Hey everyone! We're excited to bring you our first update of the new year. 2020 brought a lot of changes for everyone — us included. We officially rebranded to Autocode on July 7th last year as we focused on delivering a better product experience. Keeping up with our penchant for relentless optimization, we took December 2020 to reimagine our product experience once more based on your feedback. The result — Autocode is now deployless. This means you can ship scalable, serverless Node.js web endpoints live to the cloud in seconds from our in-browser IDE.

Deployless

We've achieved an average speed up of over 10x compared to what Autocode used to be capable of. We'll optimistically install NPM packages for you as you type, so by the time you go to run your code it just works.

That's not all...

Along with speed updates, we've also rebuilt the in-browser IDE and continuous delivery process as well. The new features include, but are not limited to;

No more "serverless function" boilerplate required. Write any JavaScript at all and it will run as an endpoint.

console.log('Some logs');
return {
  message: 'code written like this will have a serverless function automatically wrapped ' +
    'around it, in this case we are returning a json object with one key: "message" :)'
};

You can access HTTP GET / POST params with a context object we'll populate automatically.

let name = context.params.name || 'Spartacus';
return {
  message: `No, I am ${name}!`
};

You can return arbitrary HTTP responses this way, too, to build any sort of web response you desire.

let name = context.params.name || 'Spartacus';
return {
  statusCode: 200,
  headers: {'Content-Type': 'text/html'},
  body: Buffer.from(`No, I am ${name}!`)
};

If you want to add type coercion / checking to your endpoints, you can still use the serverless function-style exporting we invented with FunctionScript. This turns ESDoc / JSDoc comments into an HTTP interface type schema. To make that easier, we've now added intelligent boilerplate generation based on a payload. For example, the editor can automatically change your boilerplate if you set your payload to {name: 'Spartacus'}.

Schema editing

We've updated the code execution experience to load your endpoints in a browser-like interface (for going back / forward through history) with built-in logging that matches an integrated experience you might expect from VSCode.

Logs in the editor

We've added easier environment variable and dependency management in the Autocode UI.

Logs in the editor

You can now modify webhook events that endpoints respond to, e.g. stripe.charge.succeeded, after an endpoint has been created. Autocode will automatically rename the file for you to keep it organized properly. You used to have to duplicate the endpoint and change the event.

Logs in the editor

Workflow and code generation is now available as a hotkey and can be used at any time.

Logs in the editor

Multi-cursor selection and cursor navigation has been updated to match the functionality of cursors in mature editors like VSCode.
You can fork development environments in just a click, making replicating your codebases and separating out development, staging and release even easier than before.
We've added a new pricing tier — Pro — for our solo power-users who need longer timeouts, more usage and more environments but aren't working with a team.
Many, many more usability fixes, tweaks and improvements.

A background on deployless software

"Deployless? What does that mean? You must still have to deploy your code to the cloud?" Yes. Much like how with serverless technology there are still servers, with deployless technology there are still deployments. But we do it quickly and without any intermediary steps. The term "deployless" was first coined by Julian Friedman in 2019. Within months, Darklang launched the first deployless solution in market boasting a 50ms time-to-cloud.

Admittedly, Autocode is not quite that fast. We don't have the same goal of delivering a custom language and runtime, we're focused on running Node.js and FunctionScript — our open source framework that turns JavaScript files and functions into APIs. Updating your project in the cloud takes about 3 - 5 seconds in the average case with Autocode. We're comfortable calling our solution "deployless" because, factoring in time it takes developers to switch from an editor and reload a webpage, this has a negligible impact on total development speed.

We're confident you'll be just as fast iterating in Autocode as in nearly any local environment. We promise it's only going to get faster from here. And, hey, if you still want a local environment? Our command line tools work great. Pushing up to the cloud takes a little longer from the command line — about 5 - 7s average case — as we perform additional quality-of-life checks on your project to make sure they're synchronized properly with the web experience.

I'm new here — why should I try Autocode?

If you're just reading about Autocode for the first time, we welcome you. We've toyed with a lot of taglines and we're still figuring out how best to describe Autocode, but for now we've settled on instant endpoints for anything. Autocode allows you to instantly build Node.js web endpoints in a fraction of the time it would take to set up on any other cloud provider. There's an open source Node.js framework baked in — it's even easier than using Express. We provide hosting, an in-browser IDE, continuous delivery — separation of development and prod environments — and we make duplicating development environments as easy as the click of a button.

On top of that, we provide one-click authentication and secret management to your favorite SaaS apps. Oh, and we automatically set up webhook events for you, too. And sign them. And there's a whole lot more. We make building for the web an order of magnitude easier than you're used to.

We recommend building internal APIs and endpoints to begin with, but the sky is the limit. People build all sorts of things on Autocode — new user notifications, purchase alerts, scheduled jobs, SQL queries. If you need an API for it, we have your back.

What's next?

We're always looking for ways to make Autocode even better for our most enthusiastic power users. If you think you could be one, we recommend you sign up and check it out! If you'd like to chat with the community, click here to join our community Discord. You can also follow us on Twitter, @AutocodeHQ.

As always, happy hacking. 🙌

Keith Horwood

Founder and CEO, Autocode