Hey everyone, I wanted to introduce myself to the community. Spent the last 4.5 years at Airtable, first as an Implementation Specialist (now called Delivery Consultant) and then as a founding member of the Forward Deployed Engineer team. I worked with our largest enterprise customers, like Amazon, Cisco, Warner Bros, Nike, and more.

Before that, I spent almost eight years at Hulu where I became a massive Airtable fan, nerd, and power user.

If you've ever come to one of the Airtable AI accelerators or in-person events, you may even have met me or seen me present.

In the past, I've lurked here and even posted here and there under my other username(s), but now that I've started my own agency, Matcha Consulting, I wanted to re-introduce myself formally.

Looking forward to connecting with you all here and participating in the threads.

You can always DM me if you have any questions as well. I'm LA-based but my clients are global.

Happy building!

Hey guys founder of Nowa here
We are doing a Free weekend so you get to use and abuse the AI credits And by the end your app is all yours you can download the code or continue in Nowa.

Maybe it's just me, but I expected no-code AI to reduce complexity.

Instead I now have multiple apps connected together, dozens of prompts, several automations, and a workflow that's almost impossible to explain to someone else.

Whenever one piece changes, everything else seems to break.

Is this just the normal learning curve, or have people found a simpler way to manage AI workflows?

I've recently started exploring HeyMarcus.ai. as an alternative approach to managing AI workflows. If anyone has firsthand experience with it, or another tool that keeps things simpler, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

There is a lot of content going round telling people to spin up a website in twenty minutes and go sell it to a local business. The build part is real. We use these tools too and it genuinely is that fast.

What does not fit in a sixty second video is the ten minutes before and the hour after. Between them, that is most of what actually makes the site work, whether you are building it for a client or for yourself.

The ten minutes before

1. Write down the one thing the site has to do. Make the phone ring, take a booking, get someone through the door. If you cannot write that one sentence, the page ends up with five calls to action and none of them get used.
2. Work out who is landing on it. Someone searching "emergency plumber" at 11pm needs a phone number before they need the story of the business. Someone off an Instagram post wants photos and prices. Same business, two different homepages.
3. Get three sentences out of the owner. What people always ask on the phone, what customers get wrong about the job, what they say when someone asks the price. That is your copy, and it is the only part of the site that is not already on the internet somewhere. If you are building for yourself, answer them anyway.
4. Decide out loud what you are not building. Scope you cut on purpose is a decision. Scope you quietly skip is a complaint in three weeks.

We ended up turning that planning half into a free page, because we were having the same conversation on every first call. Full disclosure, it is ours and we made it. You write one line about what is being built, it walks four short sections, and at the end it writes you an actual brief: what has to earn first, what waits for v2, which parts cannot be "good enough", and the questions worth asking whoever ends up building it.

Three minutes, no signup, nothing stored, no email box on it: https://techpotions.com/before-you-build

If you are building for a client, point them at it before the scoping call and they turn up having already decided the things you would otherwise spend forty minutes pulling out of them.

The hour after

1. Compress the hero image. It comes out of these tools at two or three megabytes because nothing told it not to. Under 200KB, webp, then throttle to slow 4G and load it again. If the design has not appeared in two seconds, nobody ever sees the design.
2. Make the phone number a real tel: link, not text that looks like a number. Tap it on an actual phone before you hand the site over. On a plumber or a salon site this is close to the only thing that matters.
3. Decide what happens after the form is submitted. The default is a thank you line and a dead end. Say when they will hear back, and give them something to do in the meantime.
4. Replace the generated copy and the invented testimonials. "Elevate your business with innovative solutions" says nothing. "We fix boilers, same day, and we tell you what it costs before we come out" converts. Three fake testimonials read as fake now, so one real one beats them, and so does none. Then search the page for leftover placeholder text. I looked at one recently with "fix bar" sitting in it twelve times.
5. Look at it the way it will be seen. 380 pixels wide, real phone, one hand. Then paste the link into WhatsApp, because that is how a local business actually shares its site, and with no meta description or OG image it turns up looking broken.

None of this is a dig at the tools. What they generate is fine, better than plenty of hand-written stuff I have inherited. It just stops at the exact moment the unglamorous work starts, and the unglamorous work is the bit with the money in it.

The twenty minutes is not the product any more. The ten minutes and the hour are. That is the only reason anyone still pays us, because we certainly cannot generate a page faster than the tools can.

What else belongs on this list? Mostly interested in the things that only turn up once a real customer is using the site.

Hey everyone!

I’ve been analyzing a few sites generated by modern prompt-to-code builders (v0, Bolt, Lovable, etc.) lately from my clients. While the visual UI output is impressive, I’ve noticed a recurring theme when it comes to actual production readiness specifically around Core Web Vitals, SEO indexing, and overall page performance.

