IDE and developer tools vendor JetBrains has released a private preview of Kineto, an AI-driven no-code platform for creators and small businesses.
JetBrains claims that no existing platform “allows people with no coding experience to build a ready-to-use app and actually enjoy the process of building it.”
A Kineto app starts with a prompt describing what the app should do and how it should look. Then AI takes over, though it needs around 20 minutes to generate a prototype. According to the introductory post, Kineto will “create a complex app architecture and then build and test the right functionality based on your prompt.”
Users can then add features and change the design. There is also a “meta layer mode,” which, we are told, allows verification and modification of functionality, user roles, and rules. The last step is to choose a publish and share option, with hosting arranged by JetBrains.
JetBrains is well known to developers, being the largest independent tools vendor and second only to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and Visual Studio in most surveys. The company is also the creator of Kotlin, a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and cross-platform language adopted by Google for Android development.
However, the company is not well known outside the developer community, which makes it curious, perhaps, that it is now seeking to market Kineto to non-coders. JetBrains said that it is “building a bridge between creative people, small businesses, and no-code platforms.”
Despite JetBrains’ insistence that it has found a gap in the market, there are now many options for would-be app creators to build web applications armed with nothing more than a prompt and a chat box.
Google, for example, has Gemini in AppSheet, which lets users create an app by describing it in natural language, as well as Firebase Studio, which also supports creating prototypes from prompts. Microsoft offers Copilot in Power Apps, which builds an app via a “conversation with Copilot” without writing code or designing screens. JetBrains probably does not want to be left behind.
The sense we get from the new preview is that it wishes as far as possible to keep the code hidden. “The key principle behind Kineto is no code for you at all,” states the announcement.
The snag is that without code, it is hard to verify behavior, fix bugs, implement advanced features, or maintain applications through framework and operating system upgrades.
Vibe coding is notorious for generating applications that seem to work but have issues – like the experience of Alden Hallak, a software engineer at Google, whose DrawAFish application had vulnerabilities including that a JWT (JSON web token) generated for one user could be used by another, allowing any user to be admin, as well as reuse of a leaked password and lack of authentication for username changes. “Every single username was transformed to a heinous slur, many unsavory fish had made it into the fishtank, and many beautiful fish were gone,” he said.
If this can happen with an experienced engineer at the helm, though done as “an exercise in vibe-coding and GCP [Google Cloud Platform],” then it shows how hard it is to combine the magic of prompt-driven development and the reliability and security needed for business applications. ®