UNA Meets NEO meets AI - The Future is Looking Fast! 🤩

Many here have been no doubt watching the evolution of NEO, our React App interface for UNA, with avid interest. As this project comes so very close to its fruition with a number of NEO based apps launching this week it seems timely to reflect on what might be the next steps in the evolution of the UNA-verse...

As @Andrey Yasko reflected with me this afternoon, he and a good number of the UNA team have been developing the UNA codebase for 25 years. In any age, that's a long time, in internet years, that's millennia! Across this time, and particularly in that last decade since Dolphin evolved into Trident and then UNA, the UNA team, past and present have assembled an incredible suite of components that can be used to build almost any configuration or social community or membership based site.

A Lego Set of Possibilities 🏗️

UNA 14 offers an incredible system to build out almost any dream site, with a robust core of system modules, a multitude of performative modules and slick templating system, there is no limitation to what can be built with UNA. UNA has often been described as a Lego set of building blocks that will empower you to build the community site of your dreams, however...

The Problem... 🤷‍♂️

The challenge with UNA is that it is too good, too sophisticated and 'too much' for most mortals to easily grasp. Make no mistake, there are some incredible sites that have been built on UNA, however most of them have been created by skilled developers, and we have always struggled with what I describe as a 'retail product' something that mere mortals, the dreamers and doers can configure with limited time and resources. There have been significant efforts made to create 'opinionated' templates that give new builders an already evolved starting point, Spacenook being an excellent starting point, however we have known for a long time that we need more.

Less is More 🎯

One of the great challenges for UNA developers (UNA team included) is switching apps off. Especially with new communities, there is often a desire to add more and be more, to offer more and more features, thinking we can win fans through features. However what we now clearly know is that when it comes to community development, less is most certainly more, people go to Reddit to ask obscure questions, Instagram to scroll stories, Tinder to find love, Twitter to argue about politics, Telegram to send naughty messages and Facebook to have our data stolen 👀... There is obviously a crossover with these features, but it certainly seems that people enjoy diversity in their apps, which is why Facebook Messenger has never taken over as a stand alone messaging system and Quora is not a dating app.

UNA meets NEO meets AI 🫶

NEO has been an ambitious project for the UNA team for over 2 years now, developing an UNA front end built on React, enabling an instantaneous native app experience for UNA. We now have a number of projects about to be released on NEO, which is pretty damned exciting, and as we move beyond that, we start to look at how we can offer NEO more widely.

AI enters the Chat... 🤖

With AI we now have a way of building with UNA that is truly revolutionary. You may have noticed the release of Agents & Assistants with UNA 14, this might look like a small thing, but is actually a REALLY REALLY BIG THING. Agents and Assistants have built into UNA the infrastructure to offer sophisticated AI integration into UNA. At the moment it seems light, but make no mistake this is a game changer for all of us.

Vibe Coding with Good Vibes 🥳

Vibe Coding is a programming approach that uses natural language prompts to instruct AI tools to generate software code. We give the AI Assistant a general instruction of what we wish to create aka "The Vibe" and the AI creates an app. The issue here is that whilst the front end interfaces can look fantastic, there is little depth to the code, and the logic is usually always problematic, in simple terms, the apps might look cool, but they are buggy AF.

The Future is Looking Fast! ⏩

So what would happen if we gave our Vibe Coding AI based App and instruction to build an app, but use the UNA code base, and the NEO React front end? With a mature database logic, deeply integrated administration layers and a suite of integrated native apps with features to cover almost every configuration solution, you would be be right to think we have an app building super weapon. Imagine, 'hey UNA, build me a version of Instagram but for snow skiers', 7.5 mins later, you have it, locked and loaded, 'Hey UNA, make me a site like Twitter, but for school teacher' make a cup of tea, site is ready... Imagine, instruct, tweak, launch... What has traditionally taken weeks, months, years, could now be done in minutes.

The mind boggles, the enthusiasm bubbles, UNA 2025 is going to be 🚀