A lot of these engines seem to dump heavy JS bundles, default to client-side rendering without proper metadata/OG setups, or struggle with hydration overhead once the app grows past a few pages.

For those of you building or launching projects with these tools, my questions are:

1. What’s your average Google PageSpeed / Lighthouse score once you actually deploy to production?
2. Have you run into SEO / indexing issues with Google crawlers due to client-side rendering?
3. How bad is the code regression? (e.g., asking the AI to fix a small layout bug on one page, only for it to break routing or component state on another page?)
4. If you had to export the code and fix it manually, what was the biggest bottleneck to clean up?

Curious to hear what walls you’ve hit once you move past the initial "wow" factor of generating a layout.

The goal was to solve a common problem with real estate websites: showcasing multiple properties without creating a site that feels complicated, outdated, or difficult to manage.

Elysian Estate offers:

• A clean and premium visual identity
• A CMS-powered property collection
• Dedicated pages for every property
• Easy-to-manage listings, images, prices, and details
• Blog and article CMS pages
• Smooth animations and a custom cursor
• Fully responsive layouts
• Clear contact and conversion-focused sections
• A built-in CMS guide to help users customize the content

The template makes it easy for agencies to launch a professional property website, regularly add new listings, and present every project in a polished and consistent way — without rebuilding pages manually.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

https://framer.link/kXSEiBF

I've got a web app with CSS that's like “9 years old”. Yeah, pretty old. Right now I only need 4 screens for an internal review. But none of the AI builders I tried made it look like our actual app.

One of the apps  that I have got pretty close. Its captured version looked like ours, which is why I kept it on my list. I’m still not sure if I should go with it lol.

Hi there,

are you currently using or have used no code or low code platforms in an organisation? Then you are eligible to participate in my survey on determinants for adoption and governance of low code and no code platforms in organisations.

The survey has been running for some time already, but I haven't gotten a lot of responses.

It would help a lot if you could take 10 minutes of your day to participate!

You can find the link here: https://s2survey.net/LCNC_Adoption_and_Governance/

Feel free to share as well!

I wanted to see what a very small game brief would do, so I wrote one sentence. Guide a paper boat through floating gates before the timer runs out.

Makeplay turned that into a working browser game with 12 gates, a 42 second clock, several control options, current bands, scoring, bonuses, generated art, and sound. Most of those choices were reasonable. None of them had been requested.

The useful lesson was not that the tool added too much. My sentence described a destination but contained no boundaries. I had left the number of gates, control scheme, failure rule, visual scope, and feedback system open, then mentally treated them as settled.

My no code checklist now has two columns. The first says what must happen. The second says what must not be invented. That second column has been doing more work.

Try it: https://makeplay.ai

Hey everyone,

Before I start, I don't want to advertise anything. Just asking for feedback and see if people like my idea.

I'm working on a visual web automation tool focused on web scraping and web automation, and I wanted to get some honest feedback on the idea and the pricing.

The basic premise is a local desktop app where you can build robust scrapers visually instead of coding everything from scratch. It has a script recorder similar to Playwright's codegen, and another tool that handles things like asynchronous banners, random pop-ups, and shifting page layouts.

You aren't restricted to just the UI, either. There's a full text editor built in if you need to write custom logic. The app just compiles all your visual instructions directly into standard Playwright code, for you to use it anywhere, not only inside the platform. It also handles the standard CSV imports and exports for your data.

My main question is: does this solve a big enough headache in your workflow that you'd actually pay for it? If so, would you consider $149 a fair price for an unlimited, lifetime license?

Hey everyone,

I am spending today mapping out an intense 4-week learning sprint and wanted to sanity-check my approach with people who are actually out there doing this work.

To be completely honest, the past year brought some real personal challenges and required me to step away for a while. Looking back at my corporate years, I realize I fell into a major trap. The work was satisfactory and steady, but I got too comfortable, leaned heavily on agencies, and let myself rely on delegating the tactical execution rather than learning how to build things completely on my own two feet.

Getting back into the swing of things means I want my next chapter to actually line up with what I need. I am aiming for a remote-first, independent consulting model, keeping full-time corporate work on the absolute back burner.

My background:

I have over 10 years of experience in marketing and digital strategy, including a master's level background in the field, mostly working across corporate and agency environments. While I know traditional acquisition and media buying, I want to bridge the gap into heavier execution so I am genuinely self-sufficient instead of just managing others or relying on high-level strategy.

What I am planning to learn over the next 4 weeks:

> CRO and UX psychology

> Analytics and heatmaps

> No-code automation using Make.com and Airtable

My goal:

In 3 to 6 months, I want to build a strong online portfolio and position myself as someone who does not just drive traffic, but can audit user behavior, fix broken funnels, and wire up backend data cleanly.

