Open Source Retool Alternative: A Code-First, AI-Native Approach

If you build internal tools in Retool, the last twelve months probably felt different. Pricing changed. Self-hosting quietly moved behind the Enterprise wall. AI features arrived, but if you tried to push them past a demo, you noticed they only generate apps from Retool's own components. This post is not a "Retool is dead" rant. Retool is still good at what it has always been good at — drag-and-drop CRUD UIs over your databases. But there's a category of teams for whom the trade-offs no longer m