (edit: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial seems to be that, though it focuses on using the SaaS and creating an account). It’s fun to see highly reactive apps converging on Triples, Datalog and Clojure. I never got very warm with Clojure and find Datalog a little weird, so Instant‘s abstractions are highly welcome! Surely the InstantQL-Datalog translator will be usable as a separate component, this would be super useful for me. In general, this sounds like a lot of things done right. It sounds VERY close to just what I wish existed. I guess I understand the choice of Postgres since this seems to be primarily focused on being SaaS. It might not matter much when the backend is Clojure anyway, but an embedded database like SQLite might make it a little simpler to deploy locally.
dewey 6mo ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't using the most popular open source framework + most popular open source database be a much better fit as there's much more training data and you don't lock yourself into yet another framework? I'd just go with Rails + Postgres and have all the documentation and options open to me.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  This is exactly it, and people trying to invent these new tools and formats (wasn’t there a “LLM optimized JSON alternative the other day) are seriously not understanding how LLMs are trained a tremendous amount on understanding JSON and XML and standard tools and frameworks.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  I disagree. The LLM seems extreme adaptable to me. Making the architecture that makes the most sense, that expresses the architecture the best, is going to be a soaring victory over bandwagoning every time. It's not at all about picking popular tech: that's what the limitation used to be. Now it's all about finding the best winds to have at your back. Reducing your app code complexity, having a better defined more cohesive base to build upon will reduce reasoning costs & token count. It will also make it easier to assess what you+agent have built too.
patwolf 6mo ago
I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started. One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  PR in progress! https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495
  - jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
    I'm confused by the messaging that instantdb has been open source... but we haven't been able to host it? What's the story here, and what's the change happening here?
    - alecthomas 6mo ago
      From skimming the linked PR it looks like it's all been open source, but has been tightly coupled to their deployed instance. The PR appears to be decoupling things completely by making all hard coded values configurable.
    - nezaj 6mo ago
      Always been able to host it! We’ve had docker compose instructions since open sourcing. Instant has evolved quite a bit in the last 18 months. With all the new functionality self-hosting has become a bit more fiddly. This PR is aimed at making the process for self-hosting even easier.
sbochins 6mo ago
This like many other attempts at this type of thing don’t understand the in distribution vs out of distribution aspect of ml models. Using something the model has the most training on will have the best outcomes. A new handcrafted programming language will perform significantly worse than a poorly thought out programming language that is widely used. Everything is going to revert to the mean as llms continue to progress.
scoopdewoop 6mo ago
Man, its hard not to have a reaction to another BaaS. Every "pricing" page really goes to show that engineering took a backseat to rent-seeking. There is an incentive to take advantage of users ignorance rather than instruct them. There is no incentive to make self-hosting easy or secure or sustainable. This is literally $600/month for 250GB of storage with no SLA. Cool "value add" bro.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  We’re 100% open source and have instructions for getting the server up and running via docker We’re also working on a PR to make it even easier to deploy https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495
saberience 6mo ago
Wait, why is this needed at all? Why is this backend AI specific? Your Claude Code or Codex is already an expert in all existing backends and databases, we don't need a new backend for AI. You can literally ask Claude to pick whatever backend it thinks it best, and it will build, deploy, and work fine and be significantly cheaper than Instant 1.0.
- nezaj 6mo ago
  I think Stopa has a great answer here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711803 You can certainly use Instant without AI! We indexed on making the API easy to understand so projects built with Instant are easy to maintain. We also invested in our AX experience since we saw more folks coming to us when trying to build apps with AI
raffaeleg 6mo ago
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chabad360 6mo ago
This seems really cool, I've used Pocketbase before for similar purposes, the only thing it doesn't offer is local-first (which is a bit of a bummer). But one very valuable feature it has is server extensibility. You can write server hooks in JS and Go (it's embeddable as a Go module) to add features you need. For example, in a previous project, I added functionality to send push notifications based on certain user actions. Is this kind of thing possible in InstantDB? Or, would I need to build a worker that listens for those events and fires off the notification on its own? Also, are there plans to release SDKs in other languages (namely, Dart)?
- nezaj 6mo ago
  You can use `db.subscribeQuery` on the server to react to react to changes. We plan to add webhooks soon to make this even easier. And yes eventually we'd love to support SDKs in other languages too!
4b11b4 6mo ago
Elixir, a language for AI-coded apps
kuzivaai 6mo ago
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reassess_blind 6mo ago
Is there rate limiting? Cant find anything in the docs.
richie-phillips 6mo ago
[dead]

