Show HN: Typebase – A single-folder back end you write in TypeScript(typebase.io)
116 pointsby andrewww-dev4 days ago15 comments
  • bdcravens19 hours ago
    To be honest, the use of AI in your marketing doesn't bother me. But paired with the fact that you have a newish HN account with no comments ever, and no comments on your own "Show HN" in response to others, doesn't put off strong trust signals.
  • pyrolisticala day ago
    It’s like next.js but for backend.

    Personally not for me. These are very productive once you learn the shape they expect.

    But the wheel needs to be reinvented on how to do everything.

    I ran have straight forward verbose code with no hidden control flow

    • jodacolaa day ago
      > once you learn the shape they expect

      I’m reminded of this essay discussing frameworks versus libraries [0].

      [0] https://tomasp.net/blog/2015/library-frameworks/

    • NoItsDangera day ago
      I’ve been saying for years we need CCR (Client Centric Rendering).

      What we do is have the server just serve the page and let the client handle most of the rendering.

      It’s novel and innovative

    • socialest13 hours ago
      I let the LLM tokens flow. Usually it ends up saving me innovation tokens.
    • virgil_disgr4cea day ago
      Am I missing something? The entire point of next.js is that it's backend+frontend in one project
      • apsurda day ago
        that’s likely the promise but it’s so confusing and high cognitive overhead to maintain that backend <-> frontend relationship. ‘use client’ - i think the special sauce for why people use nextjs is all frontend based. the frontend that comes from the backend.

        nextjs dx is a special kind of hell. disclaimer: im just a simple rails guy.

        • chrysoprace20 hours ago
          Next.js is a poor choice for a client-side application. It is first and foremost a server-side framework, and trying to force it to be client-side is to work against it. There are so many better options than Next.js for dedicated client-side front-ends.
          • hirako200019 hours ago
            Nextjs is also a bundler for web applications. And it deploys the front end assets.

            It's yet another backend framework, added that it only runs on vercel infrastructure.

            There are better front end and back end servers, those that simply rely on nodejs to serve. Next.js does that, without vercel.

  • stack_framera day ago
    The pronunciation of "Vercel" near the end of the "Typebase in 100s" video was VER-cel, with the emphasis on the first syllable, instead of ver-CEL with the emphasis on the second syllable.

    Was the video generated by AI?

  • phren0logya day ago
    I love the (well-disclosed) fake testimonials. Hilarious!
    • adamddev1a day ago
      > “I’ve told four separate therapists about Typebase. Two stopped taking me as a client. The other two are now shipping an app with it.”

      So good. I laughed out loud at this.

  • rgbrgba day ago
    I’ve been curious about trying the Supabase type of RLS model for an app but haven’t yet. I like the idea of the db defined api like postgraphile and hasura but had trouble with testing and ergonomics. This looks pretty nice though, it’s cool that you’re thinking about ergonomics for working with coding agents. I feel like a hard thing with that rn is that everyone is kind of figuring out different workflows for AI coding right now so it’s hard to optimize DX. Can you talk a little about your personal agent workflow and how this fits it?
    • k4rlia day ago
      I've only had experience in one full-stack project with supabase RLS so experience is limited. However it seemed like a mess. Seems much more human-maintainable to have a classic spring/golang backend. For sure in some projects, esp mobile apps, it makes more sense, and fable-level models might also keep it from being full spaghetti.

      Also Supabase at that time wasn't reliable and it's not really made for self-hosting. Felt almost as bad as Github stability these days.

      Still, based on this limited experience, I've been avoiding RLS and supabase.

      • NewJazza day ago
        I thought supabase was mainly for self hosting? Like it was self-hostable firebase... Not too familiar with it though.
  • ishbrzeroa day ago
    Sounds very interesting. I have to agree I didn't like RLS as well. I mean, it's useful but it seems too many knobs to turn...
  • xixixaoa day ago
    Very cool!

    Note that you can run Convex on top of your own Postgres, and we do this for our internal apps, with very nice performance (plenty for our internal use cases).

  • ramon156a day ago
    Fake reviews are a hard no-no imo. Really weird addition, but I suppose it wasn't you who got the idea.

    Looks an awful lot like a orpc, just built on top of drizzle instead of raw queries. I'm sure some people want this, but it seems like gross duct tape that will bite you in three years

    • dinkleberg21 hours ago
      I’m very surprised to see others commenting here that they like the fake reviews. Claude loves adding that shit, but you’re allowed to modify and remove the junk it produces.

      > * None of these people exist. We checked. Twice. Legal is chill

      Maybe I’m just the old man yelling at the clouds, but can we not have some integrity and actually put the truth out there? There is nothing wrong with using AI, but we’re still responsible for our work.

  • bosky101a day ago
    very cool. though the deploy wasnt clear if i can just run migration on some pg url. and it wasnt clear if i can bind some middleware into my existing app server (like express)
  • catlifeonmarsa day ago
    What, in your opinion, is this not a good fit for?
    • SillyUsernamea day ago
      Enterprise software, stuff that you expect to scale exactly because it has queues and distributed computing.
  • dsabanina day ago
    Looks useful, congrats
  • desireco42a day ago
    I was about the ask a question but you just answered how it is built. I guess I will try it out, it sounds really good.

    I love your approach, fake testemonials and all.

  • scrollawaya day ago
    Scratching my head a little bit here, I'm not sure how this differs from NextJS (or Vite) with a layer of drizzle & better-auth.

    Not that that layer isn't important. We ended up building something like this at Ingram, nextkit: https://github.com/ingram-technologies/nextkit - but we distribute it as a set of micro libraries that work well together rather than a unified framework. (Auth is nk-auth, built on top of betterauth, and sql is nk-db, built on top of drizzle)

    You got to pretty much the same conclusions we did though regarding the "why".

  • SifatAhmeda day ago
    This looks great. Question specifically on the Cloudflare Workers target: when you deploy there, does Typebase use D1 for the DB, or does the Postgres/Neon backend stay the same regardless of which server target you pick (Vercel/Workers/Deno) - i.e. is the DB layer decoupled from the server runtime, or does choosing Workers also mean choosing D1? I ask because I've shipped a small Workers+D1 service and the main friction I've hit isn't the server code, it's Workers' constraints around D1 (no long-running connections, HTTP-based driver quirks) - curious whether Typebase abstracts that away or whether you still feel it at the DB layer when targeting Workers specifically.
  • mermadicsolutioa day ago
    [dead]