First of all @josh, want to thank you for taking the time to read and respond to our feedback. I thought you and Emmanuel had burnt out after the community response to WU but it’s clear you still care.
TBH, I’m over WU. This isn’t an existential threat to the product like AI tools are. Because of your “swamp”-like infrastructure it’s very hard to do it in a perfectly accurate fine-grained manner. It ultimately doesn’t matter because you can just adjust the pricing ratio as needed. Please don’t waste time on WU. You can make things a bit cheaper to appease the community and that will get you 95% of the way there with 10,000 hours of less work.
Let me tell you what the real issue is. You have three categories of products, frontend platforms (weweb, toddle, etc.), backend platforms (xano, supabase, etc.), and what I charitably refer to as “Slop Builders” (Bolt, Loveable, etc.). There is a secret fourth category which is actually just one product (replit). They may not be actively aware of it right now but all of them will eventually converge to the same point (Bubble). You guys had the early vision figured out a long time before anyone else, and you had a 10 year head start. But they are rapidly closing in due to AI. They are coming for your “Day 2.”
Right now when I write or edit an expression, I feel as if I’m being actively trolled, which is not a good feeling. If I need to change several regex expressions, for example, going into them one by one and manually changing each piece instead of being able to 1) find/replace or 2) write a prompt that changes everything feels like the platform is being hostile to me on purpose.
Let me remind you that you guys attempted to fix it with the “beta” expression composer. It didn’t blow up the platform, you guys just reverted it because it didn’t work. I understand the complexity involved with a highly abstracted language with a “middle layer” but I promise you this is not an intractable problem. They are writing software for landing rockets in other companies. Netflix serves hundreds of millions of customers impossible amounts of video content every night. Google and Facebook create their own languages (Go/React). You guys can do this. This is just my suspicion, but I think there is a talent issue. You guys are losing out on hiring the cracked engineers that are instead flocking to Tesla, Spacex, OpenAI, Google, etc. You need to basically offer extortion amounts of money like OpenAI do for their top engineers to get this talent. It just takes one 10x or 100x engineer. You guys raised a 100M round not too long ago, it should be possible to attract someone of this caliber.
If you guys can’t do it, then open up the middle layer of the language like @MattN has suggested and let us just use chatGPT or whatever the latest best model is to write straight into the JSON file. I know it goes against your philosophy but I don’t think there is another solution at this point.
This is the bare minimum to bring no-code in line with code. Right now they have the luxury of being able to generate and edit, and we’re stuck with primitive editing. There is even one guy on X using chatGPT’s Operator to automatically use Bubble, which is just reaching Inception layers of abstraction.
It just sucks that I’m able to generate an awesome design in OpenAI’s Canvas or Claude’s Artifacts, but then I have to do the “homework” of rebuilding it manually in Bubble. I hope you can understand my frustration. Thanks again for engaging with the community, we just want to see you guys succeed.