It provides a panel filled with slowly moving dots. Right of the panel, there are objects labeled "water", "fire", "wind", and "earth" that you can instantiate on the panel and drag around. As you drag them, the background dots, if nearby, will grow lines connecting to them. These lines are not persistent.
And that's it. Nothing ever happens, there are no interactions except for the lines that appear while you're holding the mouse down, and while there is notionally a help window listing the controls, the only controls are "select item", "delete item", and "duplicate item". There is also an "about" panel, which contains no information.
In the panel, you can drag one of the items (eg. Water) onto another one (eg. Earth), and it will create a new word (eg. Plant). It uses AI, so it goes very deep
Random but I love the name. I feel like we've entered into a new fun era of startup names. No more ___ly or ___ist etc. This era is generic word/noun + arbitrary numbers or letters after it.
I think ChatGPT really kicked that off, but maybe it was something else that inspired it?
Less normie/friendly and more technical sounding. So far, I'm a fan!
Partially inspired by WD-40 but more so the exorbitant price for anything workflow.com. The number did have some logic behind it: 8 letters in automate and 6 in no-code.
I've been using Instant for about 6 months and have been very happy. Realtime, relational, and offline were the most important things for us, building out a relatively simple schema (users, files, projects, teams) that also is local first. Tried a few others unsuccessfully and after Instant, haven't looked back.
I think my usage of figma,sheets,etc. is 90% single player, until the moment of sharing my (maybe unfinished) work, where I go through an intense period of collaboration with others for an initial review, then tails off, and becomes async.
I can't see myself using muddy for the single player part, but it sounds interesting for after that initial intense collab process. Especially if the process includes multiple apps, as opposed to a single design review in figma etc. I find the longer running async collab is when I get the most scatterbrained across apps.
I felt this pain a lot. Never really resonated with all-in-one apps so we always had a few places to check for every project. Figuring out the right links was hard and prone to distraction.
In a way, we like trying new software. Downside is each app has the need to build their own slightly different file system, which makes finding things extra challenging. Wanted to solve with Muddy.
Interesting aside: AI models trained on spreadsheets need "good tables" such as column names, headers, etc. to understand context. Like Fortap: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07323
https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/