If you look at the software landscape of any major company, it generally breaks down into three buckets:
- Core Business Apps: The "Center of Gravity" systems (Core Banking, ERPs). The massive engineering moats.
- Customer Facing Apps: The revenue generators (eCommerce, Mobile Apps) where GMV happens.
- Internal Software & Tools: The operational glue.
Let's zoom in on that third bucket: Internal Tools.
The Internal Tools Dilemma
Historically, you had three choices to build these tools:
- Own Engineering (Traditional Code): The gold standard. But engineering bandwidth is expensive and scarce.
- The Agency Route: Outsourced, slow, and results in a "black box" you can't easily maintain.
- The Low Code / No Code Route: Tools like DronaHQ (or our competitors). This was a breakthrough for semi-skilled tech people—Technical Product Managers, Backend Engineers avoiding frontend, or Data Analysts. It empowered them to build tools internally with speed.
The Low Code Engine Room
To understand why we needed a revolution, we first have to look at the machine that has powered internal tools for the last decade. It relied on three distinct layers.
The promise was "Don't write HTML/CSS." You are given a canvas and Lego blocks (Tables, Inputs). It's fast, but you are trapped in the grid.
Business logic turned into a flowchart. Drag blocks: `Call API` → `If Success` → `Show Toast`. This made logic deterministic and debuggable by non-engineers.
The unsung hero. It "air-gaps" your frontend from your backend. No exposed credentials. The platform handles the handshake securely.
This stack worked. It let businesses build apps 10x faster. But there was always a catch: The UX Compromise. Everything looked "Enterprise-y"—functional, but rigid. You couldn't build a consumer-grade experience because the tool wouldn't let you.
The Challenge: Hitting the 10x Ceiling
Despite the speed, the Low Code route comes with a friction point: The Learning Curve. To achieve proficiency, you still need to learn the tool, understand the components, and master the logic blocks. Even for technical folks, learning a proprietary drag-and-drop syntax takes time.
As Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) noted in their article "One Prompt, Zero Engineers", Low Code solved the "10x faster" problem, but the market was ready for a "50x faster" disruption.
The Vibe Coding Phenomenon (50x)
Around early 2025, Vibe Coding entered the market. It didn't just offer speed; it offered freedom. You don't drag-and-drop; you speak. We saw three distinct flavors emerge:
- IDE-Native Tools: Players like Cursor and Windsurf, which sit inside your code editor and vibe code alongside you.
- Hosted Services: Platforms like Lovable and Replit, where you prompt in a browser and it generates a full hosted app.
- General Purpose Agents: Like Gemini and ChatGPT, which started giving out production-ready code snippets on demand.
Power users could now just "Vibe it up." The need to learn a proprietary grid vanished.
Art of Possibility with Vibe Coding Agents
On a recent trip to Singapore, I discussed this shift with Rory Wilding, COO of Supabase. He highlighted a defining characteristic of this wave: these are fundamentally General Purpose vibe coding Agents. These generalized tools cater to everyone—from a kid building a game to an engineer building a landing page. Because they serve such a wide audience, they often miss the specific depth required for Internal Tools. Rory noted the wave of "hobby" projects they create. They spin up fast but often lack the enterprise-grade structure (SSO, RBAC, Data Security) that business applications demand.
This distinction is critical because the user base is incredibly varied. On one end of the spectrum, you have a hobbyist building a 'Flappy Bird' clone. On the other, a founder shipping a vertical SaaS. Somewhere in the mix, you have engineers building Internal Tools. While the prompting interface remains the same, the code requirements for these use cases differ dramatically. A game needs physics logic; a SaaS needs multi-tenancy; an internal tool needs strict RBAC, SSO, and secure data handling.
Internal tool builders took a pot shot at it too. Technical PMs and Engineers saw a way to bypass the frontend backlog. They started attempting to build complex Admin Panels and Dashboards using these general-purpose agents.
Learnings from Product leaders who used vibe code agents for internal tools
One of my customers, a Product Leader in Ad-Tech, achieved massive success with Cursor. He built a full-fledged V1 tool that let internal users generate AI videos. He did this in 15 days (60 hours of prompting) without ever looking at a single line of code.