215 points by stopachka 6mo ago

ladon86 6mo ago

Looks very nice! I'll give it a spin for prototypes. Would love to check out /docs but it's currently a 404.

nezaj 6mo ago
Docs should be working now! If anyone else has issues please let us know!

chrysoprace 6mo ago

Is InstantDB no longer about local-first or is the AI angle just a marketing thing?

dghlsakjg 6mo ago
This looks like a blog post highlighting that this can be used for vibecoded apps, not necessarily a pivot on the product.
nezaj 6mo ago
We built Instant to optimize for two things: We wanted to make a tool that (a) would make it easy to build delightful apps, and that (b) builders would find easy to use. This got us into making things that touch both local-first and AI. On the local-first side, we took on problems like offline-mode, real-time, and optimisitc updates. On the AI side, we built a multi-tenant abstraction, so you can spin up as many apps as you like, and focused on great DX/AX so agents found Instant easy to use too.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]

jamest 6mo ago

They actually deliver on the promise of "relational queries && real-time," which is no small feat. Though, their console feels like it didn't get the love that the rest of the infra / website did. Congrats on the 1.0 launch! I'm excited to keep building with Instant.

stopachka 6mo ago
Thank you! We spent a lot of time with the demos on the home page, the essays page, and upgrading the docs. We're going to redesign the dashboard in the next few weeks. One interesting observation from our users: though they use the dashboard less in some ways (the AI agents spin up apps and make schema changes for them), we found people use them _more_ in other ways. Instant comes with an Explorer component, which lets you query your data. We found users want to engage with that a lot more.

asdev 6mo ago

I wonder if people really need this. How many people are really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear etc? I'm guessing 99% are CRUD and I doubt that will change. Even if so, would you want to vendor lock into some proprietary technology rather than build with tried and tested open source components?

nezaj 6mo ago
For what it's worth, Instant is 100% open source! https://github.com/instantdb/instant https://github.com/instantdb/instant
stopachka 6mo ago
> really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear I think there's two surprises about this: 1. If it was easier to make apps multiplayer, I bet more apps would be. For example, I don't see why Linear has to be multiplayer, but other CRUD apps don't. 2. When the abstraction is right, building apps with sync engines is easier than building traditional CRUD apps. The Linear team mentioned this themselves here: https://x.com/artman/status/1558081796914483201 https://x.com/artman/status/1558081796914483201
risyachka 6mo ago
Yeah I kinda agree. Considering llms write most of the code today, the need for fancy tech is lower than ever. A good old crud app looks like a perfect fit for ai - its simple, repetitive and ai is great at sql. Go binary for backend and react for frontend - covers 99.9% use cases with basically zero resource usage. 5 usd node will handle 100k mau without breaking a sweat.
- stopachka 6mo ago
  > 5 usd node will handle 100k mau without breaking a sweat. One problem you may encounter with the 5 usd node: how do you handle multiple projects? You could put them all in one VM, but that set up can get esoteric, and as you look for more isolation, the processes won't fit on such a small machine. With Instant, you can make unlimited projects. Your app also gets a sync engine, which is both good for your users, and at least in our experiments, the AIs prefer building with it. And if you ever want to get off Instant, the whole system is open source. I still resonate with a good Hetzner box though, and it can make sense to self-host or to use more tried-and-true tech. For what it's worth, with Instant you would get a lot more support for easy projects. At least in our benchmarks, AI

