A backend for AI-coded apps
Instant 1.0 is out! This essay shows a bunch of demos, to explain why we think Instant is the best backend for AI-coded apps. We also cover the architecture that makes all of it work.
Counter-Strike Bench: GPT 5.3 Codex vs Claude Opus 4.6
GPT 5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 shipped within minutes of each other. How well do they compare building a multiplayer Counter-Strike?
Team features are free through the end of Februrary
Share your favorite apps with your favorite people, with free Instant teams for February.
GPT 5.2 on the Counter-Strike Benchmark
How does GPT 5.2 do when you ask it to build a multiplayer Counter-Strike?
Codex, Opus, Gemini try to build Counter Strike
Introducing CS Bench: we ask all top models to build a multiplayer Counter-Strike from scratch.
Count-Min Sketches in JS — frequencies, but without the data
What's the most efficient way to store frequencies? Come find out with us, and learn some of Wodehouse's favorite words to boot.
Video: Founding Firebase with James Tamplin
We sat down with one of the founders of Firebase to learn about the story behind the database platform that inspired many of us.
HeroUI helps people build beautiful apps, on top of Instant
Junior went from Venezuela to YC to build HeroUI, a suite of primitives that have helped thousands of developers build frontends. Here's the backstory.
Mirando transforms Latin-American Real-Estate on top of Instant
Ignacio De Haedo and Javier Rey left their software engineering jobs at Meta to build Mirando, an AI-powered real-estate platform for Latin America. This is the backstory.
GPT 5 vs Opus 4.1 for Vibe-Coded Apps
How do GPT-5 and Opus 4.1 compare for vibe coding apps? We built a full-stack chiptunes player to find out.
How and where will agents ship software?
Beginners are vibe-coding apps and experts are maxing out their LLM subscriptions. What does this mean for how we build software?
Sync Engines are the Future
We've been building frontends that talk to backends for years. But in the meantime the browser has become an OS. In that case what should your stack look like?
A Major Postgres Upgrade with Zero Downtime
Right before Christmas we discovered that our Aurora Postgres instance needed a major version upgrade. This covers how we made the upgrade with zero seconds of downtime.
Video: Building a Sync Engine in Clojure
Our CTO gave a talk about building Instant at Clojure Conj 2024! In this talk he discusses the common schleps developers face when building apps, and how Instant compresses them.
Instant raises $3.4M seed to build a modern Firebase
A month after we open sourced Instant, we had one of the largest Show HN's for a YC company. This shares the news of our $3.4M seed round.
A Graph-Based Firebase
This essay covers the design behind Instant. If the schleps we face as UI engineers are actually database problems in disguise, would a database-looking solution solve them?
Datalog in Javascript
Let's build a query engine from scratch. In about 100 lines of Javascript, we'll support joins, indexes, and find our answer for Arnold!
Database in the Browser, a Spec
How will we build web applications in the future? We think it's going to look like a database in the browser, and this essay explains why.