🆕 AI Custom component is LIVE, plus more AI updates

Announcements
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Hello Gliders!

We have a handful of Glide + AI announcements to share today:

Let’s get into it.

Glide’s AI Custom component is now live :sparkles:

Thanks to your ongoing feedback, it’s easier than ever to generate custom components for your Glide apps.

We’ve made several improvements since the early preview, including:

  • Improved system stability
  • A refined user interface
  • Auto-suggested Actions

Haven’t tried the AI Custom component yet?

Here’s a quick walkthrough from Jack:

Learn more about the AI Custom component in our Glide docs.

Generate Text costs ~5-10x less for large inputs :brain::robot:

Generate Text is one of our most popular native AI features. You just need to provide instructions, select an input, and then let Glide take care of the rest.

We’ve reduced the price of Generate Text by approximately 5-10x for large inputs, which means you can now pass more data – and get better, context-rich results from AI – without worrying about the cost.

Learn more about Generate Text in the Glide docs.

Feedback wanted on a new AI project :zap: :hammer_and_wrench:

We’re interested in speaking with people who have a business challenge in mind that they’d like to address with technology. We’ll walk you through some early prototype-level work and ask some questions to get your advice.

Grab time with our team if you’d like to participate.

…

Questions or comments about any of the above? Drop it below.

Thanks! :pray:

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Can we please pump the brakes a bit on the AI focus and address the fact that Glide severely needs to update its existing components to keep up with the more complex use cases against which they are being applied?

I cannot be the only one disappointed at yet another announcement post entirely about AI when the Ask for Help forum is full of folks coming up with incredibly complex workarounds to make the Calendar, Kanban, Checklist, etc. components useable.

As Glide scales, so does its applications – the use case for using Glide diminishes significantly when every checklist and calendar requires a wildly convoluted workaround for basic applicability.

@Danny_Nielsen’s post here is a great example of what we need more of.

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Open question: is it possible that the custom collection, AI custom component and why not other upcoming features such as an AI container, AI collection, AI screen (all totally theoretical) are more interesting developments to the layout editor than updating the existing components?

Or perhaps one doesn’t prevent the other.

To me, the AI custom component is almost the one component to rule them all. Why have all the other components when one AI custom component can do all the work and then some? Perhaps this vision is a little exaggerated, but I find dynamic, adaptable, versatile AI components, collections, and screens more interesting than updating what seems to me like static components.

I’m just playing devil’s advocate here a little.

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By the way, Jack’s video on AI custom component is another mic drop. Amazing.

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I believe a very large part of Glide’s value proposition is that it leverages a good understanding of aesthetics to allow people to come up with good looking apps in a relatively short amount of time. Components are the building blocks of this: in just a few clicks we can create a list, table, user profile, etc. that is already 80% formatted and ready to go.

The AI custom component is, in fact, custom. The functionality of it is not yet there where heavy tweaking is not needed for serious applications. Thus, what would be the point of using Glide if it just becomes another platform for a non-proprietary AI development?

The AI component is yet another focus that looks good on paper but does not pass muster at scale. I believe Glide needs to reckon with the fact that it is no longer being used for just relatively low-impact applications. Businesses and organizations depend on Glide, and depend on the consistency of brand that components have been able to provide for the platform.

EDIT: I do support, however, the use of more specific and bound AI applications in components that could enhance their functionality - if that is possible. Also, the core changes needed are not only just components… the lack of ability of the system to pass and retrieve values outside of the table that a page is built against have caused our user profile rows to look ridiculous.

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First, I will say that I agree that existing components and functionality have been largely ignored in favor of new features for several years. One simple example is a long standing visual bug with the action row component when you don’t have any actions assigned to it. Doesn’t inhibit functionality, but frustrating that little things like this exist. I use multiple action row components with and without actions to maintain visual continuity. There’s also other functionality that would be rather minor to fix in my opinion, but requires workarounds that are now second nature to many of us but not to new users, so several posts in the forum are just repeats of the same questions and the same workarounds over and over. But I’m not here to derail this thread and get off topic. I have a whole different thread that I maintain to cover a lot of these issues in more detail. I just largely stay in my lane and deal with it, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Moreso, to my second point…I’ve been experimenting with the Custom AI component more and more, and one common issue that I run into is the old ping-pong effect when I have a custom component text entry bound to a table column. The two-way communication is causing issues when rapidly typing or deleting text. In many cases I’ve had to instruct the AI to introduce a Save button so it only commits the data to the table when I click on save rather than have write to the table in real time. I’ve tried to enforce some sort of delay, such a 2 seconds after I stop typing, or some kind of onBlur event, but no luck so far. With code I could fix it in a couple minutes. With AI, no luck so far. Has anybody else ran into this or found ways to mitigate? Brings me back to the old days when it was a common issue with native components.

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While I’m not a part of the AI craze, it’s probably not wise for Glide to pump brakes on it. Keeping up with these technological advancements might prove to be make-or-break for Glide in the future.

That being said, I totally agree that there are so many simple improvements that are currently being neglected and restrict us daily. If there could be a more visible way for us to track how Glide is prioritizing our requests, it would be appreciated. Some of the members of this forum can even help speed up the improvement process with their knowledge and ideas.

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I concur with this. Dealing with something as transformative as AI requires a significant amount of experimentation, effort, and relative shots in the dark. I’m in no way saying that Glide should not focus on it.

I just think that it would be great just put more focus on core development for components, which are (and in my opinion always will be) the core of Glide’s value proposition compared to other low code dev platforms.