He was overjoyed. The UX was incredible. But then he hit the walls:
- The Maintenance Ceiling: Adding a simple "Toast Message" took 15 minutes of back-and-forth prompting.
- The Deterministic Gap: In Low Code, a Table Grid is battle-tested. In Vibe Code, a re-prompt might break the sorting logic or mess up the pagination state, costing hours and tokens to fix what should be standard.
- The Enterprise Gap: The generated app looked great, but it lacked the "adult" features. There was no User Management, RBAC, SSO, or Audit Trail. He had to hack together authentication logic, creating a security risk.
- The DevOps Gap: Deployment wasn't magical. He had to push code via restricted Git pipelines. Thankfully he had access, but for most business users, managing CI/CD and CLI commands is a non-starter.
- The Complexity Wall: Eventually, the application grew too intricate for the AI to maintain full context. To ensure stability and scalability, he ultimately handed it to engineers to rebuild on a stricter foundation.
The "Expensive Mockup" (Replit)
Another customer used Replit to "vibe" a benefits portal. It looked perfect. But because the code wasn't secure or scalable, they handed it to an agency to code from scratch. The Vibe tool didn't build software; it just built a really expensive wireframe.
The Low Code Response: "AI-Native" Tools
The Low Code industry (ourselves included) didn't sit still. We saw the gap: Gen AI apps lacked Enterprise features like RBAC, SSO, and secure connectors. So, we all raced to solve this challenge.
We rebranded as "AI-Native" tools (a term highlighted by a16z). The premise was simple: give users the speed of AI generation, but wrap it in the safety of our Enterprise platforms.
While this approach worked, it was fundamentally limited. We were essentially putting AI on top of the existing constraints and bloats of Low Code tools.
The AI wasn't writing free-flow code; it was configuring our rigid UI widgets. It accelerated the generation of the "Grid," making it easier to edit than raw code, but you were still trapped in the same old "Enterprise-y" look and feel.
While competitors went General Availability (GA) with this approach, I held back.
I never viewed this as a true solution. It didn't check all the boxes. It felt like a faster horse, not a car. I wanted the true freedom of Vibe Coding, not just a faster way to configure a widget.
The Pivot: The Version 2 Machine
This is where I pivot to a new machine—a completely new design that is way more powerful.
It marries the True UI Flexibility that Gen AI offers, and latches it to the power of our Enterprise-Focussed Low Code Stack.
1. Unconstrained UI (The Vibe):
We use the best parts of tools like Cursor/Replit. We let the AI write raw, beautiful React code for the interface. No widget constraints. If you can prompt it, you can render it.
2. Retain the Magic Connector Layer:
We retain the Connector Layer—our "magic layer" for data. It effectively handles data interfaces for your frontend securely. No leaking credentials in your AI-generated React code.
3. Hybrid Logic (No-Code Blocks):
We bring in elements of No-Code blocks on UI logic by enabling you to revert to the logic blocks like Toasts, Confetti, JS, or simply calling a REST API without needing continuous prompts. You snap a block, and it works every time.
4. Fix the Broken Experience (Managed Runtime):
We solved the "Git Pipeline" nightmare. DronaHQ stitches the runtime directly into the platform. You don't need CLI commands or DevOps access. We handle the hosting, the environment, and the deployment.
Just a README.md is good enough for you to understand what's happening. The machine handles the rest.
The result: You build internal tools 50x faster, without the constraints.
For the Curious Souls: Watch me Build
I am building a CRM application live. Now, I know what you're thinking: 'Why build a CRM when you can buy HubSpot or Pipedrive?'
Valid point. This isn't about replacing HubSpot. I chose a CRM because it is UI Complex (kanbans, dashboards, lists) but Functionally Standard. It’s the perfect stress test to see if we can truly vibe code the interface while low coding the backend.
Watch me attempt to generate the UI layer using natural language.
I will be wiring up the backend APIs to make the CRM functional. Expected in 48 hours.
Recording in progress...
Want to test this with me?
This service is not yet public, but I am opening up spots for beta users.
Why controlled access?
We are providing $10 in free AI credits to testers. To ensure these go to serious business use cases (and avoid personal 'planner app' projects), we manually verify requests via business email.