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Show HN: A better visual builder for complex business logic

66 pointsby frankgrecojrover 1 year ago
I’m Frank, part of the engineering team re-imagining how software is built at Superblocks. We’re an extensible low-code platform that developers use to build mission-critical internal apps and workflows.<p>We just launched “Control Blocks”, a visual builder for backend business logic that enables developers to drag and drop “blocks” (conditional, loop, parallel, try&#x2F;catch, variables etc.) onto a canvas and construct cohesive business logic that reads linearly like code.<p>The industry&#x27;s approach to visual builders thus far has primarily been free-form flow diagrams where lines define the “control”. This approach works fine for a small set of blocks. However, as logical complexity increases, it quickly becomes impossible to read and debug. We wanted to take a much different approach that catered to the enterprise developer by retaining the same abstractions as code.<p>With Control Blocks, developers get a visual programming language that looks, feels, and scales like code. We provide the core primitives that allow you to build visually in Superblocks what you would through code. Some of these primitives, such as our take on parallelism, offer a much simpler abstraction than code. With this approach, operations like debugging and refactoring feel much more “native”. With this as our foundation, we’ve found that it is much easier to design features for testing, tracing, reusability, breakpoints, generative AI, and more.<p>On the technical side, we used this as an opportunity to improve our core execution engine so that it can provide the performance and reliability needed for enterprise usage. We migrated from TypeScript to Golang and started utilizing V8 for our binding resolution engine.<p>Read the linked blog and watch the embedded video and let’s have a conversation about your thoughts on our new take on this visual builder.

11 comments

dangover 1 year ago
As you had a successful Show HN a few months ago, it&#x27;s probably too soon for another - see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;showhn.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;showhn.html</a>.<p><i>Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36495680">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36495680</a> - June 2023 (62 comments)
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shrimpxover 1 year ago
That&#x27;s cool, it&#x27;s kind of like Scratch [*] for business. Presumably the market is people who don&#x27;t like Retool because it is too high-level (not enough control) and don&#x27;t like code because it&#x27;s too low-level (too much boilerplate and tool complexity).<p>The risk is that the finer grained control stuff is too much like code (&#x27;you lost me at &quot;loop&quot; and &quot;condition&quot;&#x27;, etc.), or not powerful enough to do the tasks that Retool isn&#x27;t good at, without diving deep into the weeds, and you&#x27;re not as good as Retool wrt the tasks that Retool excels at.<p>Definitely cool that you can extend it with code, though I haven&#x27;t parsed how that works.<p>[*] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratch.mit.edu" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratch.mit.edu</a>
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withinboredomover 1 year ago
All you are missing now is a &#x27;scratch pad&#x27; to &#x27;sketch out&#x27; an idea without any definites. Like take a nomnom&#x2F;mermaidjs flow chart and let me &#x27;flesh out&#x27; each block with the control blocks.
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dragonwriterover 1 year ago
&gt; With Control Blocks, developers get a visual programming language that looks, feels, and scales like code.<p>What problem does that solve? I get that there are situations when a programming medium that <i>doesn’t</i> look, feel, and scale like code might be useful, but when the right solution is something that looks, feels, and scales like code, isn&#x27;t that what is solved by <i>code</i>?
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cjohnson318over 1 year ago
Does this handle tasks in different timezones? Is there a map interface? Like, say I&#x27;ve got to manage multiple drivers over multiple timezones, and I need to know who&#x27;s got an hour left on their shift, what they&#x27;re hauling in their truck, and where they are on a map.
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simonbarker87over 1 year ago
I love the idea of low code&#x2F;no code for fast prototyping and experimentation. We use Zapier extensively for exactly that. Once the experiment is tweaked and considered a success, we port it to code.<p>The problem comes in the middle phase, after until deployment and before turning it in to code: version control, debugging, collaboration etc is all a nightmare with no&#x2F;code and so if any experiment gets too big it’s a real pain to deal with.
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pvgover 1 year ago
Discussed recently here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36495680">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36495680</a>
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vb-8448over 1 year ago
Some questions:<p>- can I self-host the whole suite without any internet connection?<p>- Are you targeting retool users?<p>- Are you targeting airflow users?
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antonylover 1 year ago
How does this compare to Retool Workflows? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retool.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;workflows&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retool.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;workflows&#x2F;</a>
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cheschireover 1 year ago
Reminds me of SharePoint 2010 workflows, and eventually Apple&#x27;s Shortcuts.
ushakovover 1 year ago
Does it work on localhost?
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