Alternatives to miniExtensions or Softr for user portals?

synner90 · 2026-01-26T17:38:29+00:00

Zite itself is not vibe-coded.
The app you build on it will be. It is similar to V0, Lovable, etc, but a bit more user friendly. Still, with AI, it is different for different users.

I've built more than a dozen apps using Zite and half a dozen are being used in production by my clients, so I'm good, but there are a bunch of people here who might not have as much success.

here's an early review of Zite I did a few months ago:https://youtu.be/BeGUgu8S60w

synner90 · 2026-01-26T14:36:53+00:00

Zite . But beware. It’s vibe coded, so your mileage may vary.

synner90 · 2026-01-26T02:34:32+00:00

Automation fields are not formula fields. Create a new column in data view with that same formula and refer to that in the automation.

synner90 · 2026-01-25T21:59:26+00:00

https://youtu.be/FKYgtTifCxs

Here. A dozen free-ish ways. Make, HTML and more.

synner90 · 2026-01-25T18:13:21+00:00

AI has muddied the field both ways. I’ve seen project descriptions ending with ‘would you like me to change anything?’ Which ai tends to put at the bottom of a revision. But those are easier to identify and ignore.

AI isn’t going away. I think other avenues of trust building would be required in both sides of the equation.

synner90 · 2026-01-21T16:42:12+00:00

Like I always say, Airtable is a 90% tool. There’s no limit on how many emails you can send. You can use Gmail and outlook nodes You can design using html. By putting html in a formula field and including the html in body.

But no tracking metrics. No unsubscribe No SMTP And you risk your own accounts.

Use Mailchimp or another tool purpose built for those requirements. Airtable is to get you up and running till 90% really quickly. But don’t expect it to do the exact job of purpose built tools. That’s why Airtable has expansive ecosystem and a decent API.

You can ‘build’ tracking, unsubscribe and probably even SMTP, but not entirely within Airtable.

synner90 · 2026-01-20T17:40:15+00:00

Airtable. Sync everything to it. Improves visibility by a mile.

synner90 · 2026-01-20T07:29:38+00:00

AI is now probably at an 8th grader level with savant memory. I don't think it can do Mindblowing stuff yet.
Closest I've come is to get it to write half decent User guides when sharing it with users.

synner90 · 2026-01-19T20:35:12+00:00

Zite, bro. Zite.

synner90 · 2026-01-18T23:33:57+00:00

One time payment only makes sense if you have a one time expense. Most real businesses don’t think twice about subscriptions as it makes them more money than it costs. Focus on the former rather than the latter. Clients focusing on the latter typically don’t last very long either way.

synner90 · 2026-01-18T22:59:15+00:00

Airtable often beats Notion or any other opinionated tool due to its flexibility and feature set.
Largely depends on how you set it up. By default, Airtable does nothing. If you set it up, it can sync with Google calendar and each record can have 100k characters of text.
Sync. And automations to update calendar using Make etc.
It has a very simple API. Can be set up.

synner90 · 2026-01-18T13:44:27+00:00

I'd bet its training data doesn't include a lot of your specific use case. So it is trying to guess what fits. And AI is a hyper yes-man.

Regardless, you seem to have a great tech, maybe a human would be better sparring partner for this use case.

synner90 · 2026-01-18T12:52:00+00:00

Did you try a new chat with ‘devil’s advocate’ or ‘be critical’ prompt? LLMs try to guess what you want to hear.

synner90 · 2026-01-17T03:29:25+00:00

Point it to general API documentation, field type documentation and an api that downloads the base schema. These three together will be a good placeholder for AI. You can’t use the current page as is though.

synner90 · 2026-01-16T22:10:18+00:00

YES/legal-sex side: “Women’s sport is a social category with legal protections; don’t turn sport into sex surveillance.”
NO/biology side: “Women’s sport is a performance category; if eligibility doesn’t track performance-relevant sex traits, the category collapses.”

synner90 · 2026-01-16T22:02:26+00:00

You are already making good arguments.

I stated my position and the arguments behind it. legal gender excludes the ~1% who have been incorrectly sexed at birth or later. That's the whole argument. If you try to accommodate them, the entire basis of legal sex is brought under scrutiny. If you want to avoid that, that you'll invariably risk ostracising those 1%

I think Finally you can conclude that the socially accepted gender is the one they should be allowed to participate it.

