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.
Add a list of people (PMs) who have added feature requests. Have their username be "<username> (<Full Name>) - <karma points>" and then I can click through to see their bio.
Genie 3 is super impressive -- but you can't manipulate it programmatically like Minecraft.
We've built our infra so that we can plug in any simulation environment. If an AI-generated world starts being programmatically modifiable (and has really solid object permanance :) then we'd happily use it!
Minecraft has a DSL that lets you manipulate the world. We've piggy-backed on that, along with a K8s infra to run N worlds in parallel, to let you create simulations of arbitrary complexity.
We think simulations are the best way to test frontier AIs due to their degrees of freedom and expressivity.
I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code.
The experience was brilliant.
Pros:
+ Fast
+ Easy
+ "Vibe coding on steroids" basically
+ The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech
Cons:
- It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seemed reasonable, but if I were doing a prod system vs a PoC, this is where the time would be spent. ("Vibe coding lets you create tech debt 10x faster")
Net-net: This is the way for prototyping / validating. This is probably the way for production systems in N months too once the toolchain + agents get better.
Would you mind sharing the code, as well as prompts if you're comfortable? I'm trying to sample anecdata to help re-baseline my intuition on these things.
* Be careful when sharing log files. Claude can include secrets in there. Some hackers may notice an adminToken in the convo. I rotated it before we pushed.
* It was fun to see Claude use the query language. It thought we had a `$startsWith` modifier. Right now we only have $like. But `$startsWith` is a great idea, we may just implement it real quick!
> It thought we had a `$startsWith` modifier. Right now we only have $like. But `$startsWith` is a great idea, we may just implement it real quick!
Haha, that's great. Turns out that "hallucinations" are just things that make sense in context, and that can translate to feature requests from our agents :)
On one walk I asked 'why are you doing another startup?'
For context, his last one, OpenSea, was valued well into the billions, so it wasn't for money.
His reply: "I just love solving all the puzzles."
It's incredibly hard to compete with someone who is playing the game for the love of the game.
Kudos on playing well, Alex.