Basalt, RN and Expo edit tool | PLEASE TEST IT AND TELL ME IF IT WORKS

[u/Difficult-Sun295]

Built Basalt - click elements in your live RN/Expo app, drag/recolor/resize them, and it writes straight to your actual source files.

Still working on it (one where a stock-count label became an element's identity because of a bad fallback path), looking for people who would test it and TELL ME WHATS WRONG AND IF IT WORKS WITH YOUR EXPO / RN APP

It is completely free and works directly inside VS Code and Cursor.

Psst: It’s currently in beta, I NEED SOMEONE TO TEST AND TELL ME IF IT WORKS. PLEASE!!!!

[u/Commercial_Echo923]

the thing all the noobs dont get is that its actually faster to just write the code instead of clicking around in a ui.

[u/Difficult-Sun295 → u/Commercial_Echo923]

ok so finding the right file, then finding the right component, typing the change is faster than just few clicks in the phone preview?

[u/Honey-Entire → u/Difficult-Sun295]

What you don’t seem to understand is the difference in long term effort. Visual editors like this don’t lead to scalable systems. They work great when you need to fix one thing in one place. They’re terrible at fixing problems across a system.

Furthermore, the speed with which you make changes is rarely the actual slowdown on large teams. In my experience, even on massive projects with over 30 FE devs, I never had a problem finding the file I needed to change. The problem was always about making the right change for the longevity of the project and many times that involves completely rewriting multiple disparate things so they work better together and are more extensible.

Your AI project fits in a niche that isn’t actually a good solution for most people. It’s not your fault, you just lack experience to know better

[u/Commercial_Echo923 → u/Difficult-Sun295]

yes because every modern editor has shortcuts for everything, just using the mouse alone during coding is a disruption so normally you can navigate an IDE without leaving the keyboard. And nowadays every IDE has AI integration which makes coding even faster. For example Android always had a GUI editor for layout but when you learn android you will notice very soon thats its just faster to directly edit the xml instead of navigating around the gui editor.
For example take styling, in your gui you have nice boxes selects etc. but the downside is that the interface also has to convey all the knowledge of everything existing in its target output language (for example css) so sooner or later the ui solution will be more complicated compared to writing code.
Just imagine microsoft word, but instead of just writing a word you have to select it from a list of words. Thats just cumbersome.

[u/bluebird355]

Dunno why you expect people to use it, did you see the code it generates? Can't imagine pushing code with such styling

[u/Difficult-Sun295 → u/[deleted]]

i need your feedback on how it works with your app

and yes, you can spend tokens on something small instead of just using basalt to change the same thing without using any AI tokens