Show HN: Dyad, local, open-source Lovable alternative (Electron desktop app)

dyad.sh

23 points by willchen a day ago

Hi HN!

I left Google earlier this year and created Dyad, a local, open-source AI app builder made with Electron.

The motivation: I tried one of the popular cloud-based AI app builders, but when I pulled down the app to run locally and debug in Cursor, it just didn’t work. So I created Dyad, an app builder that runs fully on your computer, making it easy to switch between Dyad and coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code.

Source code: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/

Download (free, no sign-up): https://www.dyad.sh/

I've gotten questions about how it works under the hood so I wrote an architecture doc explaining how it does tool calling using XML tags, etc: https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/blob/main/docs/architecture....

Let me know what you think and happy to answer questions about building an Electron app, etc!

JeffKazzee 14 hours ago

Thanks for all of your hard work and commitment, Will! You've put everything into it, but its turning into something far more than some other companies that are much larger.

Thanks for being such a kind, caring guy. I have been here for a long time now, using Dyad. It's often becoming my main choice for designing and prototyping on things when I have a bit of inspiration.

I hope you find all the success out there, man. You're a genuinely good guy and it really shows in the way you do business. Have a wonderful time. Reach great heights.

omneity a day ago

Congrats for launching and awesome work, I will try it out soon!

Question, I have my own persistence and auth services, all well documented, that I would like to build apps against. Is there a recommended way to do this other than pasting the docs in the prompt each time I create a new app?

thekevan a day ago

I have been using it and I love it. It's isn't my main driver because I have to work on a lot of Bootstrap sites, it didn't like them the last I checked because they weren't a js framework. But I have made a few playthings with it that were and it was good.

aitchnyu a day ago

My Kagi-fu fails me, but I recall a builder generated code use Supabase row level security, and it fails open, and no longer filtering out data from other users. Is this guaranteed to protect your data?

freakynit a day ago

These things does work (up to a max few thousand lines of code), but, they eat tokens like f*ng monsters.

  • willchen a day ago

    we have features like manual context management https://www.dyad.sh/docs/guides/large-apps#manual-context-ma... which lets you select files to use in your context window

    • freakynit 19 hours ago

      Hey, could the tool do this itself? Like using code embeddings?

      https://www.trynia.ai/ seems to be doing sometihing similar.

      • willchen 16 hours ago

        very interesting - when we ship MCP support you should be able to use nia!

        • freakynit 4 hours ago

          How about local support? First draft is simple enough to implement: chunk => embed => store. And then one simple lookup function.

          Complexity would arise once we start to go into AST's and graph traversals.

johnisgood a day ago

> All source code remains on your machine. Use your preferred IDE (VS Code, Cursor, etc.) and seamlessly integrate Dyad into your existing workflow.

The fact that it has to be said... :D

willchen a day ago

I'm working on adding MCP support to Dyad soon! What's your favorite MCP servers? (trying to curate a list of recommended MCPs)

  • JeffKazzee 14 hours ago

    Context7 or Deepwiki are a must-have. They are also relatively secure, unless those sources of information become compromised in some way.