[bandoti]

It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting.

One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well.

OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release the runtime and distribute the “carts” or apps. :)

Still, it’s pretty complex creating a trusted distribution network outside of SaaS. Definitely could work though it’s been done before!

[1]: https://penpot.app/

[2]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

[al_borland]

I was also thinking back to when I used TiddlyWiki almost 20 years ago. If this tool is effectively just HTML, CSS, and Javascript... could they bake it all into a single HTML file. Download a template, design your app offline, and save your work to a file that can run on its own, offline, in a browser window. Maybe the about of JS they need to bake in, or images, would make that impractical.

Of course, as it stands, the examples were so simplistic that they could easily be vibe coded. I just tried it with the attendance counter and ChatGPT gave me that's only 50 lines. I'm sure I could make that much shorter doing it manually. Granted, a project like this has to start somewhere, but as it stands it's adding a lot of infrastructure without adding enough value to make it worth it, when AI is pretty good at these really basic things, like "give me a text box with a button to increment it".

[II2II]

Vibe coding may get the job done, but it isn't going to be as fun for someone who wants to write a little app for a friend. Also, chances are that the generated code is going to be less friendly for a novice to edit should the want/need to make changes.