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asdevyesterday at 10:31 PM3 repliesview on HN

I wonder if people really need this. How many people are really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear etc? I'm guessing 99% are CRUD and I doubt that will change. Even if so, would you want to vendor lock into some proprietary technology rather than build with tried and tested open source components?


Replies

stopachkayesterday at 10:49 PM

> really building multiplayer apps like Figma, Linear

I think there's two surprises about this:

1. If it was easier to make apps multiplayer, I bet more apps would be. For example, I don't see why Linear has to be multiplayer, but other CRUD apps don't.

2. When the abstraction is right, building apps with sync engines is easier than building traditional CRUD apps. The Linear team mentioned this themselves here: https://x.com/artman/status/1558081796914483201

nezajyesterday at 10:32 PM

For what it's worth, Instant is 100% open source!

https://github.com/instantdb/instant

risyachkayesterday at 10:53 PM

Yeah I kinda agree. Considering llms write most of the code today, the need for fancy tech is lower than ever. A good old crud app looks like a perfect fit for ai - its simple, repetitive and ai is great at sql. Go binary for backend and react for frontend - covers 99.9% use cases with basically zero resource usage. 5 usd node will handle 100k mau without breaking a sweat.

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