Show HN: Srcbook – Self-hosted alternative to AI app builders
github.comToday we’re releasing a full AI app builder in Srcbook. We released our TypeScript notebook a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291700) and the response was encouraging, but we kept hearing that people wanted to build interactive apps.
Today we are releasing just that. You can think of it as an open-source and local version of vercel’s v0. We actually think of it as something in between an IDE and that, because we believe the code matters and don’t shy away from that: you can view and edit the code in a full editor, but prompt your way forward if that's what you prefer. When the AI makes changes you can review the files diff like you would a GitHub pull request, and toggle between versions to view the visual diff.
Try it now: npx srcbook@latest start
It’s surprisingly good at building apps, especially with the latest claude model sonnet3.5 that came out yesterday. Here’s a video showing building and iterating on a ticket tracker MVP in a few minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYOmzasvP74
Key features:
- bring you own API key
- diff viewer
- apply/undo mechanism to see the visual diff
- export the code
- code is OSS under apache2
Really like the inclusion of the diff + undo here. It feels like a nice sweet spot between the two dominate workflows: ai-integrated IDEs and copy & pasting from Claude/ChatGPT.
Seems pretty nice, I'll give it a try !
We love feedback, let me know what's missing / what you wish was better. We have a discord if that's easier, or just email me at nicholas <at> srcbook <dot> com
How would you compare this to https://www.marblism.com
Same category. Differences that I can spot (I'm not very familiar with Marblism):
Currently, Srcbook is:
- open source
- local
- focused on a different stack
- also offers a notebook product