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Brokenatom: No-Code Platform
Built a full-stack no-code platform end-to-end in the pre-AI era: UI generation, backend, custom React parser, all from first principles.
The Challenge
Build a no-code system that lets users construct fully working applications, frontend through backend, from specifications, without writing code. Pre-AI era. No GPT to lean on for code generation. Everything had to be solved from first principles.
What I Built
- The entire platform end-to-end, by myself, as the founding engineer. UI generation, backend logic, data handling, system architecture, the full stack.
- A custom React parser that took HTML-like input and produced real React code in the browser, enabling a Figma-style visual building experience that emitted usable, editable code instead of locked-in output.
- The integration layer for state management, data flow, and backend connections, making the visual builder produce applications that actually work in production, not just demos.
The harder parts
- Doing this without AI assistance meant reasoning through compiler-like problems by hand: AST manipulation, runtime evaluation, hot-reloading edits in a sandboxed iframe. The kind of work that would now take a fraction of the time with modern AI tooling in the loop. There’s a particular clarity that comes from solving these things without help.
- Designing for arbitrary application structures while keeping the system reliable and performant. Every “this should be possible” had to compose with everything else.
What I learned
Building from scratch in the pre-AI era taught me how to model problems before reaching for tools. That habit has stuck, I still write the architecture down before writing a line of code, even when the AI would happily fill the gap.