ghm2199 6mo ago

For people like me — who are kind of familiar with how react/jetpack compose/flutter like frameworks work — I recall using react-widget/composables which seamlessly update when these register to receive updates to the underlying datamodel. The persistence boundary in these apps was the app/device where it was running. The datamodel was local. You still had to worry about making the data updates to servers and back to get to other devices/apps. Instant crosses that persistence boundary, your app can propagate updates to any one who has subscribed to the abstract datastore — which is on a server somewhere, so you the engineer don't have to write that code. Right? But how is this different/better than things like, i wanna say, vercel/nextjs or the like that host similar infra?

stopachka 6mo ago
I would say NextJS focuses a lot more on server-rendering. If you use the app router, the default path is to render as much as you can on the server. This can work great, but you lose some benefits: your pages won't work offline, they won't be real-time, and if you make changes, you'll have to wait for the server to acknowledge them. Instant pushes handles more of the work on the frontend. You make queries directly in your frontend, and Instant handles all the offline caching, the real-time, and the optimistic updates. You can have the best of both worlds though. We have an experimental SSR package, which to our knowledge is the first to combine _both_ SSR and real-time. The way it works: 1. Next SSRs the page 2. But when it loads, Instant picks it up and makes every query reactive. More details here: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/next-ssr https://www.instantdb.com/docs/next-ssr

nharada 6mo ago

This is super cool and exactly what I've been looking for for personal projects I think. I wanna try it out, but the "agent" part could be more seamless. How does my coding agent know how to work this thing? I'd suggest including a skill for this, or if there's already one linking to it on the blog!

nezaj 6mo ago
We do have a skill! npx skills add instantdb/skills Would recommend doing `bunx/pnpx/npx create-instant-app` to scaffold a project too!
- LoganDark 6mo ago
  Can I view the source code of this skill / install it manually? I am incredibly not a fan of automated installers for this type of stuff.
  - nezaj 6mo ago
    You can! The skill lives here https://github.com/instantdb/skills https://github.com/instantdb/skills
stopachka 6mo ago
Good idea! I went ahead and updated the essay: https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2530 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2530 It should be live in a few minutes.

minantom 6mo ago

how is this better than vercel?

nezaj 6mo ago
Stopa answers this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711254 But pairing Instant with Vercel works great too! We have a tutorial on how you can build an app with Instant and deploy it to vercel here https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial

ghm2199 6mo ago

One thing I have always wanted to do is cancel an AI Agent executing remotely that I kicked off as it streamed its part by part response(part could words, list of urls or whatever you want the FE to display). A good example is web-researcher agent that searches and fetches web pages remotely and sends it back to the local sub-agent to summarize the results. This is something claude-code in the terminal does not quite provide. In Instant would this be trivial to build? Here is how I built it in a WUI: I sent SSE events from Server -> Client streaming web-search progress, but then the client could update a `x` box on "parent" widget using the `id` from a SSE event using a simple REST call. The `id` could belong to parent web-search or to certain URLs which are being fetched. And then whatever is yielding your SSE lines would check the db would cancel the send(assuming it had not sent all the words already).

stopachka 6mo ago
If I understood you correctly: You kick off an agent. It reports work back to the user. The user can click cancel, and the agent gets terminated. You are right, this kind of UX comes very naturally with Instant. If an agent writes data to Instant, it will show up right away to the user. If the user clicks an `X` button, it will propagate to the agent. The basic sync engine would handle a lot of the complexity here. If the data streaming gets more complicated, you may want to use Instant streams. For example, if you want to convey updates character by character, you can use Instant streams as an included service, which does this extremely efficiently. More about the sync engine: https://www.instantdb.com/product/sync https://www.instantdb.com/product/sync More about streams: https://www.instantdb.com/docs/streams https://www.instantdb.com/docs/streams

shay_ker 6mo ago

with a huge multi-tenant database, how do you deal with noisy neighbors? indexes are surely necessary, which impose a non-trivial cost at scale.

