yakkomajuri

This is insane!

I also love the presentation on this, which is probably a byproduct of LLM usage (in a good way). As someone who doesn't actively read academic papers I'd definitely read more of them if they were presented like this.

Small clarification: some people in the thread seem to think I'm saying Bitcoin will no longer exist or will tank in value. I'm actually not making a point about the price of crypto at all, just its usefulness as currency.

The price seems to be fully independent of that and as someone who diversifies their investments I own a little bit of crypto and would like to see it go up :)

I think we can probably declare crypto as failed now.

Note that I was one of the folks early on that bought into the idea (but not as much of the coins sadly) and I still think the Bitcoin white paper is a beautiful intellectual exploration (as is the concept of blockchains).

But the centralized entry and exit points in practice mean all the theoretical benefits aren't really in play.

Yeah and they will happily give you all the context you need about their experience

I mean, fair play? I appreciate marketing that has effort involved, especially these days.

You do have to get your word out somehow

Hey, thank you! I think you've hit at the heart of what has been a struggle of mine which is what to call this thing.

Originally Railcode started out as an AI-native Retool let's say. But while Retool added an MCP and now supports custom code they're still a reasonably rigid platform. I don't really believe a platform that's rigid works out today, and I'm also all-in on the user's own harness [1]. As a result we ended up building something that's a lot closer to Vercel as far as the flexibility and ownership you have, but with the governance layer of Retool.

I'd say we're technically a layer above plain compute.

In practice:

- Projects are just code. We can host static frontends and JavaScript serverless functions for the backend.

- When you deploy an app it's immediately behind company auth

- If you want to connect some data, you can e.g. connect an MCP and allow the Growth team to use that connection. Projects the Growth team builds can then use railcode.connector('posthog') and no API keys are ever shared

- If you connect a warehouse, you can create specific queries and assign them to users or roles to be able to build on top of, same model as connectors

- If you need to store some data, you can just do railcode.db.collections.create('orders') and it works. For an LLM it's railcode.llm.generate and admins can configure keys and manage spend centrally

- You can set a design system that agents follow when building apps in Railcode

Non-technical users don't need to manage infra or spin up a database (like they would on Vercel) and admins retain control and observability over everything that gets built.

Companies have started to build some version of this internally on top of Vercel, Railway, and Cloudflare, so I'd say we're somewhere in between an application layer thing and compute.

Genuinely curious: what would you call it if not a cloud?

[1] https://railcode.dev/blog/best-harness-is-your-own

Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is how much we still need UIs vs if we'll just interact with agents.

We have a platform that enables building both and I still find UIs to be quite relevant. Especially if it's so easy to build like in this case because you can always throw together a visualization for something quickly and then never look at it again.

This looks really cool and because I'm in a tangential space I know how fun and useful it's been to build and host stuff on the web quickly.

We're geared towards fully-fledged (serverless) apps and agents for internal use only though, in case it's of interest to anyone: https://railcode.dev/

Not at all! I agree with what you said

This makes sense yeah, I guess following a similar approach used on the buttons for the tabs as well. Point taken!

It definitely does. Particularly under the hero imo.

Doing this is really time-consuming so certainly there were some corners cut -- need to also focus on product after all!

Particularly after we changed a lot of the messaging (after this post was written) I slacked off a bit. Keen to hear what's most annoying to you though, always looking for feedback.

ah thanks for the feedback!

AI is just another tool and I have actually found it really fun to dive into design as a non-designer. It still takes a lot of time and effort but I can now create designs that I'm quite happy with that I'd have never been able to do before.

Wrote a bit about my process in a blog post [1]. Obviously my designs are far from perfect but I'm really happy with my company's website.

[1] https://railcode.dev/blog/vibe-coded-website

ofc we meet in the ClickHouse thread

> "Every single company handling ClickHouse® struggles with ingestion."

Very true. Reading about "too many parts" gave me flashbacks.

(previously owned ingestion into CH at PostHog, no longer)

The lack of any decoration is what struck me.

Otherwise really cool! Enjoyed the FAQ and appreciate the courage to put this out given the types of comments one receives online (see thread).

The resumes are impressive :) didn't realize Kenton had created Cap'n Proto