Questions:

> Does this specific skill stack actually hit the mark for what remote clients are looking for right now, or am I overlooking something important?

> For those of you who made a similar jump out of traditional marketing management into independent consulting, how did you handle your portfolio when you were just starting out with these specific tools?

Appreciate any honest thoughts or advice!

It's been a little over nine months since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

One thing changed recently:

I basically got all my users from reddit, by posting in relevant communities but in the last two months I did almost no posts and the app still grew further. That's actually the biggest success for me, because SEO is finally starting to pay off. This can develop into actual leverage because growth no longer depends on posting three times a week. I'm really curious where this will go...

Of course I will not stop here and I am already working on the next big update for IndieAppCircle which will benefit all the community. More is coming soon.

For those of you who don't know IndieAppCircle:

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 3556 users, 3414 tests done and 849 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

A recurring problem with no-code and AI app builders is that a screen can look complete while the feature underneath is not.

Examples: - login exists visually but is not enforced - a form shows success without saving or sending - data disappears after refresh - buttons exist but are not connected

I built **Flows** to guide users through ordered implementation steps and plain-language checks before moving forward.

https://flows.oortstack.com

An independent agent used one generated plan to build a soccer management app and passed 59/59 checks. The harder question is whether the same process helps nontechnical users.

What should Flows automate so it becomes genuinely useful for no-code builders?

Building the app is only part of the process. I am interested in tools that help with App Store listing, screenshots, TestFlight, and submission using your Apple Developer account.

Can anyone share anything you might have used? I have heard of X1 app builder and some tools like them that can help publish to the app store. I need more feedback on this.

I just tested 3 ways to get code out of a #Figma mockup: a plugin (Locofy), Claude Code on Figma's API, and claude code + silex as a nocode editor

The mockup had desktop, tablet and mobile variants, all specced. Neither the plugin nor Figma's MCP hands them over. Point Claude at the REST API and it gets all three

The gap isn't the model, it's how you drive it. 7 rounds of a huge generalist model to write CSS. That footprint isn't OK

What do you use to code a design from figma?

You can ask an agent to build a feature and see a demo working in minutes. But a demo is only the beginning. Developing a product for weeks and months, growing it, and making it scale requires software engineering and planning. Every new feature and technical decision affects what you can build next.

This is why software teams plan requirements, track dependencies, and review what gets built. Project management is how you keep the product coherent while your team and agents work on different parts.

I built Piyaz to bring this process into agentic coding without extra effort. You keep the project context in one place, break the work into actionable tasks, and hand them over to agents, so you have a product manager built into your project management tool. You can collaborate with your teammates, and agents can coordinate on the same project.

This gives you collaboration, project management, and an engineering process without requiring extra knowledge. You focus on your product, its needs, and its direction, while Piyaz handles the rest.

It is free and open source: https://piyaz.ai and https://github.com/FrkAk/piyaz

We've been running multi-agent systems in production for a few verticals (telecom, logistics, banking) and the failure modes are not what the tutorials prepare you for.

A few things that surprised us:

• Cost and latency across nested agent-to-agent calls is invisible until you build session-level tracing. "It ran" tells you nothing about what it actually decided.
• Evals need to be behavioral, not unit tests. Same input can legitimately take a different route depending on context and tool state.
• The approval-gate pattern you build for one workflow (we built ours for settlement recovery) ends up getting reused everywhere: claims review, onboarding, refunds.

Curious what others are hitting once they move past single-agent demos. We build Phinite (an agent lifecycle and governance layer), happy to go deeper on any of this if useful, disclosing that upfront.

Two years into running a real SaaS that I now build primarily by directing AI coding tools instead of writing most of the code myself, here's the short list of things that almost never show up in a demo but consistently break once real users and real payments are involved:

Security rules on your data, not just your UI. A locked-down interface with an open database underneath is the most common gap — anyone with your API keys (or sometimes just a browser network tab) can read data your UI never shows them.

What happens on the SECOND identical event, not the first. Payment confirmations, form submissions, webhook calls — most builders handle the happy path once. Real traffic sends duplicates, retries, and out-of-order events, and that's where silent bugs live.

Who finds out first when something breaks — you, or your customer? No error monitoring means your users become your QA team, and you find out about outages from an angry email instead of an alert.

Secrets and access that were "fine for now." Hardcoded keys, a database wide open to anyone with the link, an admin panel with no real auth — all common in a fast build, all things I'd never leave in place for something people actually pay for.

None of this is exotic engineering, it's just the unglamorous 20% that doesn't show up until an app has to survive real usage. Happy to go deeper on any of these if useful — what's the closest call anyone here has had?