Perspectives

Learn how to write better apps using AI app builders like Chef by Convex with these five expert tips from Jordan Hunt, prompt engineer at Convex. This guide covers how to build simple MVPs, keep prompts under 300 words, provide clear UI and design instructions, use AI tools like ChatGPT to refine your prompts, and recover quickly when things go off track. Includes real app examples like a habit tracker, to-do list, and finance tracker—all built with Chef. Perfect for developers building full-stack apps with AI.

Convex compared Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro to see which LLM works best for building full-stack apps with Convex Chef, the new AI Agent app developer tool. Claude stood out for its precise backend coding and function calling, while Gemini made impressive UIs, and GPT offered solid speed and value.

Agents rely on long-lived workflows, but when happens when they fail midway through? Here are the tools you need to manage correctness and reliability: transactions, idempotency, retries, durable functions, journaling, and state machines. The missing abstraction layer for agentic is durable workflows, which bring them all together.

I reimplemented Mastra’s agentic workflows with durable functions in Convex, and it was the wrong decision. Look at three common strategies (reimplementation, API wrapping, and “blessed” plugin paths), along with learnings along the way and reflections on what I’d do differently next time. TL;DR: Do less, do it smarter, and prototype faster.

AI coding is here: The most productive developers are leveraging AI to speed up their workflows. This ranges from asking models questions about system design to letting AI take the driver's seat with tools like Cursor Composer.

Coding agents can do more autonomously when they write code that has tight, automatic feedback loops; use systems that express everything in standard, procedural code; and have access to strong, foolproof abstractions.

WebDevCody drops into Databased to discuss content creation, AI, and sponsor relationships.

After years of wrestling with state management, I've found myself excited by how Convex queries have simplified the way I think about derived state. Instead of juggling complex state libraries and websocket implementations, Convex offers a refreshingly straightforward approach: just declare what data you need, and it stays synchronized across all clients automatically. It's made me wonder if we've been overcomplicating things all along.

As the newest member of the Convex team I am keen to find out how the magic works. Join me as I go spelunking through the codebase and uncover how the API generation actually works under the covers.

A good set of values can be critically important in establishing a team that stands for something. This post outlines why company values are important, what characteristics good and bad company values have, and how to run a process to determine your company values. This applies equally well to a company or team or any other organization.

Today is my first day working for Convex 🎉, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my thoughts on why I decided to join and what excites me about the technology.

Object sync engines manage a rich object graph across multiple clients and a centralized server and are a great fit for building local-first apps.

Indy, our Head of Product, led building Google Photos for Android. This is his story.

We can categorize sync platforms across nine dimensions: data size, data update rate, the structure of the data, input latency, offline support, number of concurrent clients, centralization, flexibility, and consistency.

Sync platforms like Convex simplify distributed state management, ensuring that developers can focus on building their applications rather than managing backend complexities.

Even though Convex supports the creation of cron jobs out of the box, until now, we've only supported static jobs. With user space crons, we now support the programmatic definition of crons at runtime.

When people want a full-stack framework, what they really want is an opinionated backend that interoperates seamlessly with their frontends in a way that empowers full-stack developers to easily build apps that can scale.

A cache is a non-authoritative representation of data maintained for performance reasons. Find out what these words mean and when you should care about them here.

Compare push-based load balancing with pull-based work stealing as scalable strategies for distributing resource-intensive workloads, such as running LLM models for AI apps.

I want to share my mental model of databases: - Databases are just big spreadsheets - An index is just a view of the spreadsheet sorted by one or more columns - Binary search over a sorted list is faster than a linear scan (for large lists)

We shipped a behind-the-scenes update that lets customers run 10x concurrent functions than they used to. Emma, who helped ship the update, provides the context, architecture, and impact.

A deep dive on how Convex's reactive database works internally.

Read this article to learn how you can build our open-source backend from source.

Our CTO James gave a talk at Developer Week 2024 about how backends have been letting down product developers by not providing clean abstractions that empower development without introducing unnecessary complexity. James outlines four major failures of the status quo: * Bad ideas in query models * Bad ideas in type systems * Bad ideas in caching and performance * Bad ideas in data sync He explains why these exist, how they are holding back developers, and discusses recent innovations at Convex that address these four areas.

Which to choose, the expressive power of code, or the robustness of built-in database features? With Convex, you can have both. By eliminating the boundary between the application and the database, Convex provides a uniform and powerful way to model your entire backend data flow and security using plain ol' code.

An overview of Convex and Supabase, comparing the DX and capabilities of both products when building out the same application.

At AICamp's end-of-year meetup for 2023, Michal goes over why you should build a custom AI-powered chat for your product, what options you have for building one, and which one you should ultimately choose.

Alex Cole discusses dynamic web apps, how serverless solutions compare to in-house stacks, and how product development changes when individual engineers can own features end-to-end.

Your document is safely stored, but search is coming up empty? Inconsistent search systems can really confuse users! Don't worry–in Convex, transactional search indexing ensures that users always get what they expect and your apps just work.

SQL has been a part of computing for a very long time, and SQL-based database systems underly most of the world's applications. But recently, developers have been clamoring for something better, and it's time to move on.

Convex 0.5.0 introduces built-in support for actions — arbitrary lambda functions that run in a Node.js environment on the Convex cloud. We use the term action to differentiate these functions from Convex mutation and query functions, which enable transactional writes and dynamic subscriptions that update whenever data changes.

Today, a new wave of innovation is making databases approachable for developers without requiring a specialized skillset, opening the door to a whole new category of ambitious web experiences. In this panel, you’ll hear from the people pushing the boundaries of database technology and learn what’s possible — and what’s coming.

The serverless movement has eliminated so many problems but it has left application developers with the hardest one of all: managing distributed state.

The future of databases is Convex. This video originally aired at Jamstack 2022, highlighting the next evolution of modern web development architecture.

You don’t have to worry about the platform locking you into a decision that seems convenient at first but is a headache to deal with later.

Dynamic application developers need global state management, not a database. James (@jamesacowling) presents his talk from the HYTRADBOI 2022 database conference on how Convex is rethinking how app developers manage global state.

Ideas around immutability, purity, and dataflow programming are quietly saturating our technologies like Bitcoin and React. And while these early inroads are enabling exciting new ways to build large and dependable applications, there is still much to do to realize the full potential of this revolution.