stopachka 6mo ago
One data structure that helps a lot is the grouped queue. I cover it in the essay here: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture#:~:text=is%20to%20parallelize.-,Grouped%20Queues,-Since%20our%20database https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture#:~:text=is%20t... To summarize: In places where we process throughput, we generally stick a grouped queue and a threadpool that takes from it. The mechanics for this queue make it so that if there's one noisy neighbor, it can't hog all the threads. There's more too (runbooks, rate limiting systems, buffers, isolated instances), but I thought this particular data structure was really fun to share.

jvalencia 6mo ago

How does security and isolation work? If someone else's account is compromised, how do I know I won't be? If instant is compromised, how do I know I won't be?

stopachka 6mo ago
If someone else's account is compromised, you would not be, because apps are logically separated. There would be no way for the compromised or uncompromised account to ever see your data. If Instant is compromised, then that's a lot more dangerous. We minimize this risk following security best practices: keeping data encrypted at rest, keeping secrets hashed at creation time, etc.
- oofbey 6mo ago
  Oh they’re logically separated. Thanks for explaining that. Now I’m certain nothing could possibly go wrong. /s
  - straygarr 6mo ago
    "logically separated" as opposed to "physically separated" (pretty rare in the Cloud world) If you want more details, read their open source codebase or ask them specifically what documentation would boost your confidence, instead of leaving snarky comments.
    - oofbey 6mo ago
      I would argue that saying the accounts are logically separated is a snarky comment. It’s akin to patting the reader on the head and saying “don’t you worry your pretty little head”. Logically separated says nothing. Distinct VMs are logically separated, containers are logically separated, as are storing data in different files which self-modifying PHP code which doesn’t check its inputs tries to keep distinct. It’s basically just saying their engineers do their best but any single bug leaks data. Which is better than saying their engineers don’t even try? Not really. It’s a completely empty statement. Also, for people who actually care about security in the cloud, physically separated is not uncommon. Side channel attacks are real. Dedicated instances are not that hard if you really care about security.

storus 6mo ago

An honest question - why would we need any frameworks at all for vibe coded apps? I can just tell the coding agent to use pure HTML5/Vanilla JS/CSS on the frontend and pure whatever on the backend and it would do it. No need for hundreds/thousands dependencies. For deployment I can ask the coding agent to do the same.

stopachka 6mo ago
A few reasons: 1. Unlimited projects: when you spin up traditional backends, you usually use VMs. It's expensive to start many of them. With Instant, you create unlimited projects 2. User experience: traditional CRUD apps work, but they don't feel delightful. I you want to support features like multiplayer, offline mode, or optimistic updates, you'll have to write a lot more custom infra. Instant gives you these out of the box, and the agents find it easier to write than CRUD code 3. Richer features: sometimes you'll want to add more than just a backend. For example, maybe you want to store files, or share cursors, or stream tokens across machines. These often need more bespoke systems (S3, Redis, etc). Instant already comes with these out of the box, and the agents know how to use them. There are a few demo sections in the post that show this off. For example, you can click button and you'll get a backend, without needing to sign up. And in about 25 lines of code, you'll make a real-time todo app.
- boxedemp 6mo ago
  >multiplayer How does it compare to photon networking? I've been using photon and webrtc mostly. I haven't had any issues, but I'm always interested in finding better solutions!
  - stopachka 6mo ago
    Photon looks interesting! I am not too familiar with it, but from what I understand Photon and WebRTC are for communicating messages between clients. Those messages can be very fast, because they aren't blocked by writes to disk. Instant has two similar services, Presence & Streams. The primary sync engine is more for storing relational data.

rylan-talerico 6mo ago

congrats!

