Alternatives
Products that do what SRA – A new architectural pattern for modern product engineering does
I have spent years trying to understand and follow established software architectures - and wound up writing my own at the end: SRA (Specification - Realization - Assembly). Please do check it out and let me know what you think! Background: Whenever I would learn a new architecture, the initial ideas seemed interesting but the implementation almost always ended up with my autistic sense of detail screaming loudly about one or more shortcomings and even inconsistencies. For example, a lot of architectures rely on human discipline, give certain aspects of the software - such as the UI - an…
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I wrote a free book (CC BY license) on software architecture. It classifies architectural patterns / system designs into groups according to their structure, so that each group features a specific set of goals and properties, as structure and function correlate. That results in a kind of inheritance for patterns, making it easy to learn them and even iterate over all the known architectures to analyze their properties. Any feedback and ideas on how to promote the book is warmly welcome!
2024 · github.com
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Curated resources on how AI is reshaping Design Systems
Jan 2026
- 4IW
Hello! I just published a book on Site Reliability Engineering. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QNZC2LL This book is a collection of 28 chapters on SRE concepts, such as observability, monitoring, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting, resilience and debugging. I adapted each chapter from blog posts I've written over the last 4 years. Most of the chapters detailed concepts that I applied while working at $dayjob, so they are 100% proven in real business settings :) ------ Some info on the backstory. Last year I started writing a book on my software development…
2022
- 5LA
Some years ago I wrote a mildly popular article called 'The Elements of Product Design' which broke down modern product design into 7 distinct layers. It was influenced heavily by Jesse James Garret's Elements of UX, hence the name similarity. The framework seems to help remind designers and their teams that there's more to design than just the visuals: structure and flow, concept modelling, product strategy, domain understanding, user needs. What's lacking from the article are concrete steps how you might apply the thinking, which was always a bit hard because it's so situational. But with…
May 2026 · layers.jamiemill.com
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Hi everyone! I built Composer, which is a tool turns your ideas into architecture diagrams. You can also use MCP to turn your EXISTING codebase into a visual diagram! It connects to all possible tools using MCP (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc.) The goal was to make system design easier and to be able to draw out what I wanted to make before I started / to explain to others. Its currently live at usecomposer.com and free! I’d love feedback on whether it feels useful for real projects and where it breaks down. :) Thank you
Apr 2026 · usecomposer.com
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I have worked with AI assistants for a while, and while I am really excited about it, there were times when I felt really frustrated. LLM would end up in a loop with no end. This is when I started experimenting with creating work plans. Initially simple todo list, but it felt like "product vibing", so a bit more sophisticated later on. I started seeing value in it. The one day it hit me. Why not use the same GitOps principles to managing product tickets? I started playing with that and really liked the way it worked. After a chat with a friend of mine, I realised that a standard or a spec…
2025 · productascode.org
- 9IV
Best practices for Server-Driven UI (SDUI) is hard to find or is unclear. I've worked with it for a number of years and have created this repository to share my learning. I hope this gives some clarity to what SDUI can do. It's a project that will continue to grow and feel free to share/express/educate/hate/love some feedback.
2022 · github.com
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Hey HN, I built ProductMap AI, a tool that automatically identifies features implemented in source code and organizes them in a visual hierarchy. The goal is to help developers quickly understand poorly documented codebases. Link: https://product-map.ai/ I’d love feedback from the HN community! Let me know what you think. Would this be useful for you?
