alt Hacker NewsI’ve rediscovered plain old CGI as a great way for users to “vibe code” custom pages on our platform. [1]
The scenario is we have our first party task lists and data viewers, but often users want to highly customize it. Say build a Kanban view or a custom dashboard with data filters and charts.
The box has a coding agent which means the user can code anything vs us building traditional report builder tools.
Go’s stdlib has good support on both the server side and user space. The coding agent makes a page-name/main.go that talks CGI and the server delegates requests to it.
It’s all “person scale” data and page views so no real need to optimize with fast CGI even.
What’s old is new again for agents!
Do be aware that CGI, unlike FastCGI, has a pretty big footgun due to the use of environment variables to convey HTTP headers: https://httpoxy.org/
Go's CGI server implementation doesn't set $HTTP_PROXY so you're safe from that, but I still don't love how CGI uses environment variables.