nezaj 6mo ago
Thank you!

singpolyma3 6mo ago

Seems like a supabase competitor?

stopachka 6mo ago
That's a fair statement! I would say we are similar to supabase in that we offer a relational backend. We are different in two ways: 1. Supabase runs on VMs, so only supports 2 free projects. We built the backend to be multi-tenant, so we can give you unlimited free projects. 2. Supabase doesn't support offline mode or optimistic updates. Instant gives you a sync engine which does.

pugio 6mo ago

Thanks, this might be exactly what I'm looking for. I see you have support for vanilla js and svelte, but it's unclear whether you can get all the same functionality if you don't use React. Is React the only first class citizen in this stack?

stopachka 6mo ago
Thank you. > Is React the only first class citizen in this stack? Each system gets the same functionality. We centralize the critical logic for the client SDK in "@instantdb/core". React, Svelte, Tanstack, React Native et al are wrappers around that core library. The one place where it's lacking a bit is the docs. We have specific docs for each library, but a lot of other examples assume React. We are improving this as we speak. For now, the assumption on React is quite light in the docs, so it's relatively straightforward to figure out what needs to happen for the library of your choice.
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  Any thoughts on a potential Tanstack DB integration? I love tanstack's rich front end. Ya'll have quite an amazing system, and I'm wondering if there's any thoughts on how perhaps your pretty substantial front end side might be adapted to tanstack DB. https://github.com/TanStack/db/tree/main/packages https://github.com/TanStack/db/tree/main/packages

sanghyunp 6mo ago

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tayk47999 6mo ago

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truetraveller 6mo ago

Moose here, congrats! This is the real "firebase alternative", not Supabase. Supabase is good, but it's just hosted Postgres + user login. People who are asking "why would I need this" don't get how difficult scalable data storage is with user permissions. Would absolutely recommend this if it's good. Been in this space for ~7 years, and made a high-perf realtime DB as well. Will contact you guys directly. Some concerns for everyone's benefit: 1) Transparency on pricing: This builds confidence. Need to know exactly what I pay for additional egress/ops (read/write). "unlimited" is not sustainable for the provider (you). For example, Firestore has detailed pricing that makes scaling sustainable for them. see https://cloud.google.com/firestore/pricing https://cloud.google.com/firestore/pricing. 2) Transparency on limits: Req/s, max atrributes, max value length, etc. What about querying non-local non-indexed data (e.g. via server-side call), that's costly for you guys. So, what's the limit? 3) Simpler code in the docs/examples overall. Currently, they're not bad, but not great. For example, change the "i" used everywhere to "inst" or "idb". Assume dev is a noob! 4) Change simplify/terminology used. This is probably the most important, but hardest thing. Internally, keep the same triple structure. But dev just cares about tables/key/val. Or tables+rows. Namespaces/entities are confusing. Also, be consistent/clear. For example: "Namespaces are equivalent to "tables" in relational databases"..Perhaps you meant "namespaces are just a list of tables/entities"..slighly different, but far clearer I think? "Attributes are properties associated with namespaces"...I though attributes are associated with entities? Please keep in mind, I am completely new to InstantDB, so need to study the architecture more. 5) Simplify docs BIG TIME. And add an API REFERENCE (super important). Right now, you have: Tutorials, Examples, Recipes, Docs, Essays. These are all essentially "docs". 6) Simplify the "About" section. Should be 1/10th the size. Right now, it's like a fruit salad of docs, and re-iterating the features/benefits. Instead, put pics of both founders. Maybe investor list. Pics of your office?

nezaj 6mo ago
Thank you for the deep feedback Moose! Agreed lots of opportunity for simplification. There’s so much context in this space. When talking about why sync we mention optimistic updates, multiplayer, and offline mode. To motivate the complexity of sync we talk about websockets, optimistic queues, and IndexedDB. To explain how we work we talk about triples, datalog, and CTEs. We try to give a clean interface so devs don’t need to worry about this complexity, but yea it’s been an ongoing iteration to make both easier and transparent to understand!