2025 · product-map.ai
- 11MP
Hi I'm the developer of UX-App if you have any questions then fire away :) Just thought I'd give you all some background. I'm a high school teacher by day and developer by night. I was bitten by the start-up bug a few years ago and UX-App is my first product launch. In between a full time job and a 5 month old at home it has taken about 3.5 years to complete the project. I'd like to think its a unique product that holds its own against the existing competition and even has some features that no other tool has. My favorite aspect is the visual code builder which allows designers to easily…
2015
- 12WB
Hi everyone, We have been developing a platform to enable professionals to build AI assistants to help them through their work. After a few months, we realized people are trying to sell basic functionalities that can be built from scratch in a couple of hours. Due to this, individuals who are not familiar with the current SOTA are misinformed about the potential of generative models. So, we decided to open up some of our most popular templates as standalone tools for free to empower individuals and set a solid standard for what people should expect. We believe the barrier to accessing…
2024 · join.modularmind.app
- 13SS
Hi HN! I’ve been building startfa.st, a curated directory of AI, developer, and product tools. Link: https://startfa.st Like many people building in AI/dev, I found myself drowning in new tools every day, everything from agents, deployment frameworks, auth platforms, workflow engines, model APIs, automation tools, design tools, security stacks, etc. There’s constant novelty, but it’s very hard to find signal. Most lists on the internet recycle the same names. So I built startfa.st to solve my own discovery problem. What startfa.st is A fast, searchable, hand-curated index of…
Nov 2025 · startfa.st
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Hi folks, I built this guide after watching AI agent prototypes repeatedly fail in production. It demonstrates transforming a monolithic marketplace assistant into a resilient multi-agent system using orra, an open-source platform I also built for production-ready multi-agent applications. The patterns shown are valuable *even if you're building your own orchestration layer*. Each stage builds on the previous one, showing the evolution from fragile prototype to resilient system. What makes this guide valuable: * Architectural transformation with working code examples - split monolithic…
2025 · github.com
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A friend and I spent a month throwing together a visual rule engine product– wanted to share it with HN today. I've been building automation tooling for a few years at prefix.app and one of the messier things both to support and to teach users was around encoding logic in their automations– most folks get a hold of the basic concepts quite easily, but every (visual) automation tool out there seems to have their own way of actually pulling it all together. For small decisions those work great! But for bigger decisions and more complex logic we don’t think it makes much sense to be embedding…
2022 · rulebricks.com
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Hi all! I've been doing spacecraft system engineering since grad school and got to keep doing it after school at Care Weather. I tried several approaches for keeping hundreds of napkin math equations and connected simulations up-to-date, but none of them were both reliable and easy to use. To solve that, I made Oneil, a design specification language with clean syntax for specifying and evaluating math describing a complex system. Oneil has been really helpful as we design one satellite iteration after another for ground testing and spaceflight. I'm really interested in hearing feedback and…
2024 · github.com
- 17MI
Hi! Recently I've launched - mybfio.io - platform for software reviews with social network aspect. Prehistory Many great system are already in place that allow people to search and rate software products, including the site I am publishing this post on. However I have always felt that those systems are not specifically centered around product/software development lifecycle (releases, real users feedback over a product entire lifetime, so on) and often too broad or not designed specifically for that type of work, which is ok. Why? As an opensource author I would like to have constant…
2021
- 18IM
Hi HN! Solo developer here. 10 days ago, I started building this after spending countless hours copying/pasting marketing sections and fighting to keep them consistent with our design system. I wondered: "What if AI could understand our design system and generate React components that actually match it?" Current progress (10 days in): - Can generate hero sections that follow your design tokens - Uses your actual component variants and styles - Works with Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui It's very early days, but I'm excited to share it with other devs who: - Are tired of rebuilding…
2024 · robustlaunch.com
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Hey HN, When I was learning to code I was always intrigued to see the guys on twitter making money with a SaaS. I always wondered how to make them and after a few months I developed my own. I wanted to share a Boilerplate for any new devs who are wondering how to start their own SaaS or wonder how things work. Boilerplate comes with Auth, Payments, UI and all the good stuff. Ali
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN! I'm one of the creators of Specify, and we're thrilled to share this on HN. I must admit, I'm quite nervous about sharing Specify here, but I was also eager to get your feedback. We've been working on design systems for several years now, so my main focus is on designers and front-end developers, or anyone working with web interfaces. Less than two years ago, we launched Specify 1.0, which allowed designers and developers to connect their Figma files, extract styles and assets, transform them, and deliver them to developers' tools in the desired formats. In addition to working with…
2024 · specifyapp.com
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I'm a VP of Engineering with 20 years in the field. I've been thinking deeply on why AI is breaking every engineering practice, and it led me to the conclusion that the Agile Manifesto's values need updating. The core argument: AI made producing software cheap, but understanding it is still expensive. The Manifesto optimizes for the former. This addendum shifts the emphasis toward the latter. Four updated values, three refined principles, with reasoning for each. Happy to discuss and defend any of it.
Mar 2026 · github.com
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We got tired of not being able to accurately answer "When will this be done?" and "Will anyone be required to work overtime on the current schedule?", or spending too much time in meetings and standups trying to answer those questions. Just opened up for beta. Would love some opinionated developers to guide future improvements (or feedback on the general idea).
2022 · projectburndown.com
- 23LA
Hello HN, I am building a devtool to understand existing codebases. The idea originates from my time at big tech as well as various attempts to get involved in open source projects. When I was in college I wanted to improve my coding skills by contributing to opensource projects. I would pickup a bug or feature request but I always found myself stuck at the very first step. I did not understood where and how to begin contributing. I once submitted a patch in firefox which was labeled "Good first issue" but that was still very handheld. The assigner told me exactly which files I need to…
2024 · lucidcode.ai
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Hey everyone! Excited to share Scene with you! We spent hours investigating the intricacies of how people create websites. We focussed primarily on collaboration: what it looks like when teammates with different areas of expertise work together to build a site. We did a deep dive into how designers and marketers work today, and how they envision working in the future. AI will be a big part of that future. But AI is not here to replace the web design process. We know designers don't fully trust creations made entirely by AI—and why should they? Instead, AI is here to lend a helping hand. It…
2024 · scene.io
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