Everyone's a developer

Happy Hump Day!

Welcome back to the Leaderboard. In today's edition: a microscope in your pocket, a tool to build a web app in under a minute, and an AI that lets you chat to your SQL. Let's dive in

Macroscope 2: Turn your iPhone into a microscope.

Macroscope 2 is such a great find—I bought it immediately for my kids! I’ve used a kid-friendly microscope with a phone adapter before, but this app removes all the hassle of buying, storing, and setting up extra equipment. Now, I can just pull out my phone and let the kids explore freely. The only tricky part was learning the focus position; it would be more intuitive if the focus control were directly on the main screen instead of hidden in settings. It even got me wondering—could a telescope version be next to help us explore the stars

Bolt: Build and deploy web apps with a single prompt

Bolt is one of those apps that really makes you go either “wow” or “uh-oh” depending on your job title I guess. My first attempt was a simple prompt: “build a Product Hunt clone.” Within a minute it had a working clone complete with authentication, upvoting, commenting, and an organized leaderboard. What really blows me away is to simplicity of a prompt to quality of ouput ratio. I’m used to having to spend time crafting the perfect prompt just to get an AI to output maybe 70 percent of what I actually wanted. This was a five word prompt and it gave me exactly what I wanted.

Chat2DB Local: Write and analyze SQL with AI.

It’s refreshing to see offline language models in a product, especially for AI-assisted SQL querying, which feels like it’s full of potential. With BI dashboards built-in, analyzing data in SQL is much more efficient. I tried chat2db-local with some Ecobee thermostat data to check on my HVAC performance and found it a bit rough: some UI wasn’t in English, AI completion didn’t work right away, and the model generated some inaccurate queries. If the UX matched other AI dev tools, I could see myself using chat2db regularly for both work and personal data projects.