owenthejumper 6mo ago

This is basically a fancy Pocketbase / Supabase?

stopachka 6mo ago
> Supabase We are similar to supabase in the sense that we support a relational database. We're different in that with us, you get real-time queries, offline mode, and optimistic updates out of the box. > Pocketbase I am not too familiar with Pocketbase.
nezaj 6mo ago
We think this is an evolution :) Stopa also gave an answer here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711866

zbiggistardust 6mo ago

What's the difference between Instant and Convex?

stopachka 6mo ago
I would say: We both offer a real-time queries out of the box. I am not 100% sure, I but think Convex also set up a multi-tenant database; so they can offer a good number of free projects well. The way I would differentiate Instant: With Convex you write your queries as Javascript functions. This means you have to do joins for example imperatively. With Instant, you can write queries declaratively. As of today Convex doesn't work offline, and you have to write optimistic updates manually. Instant can run offline and comes with optimistic updates out of the box. Both Convex and Instant support files out of the box. But with Instant you can write CASCADE delete rules, and you also get other services, like presence and streams.
- taoh 6mo ago
  Congratulations on your launch! 4 years of work is certainly remarkable perseverance. The sync engine feature looks very interesting to me. There have been quite a few products available on the market today, but none has achieved a dominant share yet. So if this is your main strength, I'd like to see more demos built local first. Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece.
  - stopachka 6mo ago
    Thank you. > Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece. We are thinking about supporting something like "Bring Your Own Postgres", which would allow folks to opt into just the sync engine piece. Right now we focused on the integrated system, because we really wanted to optimize for a delightful developer experience on greenfield projects.
yoavshai 6mo ago
For me (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Instant team) the largest difference and a major source of frustration in trying Instant is that you don't have a backend. You get a real-time database with RLS and a sync engine. You don't get to run business logic. You don't get to write queries by name and gain the ability to migrate the schema as long as the query shapes match.

nl 6mo ago

What does "X Team Members per app" mean? Is this the number of users you can have registered or does "Team Member" have special meaning?

nezaj 6mo ago
You can think of this as the number of devs. So if you're working on an app as a team you all can use the dashboard and CLI tools to manage the app. No limit on number of end users for what you build
- nl 6mo ago
  Thanks, that's great. Congrats on the launch.

jgeurts 6mo ago

Is there a way to pair this with an existing (Postgres) database?

nezaj 6mo ago
Not at the moment but something that we've started exploring! Our thinking was to first get the DX/AX + feature set solid with Instant and then let folks bring their own Postgres

dalmo3 6mo ago

Congrats on the launch! InstantDB is a joy to work with. Granted, I've only ever built small toy projects with it, but it's my go-to. Just so much simpler than anything else I've tried in this space. The core product is so good that the AI emphasis feels weird. Hopefully that's just marketing and not a pivot. Unfortunate if that's what it takes to get funding these days.

stopachka 6mo ago
Thank you for the kind words. > AI emphasis It's not quite marketing or a pivot. We've just noticed that most of our users are coding with AI, and really optimized for that too.
nezaj 6mo ago
Thank you! We last updated our website when open sourced back in August 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281 Back then most folks weren't building full-on apps with AI yet. Since then we've seen a large number of people find us through content on creating apps with AI. We felt our previous messaging didn't speak to that and we thought it was time for a refresh. We also invested a lot to make the agent experience with Instant a delight!

aboodman 6mo ago

Congrats, Instant team. Genuinely happy for y'all.

nezaj 6mo ago
Thank you! Awesome work with Zero, been a fan of you since listening to your episode on the local first podcast!

d0100 6mo ago

Any example more complex in the backend? Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?