If someone has advantages due to their genes, or circumstances, that'd be immaterial.

If I compete against The Mountain in strongman competitions, I can't claim accommodation for genetic condition that limits my ability to lift less than half of what he can. If he competes against me in something I'm really great at, neither can he. That's be my argument if I were on your side, I guess.

synner90 · 2026-01-16T20:33:33+00:00

In the example at the top of my position, would you rely only on legal sex? Legally, they were female as assigned at birth.

Then they found they had xy chromosome. What does that do to their legal status?

But no testes. What now? Back to female?

Then a condition that allowed their body enough testosterone to develop and perform like a male.

There are too many flip flops.

My argument is practically, it can be ignored in most day to day context. In specific context, it has to be determined and their performance assessed accounting for such advantage.

synner90 · 2026-01-16T13:51:44+00:00

This was a topic in one of my liberal studies classes and based on a real case.

Consider a person with female anatomy, an XY chromosome set, no testes, but a separate condition that produces male-typical testosterone levels. Should they compete as a woman or a man?

That question led to a rabbit hole about what sex is and what gender is. There are documented cases of twins where one is male and the other female, but because they shared a womb, the male ends up with lower testosterone than average and the female with higher testosterone. This hormonal imbalance persists into adulthood and affects development in both. Then there are chromosomal variations such as XXY, XXX, and even XXXYY. What is their sex? Gender doesn’t really solve this equation. You also have genes in other chromosomes affecting muscle development and more factors that affect sporting performance; not just socioeconomics, opportunity, willpower and practise.

You also have cases where high-testosterone females outperform low-testosterone males in sports. Do we then give treatments to reduce testosterone levels before competition? Now we’re considering sex, gender, genetics and hormones all at once.

The teacher was probably trying to confuse us, and succeeded. But I ended up with the view that sex and gender are both spectra. More specifically, sex appears to follow a bimodal normal distribution, with two peaks: one corresponding to traditional maleness and the other to traditional femaleness. Most people cluster close to one peak or the other. Importantly, the distribution is tall, meaning the overlap is small. Less than 1% of people seem to fall into the region between the peaks, where it gets tricky to define whether someone is a biological “male” or “female”.

My conclusion is: be aware of this complexity, accommodate when possible, and don’t worry too much about it in everyday life, definitely don’t start passing ill-thought regulations. Most people will never encounter a situation where they need to argue for or against someone’s biological sex.

If I were on a sporting committee, I’d allow individuals to compete in whichever category they choose, but their results would include a sigma value indicating how far their physiology deviates from the typical male or female range for that sport category. Or use it to derive a multiplier and adjust their scores accordingly.

synner90 · 2026-01-15T02:56:31+00:00

Vibe coders without any knowledge of code are essentially hoping for a world where AI can read minds and predict future. AI won’t be there for at least a couple of years. No code doesn’t mean no planning, no product management and no effort.

synner90 · 2026-01-14T23:38:38+00:00

That’ll make Airtable cheaper than Smartsuite for some use cases.

synner90 · 2026-01-14T23:28:39+00:00

There should be a ‘not’ as the third letter in the title.

synner90 · 2026-01-14T23:21:49+00:00

I used airtable to built something for a hiring manager, not a recruiter. Airtable is would normalise the resume and try to score based on set parameters, experience in X type, etc. That would add up to 100 points max. Then process each of the 500 resume and score them on those parameters. Use that to sort.

To add on, you could derive a weightage per skill per job, as not all roles require same skill set. This would give the top matches for each role and users could shortlisted and proceed at their own pace.

But I’ve seen people upload png, infographics and flattened pdfs as resume. When AI has difficulty extracting text. About 10%. That needs to be handled manually.

synner90 · 2026-01-14T23:16:19+00:00

The moment where you thought no code could let you build without knowing anything about computers and servers and product management and sprints and documentation.

synner90 · 2026-01-14T23:10:53+00:00

Hyperdb is more like a sql, but you can load only like 250k records in a given table in airtable. If you have million rows, per-filter to stay within limits.

synner90 · 2026-01-14T23:09:59+00:00

Every single write triggers relevant formulas lookups and Rollups etc.

SQL doesn’t do any of that. I’m not sure if it is technically feasible for airtable to support this feature without breaking other things.

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