Breadboard
A modern HyperCard for building web apps on the canvas
Details
- External ID
- 47039051
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Breadboard
- Website domain
- breadboards.io
- Launched
- Feb. 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 93
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8854447439353099
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey HN! I’m Simone. We re-built Breadboard, a visual app builder that mixes Figma-style UI design with Shortcuts-style logic so you can build, preview, and publish interactive web apps directly from the canvas.What it does Design UIs visually with a flexible canvas –like Figma–. Define app logic with a visual, instruction-stacked editor inspired by Shortcuts. Live preview apps directly on the canvas –no separate preview window–. Publish working web apps with one click. Why we made it Modernize the HyperCard idea: combine layout, behavior, and instant sharing in one place. Reduce friction between design and a working app. Make simple web apps approachable for non-developers while keeping power features for developers. Build a foundation for LLM integration so users can design and develop with AI while still understanding what’s happening, even without coding experience –in progress!–. Try it –no signup required–Weather forecast app: https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/weatherSwiss Public Transit: https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/public_transitinfo: https://breadboards.ioI would appreciate any feedback :)
Enrichment
- Theme
- creative coding and visual experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- modern hypercard for web app building
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic canvas and visual block UI can be assembled with AI assistance, but building a fully interactive visual application compiler with reactive state and sandboxed deployment is an advanced engine engineering challenge.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires an infinite-canvas rendering engine, a visual AST interpreter/compiler that maps user-defined node logic to executable web code, and an isolated iframe or web worker runtime. The hard part is building a reliable reactive data-flow graph and managing complex two-way UI state bindings across canvas elements without visual glitches or performance degradation.
Discussion
16 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Retool, LiveCode, Decker, HyperCard (historical reference)
Concerns raised: Apps permanently locked into Breadboard ecosystem, not independently downloadable, Enterprise customers need subprocessor disclosure and audited dependencies, Third-party vendor dependencies (unpkg.com, Google Fonts) require disclosure, Mobile layouts need improvement, Low-code tools hit rough edges on critical paths
Feature requests: Downloadable/exportable apps for self-hosting, Publicly shareable playgrounds/remixable apps, Modular editor as swappable component, Make tools/dialogs/editors themselves editable, Git/GitHub integration for version control
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 20 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 21 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 110 days after the earliest competitor.
- Breadboard · hn · 2026-05-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Whiteboard (YC W26) · hn · 2026-09-24 · 421 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I left Figma to build a diffusion-based UI design tool · hn · 2026-07-21 · 80 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Whiteboard · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- DuoLauncher · github · 2026-09-10 · 88 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Build offline-first web apps in pure Go and HTML · hn · 2026-07-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Sophomore at UMich, built an app with my dad · hn · 2026-01-12 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- MonoMap · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.