stopachka 6mo ago
> Any example more complex in the backend? The home page has some examples of complex startups that use Instant as their core infra: https://www.instantdb.com/#:~:text=Startups%20love%20Instant https://www.instantdb.com/#:~:text=Startups%20love%20Instant > Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security? Yes. This may feel foreign, but we think it's one the best ways to do permissions. We were originally inspired by Facebook's EntPrivacy. When you have permissions at the object layer, you can be more confident that _any_ query you write would be allowed.

kenrick95 6mo ago

Congrats on the 1.0 milestone! I had a Show HN that built with Instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44247029 The common request from that thread was to add guest auth, and few months later Instant had it baked in, so it was really easy to add that feature. Great dev experience :)

stopachka 6mo ago
Brightened reading this, and the whole team was rooting you on for your Show HN!

seyz 6mo ago

Nice launch! It reminds me a lot RootCX (https://github.com/RootCX/RootCX https://github.com/RootCX/RootCX)

satvikpendem 6mo ago

Conflict resolution for real time simultaneous updates, how do you resolve them? I use a CRDT for solving precisely this problem but seems like most multiplayer database services don't actually handle this correctly, using last write wins instead.

nezaj 6mo ago
We use LWW on the attribute level which greatly reduces conflicts. There are certainly cases where you'll need a different CRDT but this works great for a lot of use cases. Including Figma! https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

mohsen1 6mo ago

Congratulations on this launch. Stepan and his cofounder have been working on this for years and great to see it being launched finally. I should be building something fun with this. Sending you guys lots of love and best of luck!

nezaj 6mo ago
Thank you!

2001zhaozhao 6mo ago

Wow, the demo-in-a-blogpost is really impressive.

nezaj 6mo ago
Appreciate it! We thought it was a nice touch too and a fun way to highlight the power of Instant! Realizing we didn’t highlight this as a use case — but you can use our ephemeral app feature (it’s free) to easily add your own interactive demos into essays!

tarcon 6mo ago

Do we really have no way to build this in a single programming language and base database? IndexDB, Postgres, Javascript, Typescript, Clojure. Not bad, but not much more attractive than the usual technology zoo any startup seems to end up with.

mentalgear 6mo ago

No e2e encryption and no p2p is a deal breaker for me.

marsven_422 6mo ago

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vincnetas 6mo ago

Can i selfhost?

nezaj 6mo ago
You can! Everything is open source and we have instructions on running the server with docker. Working on making this even easier for folks https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495

rambrrest 6mo ago

Sounds backward to me - why would you need a backend for AI coded apps - if you create a new backend - you also have to 'teach' the LLM how to use it - how do you imagine doing that ?

nezaj 6mo ago
We've been around long enough that the LLMs already natively know how to use us! If you give them a little bit of context they can use the platform fully.

rock_artist 6mo ago

Apologies if it's due to lack of understanding from my end. But why is it 'for AI-coded'? Don't get me wrong, as I look for some simple backend for an app I plan it does look another awesome alternative. But what I'm not understanding is, what makes it 'ai-coded' focused? And least, vs. other backends, it seems to be TS focused. do you have plans to have some drop-in bindings for (native) mobile platforms?

solarkraft 6mo ago

What a delightful demonstration. The AI hook is brilliant, but under-explained. I expected a paragraph on how to quickly get running with my assistant (edit: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial seems to be that, though it focuses on using the SaaS and creating an account). It’s fun to see highly reactive apps converging on Triples, Datalog and Clojure. I never got very warm with Clojure and find Datalog a little weird, so Instant‘s abstractions are highly welcome! Surely the InstantQL-Datalog translator will be usable as a separate component, this would be super useful for me. In general, this sounds like a lot of things done right. It sounds VERY close to just what I wish existed. I guess I understand the choice of Postgres since this seems to be primarily focused on being SaaS. It might not matter much when the backend is Clojure anyway, but an embedded database like SQLite might make it a little simpler to deploy locally.

