Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB
15 points
4 hours ago
| 5 comments
| getadb.com
| HN
Hey HN! We made GETadb.com, so it's easier to get agents to build you full stack apps. You don't need to give them any credentials. Just by loading a GET request, they get access to a database, a sync engine, and abstractions for auth, presence, and streams.

To see what the agent sees, you can load https://getadb.com/new

There's two fun things about how it's implemented:

1. If you curl the home page, it the agent content rather than human content. We do this by detecting the 'Sec-Fetch-Mode' header. It's not perfect, but gets the job done for Claude Code et al.

2. For an agent to spin up an app, they make _two_ fethes. (1) getadb.com/guide tells them to generate a uuid, and fetch (2) getadb.com/provision/<uuid>. We did this, because just about half of the popular web-based app builders cache URLs globally, even if you return no-store headers. To get around this we just instruct the agent to generate unique URLs

You may wonder: Why GET requests, rather than POST requests? It's because then you can build in surprising places. For example, we get meta.ai to build an app inside the artifact preview: https://artifacts.meta.ai/share/a/b80c7412-c3af-4088-b430-78efdfe8ea2d

Under the hood, this is possible because the whole infra is mult-tenant from ground up. We already announced how that works on HN, but if you're curious here's the essay for it: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture

lucb1e
1 minute ago
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I thought this would be something about getting (downloading?) the Android Debug Bridge tool (adb) until I read further. Might want to capitalize DB as well (GETaDB), at least from my pov
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aleda145
23 minutes ago
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I appreciate this part of the agent instructions: `AESTHETICS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. All apps should LOOK AMAZING and have GREAT FUNCTIONALITY!`
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stopachka
18 minutes ago
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Thank you! Yeah, it is surprising how magic words can impact the performance of LLMs
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wewewedxfgdf
16 minutes ago
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So, give your LLM a URL and tell it to follow the instructions there?

Err, no thanks.

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debarshri
47 minutes ago
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The agent thing is going a bit out of hand here.
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stopachka
45 minutes ago
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Admittedly stateful GET requests are heretical, but it may be the future!
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dennisy
56 minutes ago
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This is very cool!

But why do we need this? An agent can just have a local DB using SQLite for example.

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stopachka
46 minutes ago
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Two reasons this could make sense:

1. With this, agents can actually deploy a full backend with their credentials [^1]. 2. If your agent ever wants to add auth, or real-time presence, or file uploads, or streams, they'll be able to do that too

[^1] Alas we don't offer static site hosting, so to push the website you would need to use something like a vercel cli.

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