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Show HN: One prompt generates an app with its own database
Coding · General · coding
67Quality
89%Useful
78Reliability
The prompt
Hey HN, manyminiapps is the world first massively multiplayer online mini app builder (MMOMA) *Here’s what it does:* You load the page. You write 1 prompt and you get a mini app back in under 2 minutes. There’s no sign up, and you can see what everyone’s creating in real-time! Each mini app comes with it’s own database and backend, so you can build shareable apps that save data. *What’s different* There are a lot of app builders that promise you’ll build production software for others. But we think true production software can take a long time to get right. Even if you don’t need to program there’s a lot of work involved. What if we turned the promise around? Instead of “you vibe code software companies”, it’s “you build fun software for yourself”. If you cut the problem right, LLMs as they are today can already deliver personal software. manyminiapps is meant to be an experiment to demonstrate this. You may wonder: do you really need personal software? We’re not 100% sure, but it’s definitely an interesting question. Using manyminiapps so far has been surprising! We thought our friends would just try to build the common todo app, but instead we found them building wedding planners, chord progression helpers, inspiration lists, and retro games. *How it works* Instead of spinning up VMs or separate instances per app, we built a multi-tenant graph database on top of 1 large Postgres instance. All databases live under 1 table, on an EAV table (entity, attribute, value). This makes it so creating an “app” is as light as creating a new row. If you have heard of EAV tables before, you may know that most Postgres experts will tell you not to use them. Postgres needs to know statistics in order to make efficient query plans. But when you use EAV tables, Postgres can no longer get good statistics. This is usually a bad idea. But we thought it was worth solving to get a multi-tenant relational database. To solve this problem we started saving our own statistics in a custom ta