dewey 6mo ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't using the most popular open source framework + most popular open source database be a much better fit as there's much more training data and you don't lock yourself into yet another framework? I'd just go with Rails + Postgres and have all the documentation and options open to me.

stingraycharles 6mo ago
This is exactly it, and people trying to invent these new tools and formats (wasn’t there a “LLM optimized JSON alternative the other day) are seriously not understanding how LLMs are trained a tremendous amount on understanding JSON and XML and standard tools and frameworks.
jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
I disagree. The LLM seems extreme adaptable to me. Making the architecture that makes the most sense, that expresses the architecture the best, is going to be a soaring victory over bandwagoning every time. It's not at all about picking popular tech: that's what the limitation used to be. Now it's all about finding the best winds to have at your back. Reducing your app code complexity, having a better defined more cohesive base to build upon will reduce reasoning costs & token count. It will also make it easier to assess what you+agent have built too.

patwolf 6mo ago

I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started. One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.

nezaj 6mo ago
PR in progress! https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495
- jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
  I'm confused by the messaging that instantdb has been open source... but we haven't been able to host it? What's the story here, and what's the change happening here?
  - alecthomas 6mo ago
    From skimming the linked PR it looks like it's all been open source, but has been tightly coupled to their deployed instance. The PR appears to be decoupling things completely by making all hard coded values configurable.
  - nezaj 6mo ago
    Always been able to host it! We’ve had docker compose instructions since open sourcing. Instant has evolved quite a bit in the last 18 months. With all the new functionality self-hosting has become a bit more fiddly. This PR is aimed at making the process for self-hosting even easier.

sbochins 6mo ago

This like many other attempts at this type of thing don’t understand the in distribution vs out of distribution aspect of ml models. Using something the model has the most training on will have the best outcomes. A new handcrafted programming language will perform significantly worse than a poorly thought out programming language that is widely used. Everything is going to revert to the mean as llms continue to progress.

scoopdewoop 6mo ago

Man, its hard not to have a reaction to another BaaS. Every "pricing" page really goes to show that engineering took a backseat to rent-seeking. There is an incentive to take advantage of users ignorance rather than instruct them. There is no incentive to make self-hosting easy or secure or sustainable. This is literally $600/month for 250GB of storage with no SLA. Cool "value add" bro.

nezaj 6mo ago
We’re 100% open source and have instructions for getting the server up and running via docker We’re also working on a PR to make it even easier to deploy https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495 https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495

saberience 6mo ago

Wait, why is this needed at all? Why is this backend AI specific? Your Claude Code or Codex is already an expert in all existing backends and databases, we don't need a new backend for AI. You can literally ask Claude to pick whatever backend it thinks it best, and it will build, deploy, and work fine and be significantly cheaper than Instant 1.0.

nezaj 6mo ago
I think Stopa has a great answer here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711803 You can certainly use Instant without AI! We indexed on making the API easy to understand so projects built with Instant are easy to maintain. We also invested in our AX experience since we saw more folks coming to us when trying to build apps with AI

raffaeleg 6mo ago

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chabad360 6mo ago

This seems really cool, I've used Pocketbase before for similar purposes, the only thing it doesn't offer is local-first (which is a bit of a bummer). But one very valuable feature it has is server extensibility. You can write server hooks in JS and Go (it's embeddable as a Go module) to add features you need. For example, in a previous project, I added functionality to send push notifications based on certain user actions. Is this kind of thing possible in InstantDB? Or, would I need to build a worker that listens for those events and fires off the notification on its own? Also, are there plans to release SDKs in other languages (namely, Dart)?

nezaj 6mo ago
You can use `db.subscribeQuery` on the server to react to react to changes. We plan to add webhooks soon to make this even easier. And yes eventually we'd love to support SDKs in other languages too!

4b11b4 6mo ago

Elixir, a language for AI-coded apps

kuzivaai 6mo ago

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reassess_blind 6mo ago

Is there rate limiting? Cant find anything in the docs.

richie-phillips 6mo ago

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