Maybe just 1 component update for every 2 AI updates… I’d be happy with that. :slight_smile:

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Also concur with all of this. And Jeff’s note here is the crux of it: we are actually reducing Glide’s value by “coding” through text prompts in a method that is actually less efficient and effective than actual code.

We use Glide so we don’t have to code to maintain consistency of different part of a client’s app. Custom components are nice to fill in the gaps, but the entire value of Glide is to be able to build a nice, functional, adaptive app without the need to significantly customize.

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Interesting thread.

I wholly agree that the standard components are the building blocks. Imagine having to iterate through several prompts with the AI component just to get a simple list or action button. AI component is great and has its place - but standard basic components are essential and many of them do need some love.

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What’s bizarre is if we recreate the image component with the custom AI component (just displaying an image), then the quality of the image displayed with the custom AI component is better than the standard image component. Which is a shame really, but also it makes me want to use the the custom AI component for even the most basic components.

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This happens because of the optimization with Cloudinary applied to the image component. You can notice the difference if you also use the rich text component.
https://community.glideapps.com/t/webp-animation-cutoff-in-glide-due-to-cloudinary-optimization/76852?u=himaladin

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I’m not a traditional developer and have never coded in my life other than tweaking bits of code right and left, so let’s say I’ve never touched code.

With Glide, I still feel I am developing software. At my own humble level, granted. I build simple, simple things. And yet, sometimes I’ll show what I’ve built to friends and family, and they are shocked: “Wait you built this???” Even I’m surprised. Almost on a weekly basis.

A lot is involved in the process of building an application, writing code is important but only a part of it. I don’t know how traditional developers work and think, but I do imagine that there is database architecture involved, logic, moving data around, different types of variables, integrations, etc. All of this still exists in Glide. What Glide does save me from (among many other things) is having to learn the grammar of coding. It so happens that my grammar in English and French are not too bad, so if I can use those to actually “code” with a custom AI component, I find that amazing and extremely valuable. Everyone speaks some language, isn’t it amazing and extremely valuable if they can take their language and use it to turn their ideas into product? I think it’s astounding.

To me coding through prompts, therefore, is not a reduction, it’s an addition. Sure it might be less efficient or effective than traditional coding. But 1>0, I personally prefer an inefficient 1 to a perfectly efficient 0. And I don’t believe traditional coders are more efficient anyway, that population is just like everyone else: 10% are stars, 80% are meh, 10% are not good.

And when it comes to efficacy or efficiency, I happen to also abhor what we see on social media “Look how I built xyz with nocode in just 2 hours”. Who cares how long it took? It doesn’t matter if it took two days, two weeks or two months. What’s important is that it didn’t take two years or two dozen developers or two hundred k to develop.

To me, Glide allows the following:

  • Discovery: Validate assumptions through quick builds
  • Design: Create UI layouts, build simple prototypes, design data structure, create navigation flows
  • Development: Configure data tables, set up basic, user-specific and computed columns, create relations, build full-blow functional layouts, add actions (soon workflows), integrate APIs, integrate with many data sources, coding through AI prompts
  • Launch: Deploy instantly to web/mobile, manage user permissions, set up authentication
  • Growth: View app analytics, monitor usage, add users/teams, modify features based on feedback
  • Extras: smart-design, infrastructure maintenance, hosting

So Glide’s value is a tad more than coding through prompts :slight_smile: And yes I agree with you, it’s a shame that some of the standard components have not gotten any love in years.

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I think we are in complete agreement.

My overall point is that Glide enables all of the things in your list through leveraging essentially best-in-class, pre-built development. We use it specifically because we do not need to customize and configure at a normal level for custom development.

The AI component for any serious application requires you to specify formatting and structure pretty heavily via text prompts, where components have already taken both of those things into account. That is why the latter is the crux for Glide’s speed and accessibility.

To be clear, I love Glide. I think it is the best low code platform out there, bar none. In fact, I also know that the Glide team put out some great core updates this year, like updating the Table & Data grid components, allowing new row IDs to pass in actions, and really enhancing the action builder. The Ask for Help forum is full of incredibly creative solutions by the geniuses in the community – I hope the Glide team looks at these as opportunities to reduce the amount of creativity and complexity in our apps by updating some core functionality.

Anyways, sorry I took this thread so off topic @NoCodeAndy :slight_smile: - I know this is an actual feedback thread, so I’ll take this chat to another forum.

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Hey, that’s what this place is for!

I’ve shared this thread with the team. It’s a thoughtful conversation with good critiques.

And, somewhat selfishly, I like seeing these threads because it shows y’all care enough to make the thoughtful critiques in the first place. :sweat_smile:

Feature Requests is a good spot to keep this going for specific improvements, or General for a broader convo about refining the platform versus expanding its capabilities.

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Is there a way to get data out of the AI-component. I get a result in “result” variable but how to extract that data to a column in glide table?

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Ask AI to store data in a provided column, usually they do it

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@slscustom.ru thx. I think I have seen it working when you add the data before you start prompting - but I have had a long chat and then discover that I need to get the data “back” to the table. But here I’m not successful.

Tried something like:

Store this.result in MyResult

Store result in MyResult

where MyResult is the Data variable

image
image348Ă—237 5.75 KB

I think you connect to actions via @-sign - and thought that there could be a similar way to connect to at Data variable.

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I have the same request/wish!

I have weeks trying to retrieve a value shown by a special chart which changes frequently but I don’t find out the trick/magic to get it.

An example is welcome :muscle:

Thanks!

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