Whenever I see a DSL where part of the DSL's responsibility is to have arbitrarily complex mathematical expressions, my reactions are (a) why???, (b) well, if they're going to do it, they should have a formal language specification with a derived lexer and parser, and (c) the product needs a robust stdlib with compatibility across build targets.
The idea that agent can built and see it is very important and how I have been building my own GUI framework https://github.com/brainless/akar
I have been using an internal screenshot feature along with a dump of the component tree. Multi-modal LLMs can be used to read the screenshot and fix issues. The dump can be read by any text based LLM. I made my life much easier.
I saw the Blender UI based framework shared on HN the other day and this one today. I am not sure if I want to continue building my own (although all code is written by agents) or if I should switch. I can take inspiration from the two other frameworks and continue with my own.
Immediate thought was the Contract reminds me of QML.
This Exact work looks great and I very much hope it succeeds. Qt has
Proven this approach works. Now if these folk at Expo can do it at a price that every dev can afford it will get much wider adoption than Qt.
Since there are no releases, I assuming this is still a WIP? It would explain why they list Linux and then don’t have any screenshots of it next to the other platforms. How it works is kinda light on details. I’m interested to learn more about the under the hood aspects of how they are translating everything to the different native toolkits.
Ambitious. I’m sure they know what their problems are and how to solve them, as evidenced by the agent being able to control the UI’s timing (and it being mentioned so far up). Getting the agent to get interactivity right is pretty hard otherwise.
This is absolutely huge. If the Expo team can demonstrate that this development strategy is viable, we will finally see a resurgence of native applications and more efficient software, getting rid of the Electron bloat.
It's a long shot for now, though! There are lot of gritty nitty details they have to get right. One of the first issues I can imagine is this framework being great to use with Opus 5.5 but not good enough with i.e. Gemini 4 Argon or DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017, due to the overreliance on having AI models write the code.
It is weird. What does "agent native" mean? This looks like work that requires the use of agents to use properly.
Hence me thinking it is satire. Are we already at a point where libraries and frameworks are being written such that they require agents (from maybe paid frontier models) to properly use?
We live in strange times, if so.
Interestingly, I was just thinking of this problem today: how can I stick with react-like declarative UIs (like one I have developed myself) but yet have them abstracted over native UI frameworks of Apple, Android, even TUIs to produce native apps? What I would have expected is a fully deterministic runtime, compiler, or library approach to solving this, not an agent-driven "solution".
No, there's no requirement to use agents, and others are already building tools for manually working with Construct with a purpose-built editor.
Tools like Hyperframes have already demonstrated the value in catering to agentic-first dev while offering manual inspection and editing interfaces.
Agents aren't equally good at all languages/tools, and just having a lot of training data on one ecosystem isn't enough to optimize the experience. If you read the announcement thread from the CEO there are several points made such as formal safeties against invalid states and build error messages that token-efficiently teach the agent correct usage.
From what I see in https://github.com/expo/exact/blob/main/contract/syntax/src/... and https://github.com/expo/exact/blob/main/contract/syntax/src/... - it's unclear this will scale to the levels of complexity that arbitrary UIs demand.
I have been using an internal screenshot feature along with a dump of the component tree. Multi-modal LLMs can be used to read the screenshot and fix issues. The dump can be read by any text based LLM. I made my life much easier.
I saw the Blender UI based framework shared on HN the other day and this one today. I am not sure if I want to continue building my own (although all code is written by agents) or if I should switch. I can take inspiration from the two other frameworks and continue with my own.
This Exact work looks great and I very much hope it succeeds. Qt has Proven this approach works. Now if these folk at Expo can do it at a price that every dev can afford it will get much wider adoption than Qt.
It's a long shot for now, though! There are lot of gritty nitty details they have to get right. One of the first issues I can imagine is this framework being great to use with Opus 5.5 but not good enough with i.e. Gemini 4 Argon or DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017, due to the overreliance on having AI models write the code.
The announcement thread covers ways it helps agents, and they sound like things that would help humans, too.
Hence me thinking it is satire. Are we already at a point where libraries and frameworks are being written such that they require agents (from maybe paid frontier models) to properly use?
We live in strange times, if so.
Interestingly, I was just thinking of this problem today: how can I stick with react-like declarative UIs (like one I have developed myself) but yet have them abstracted over native UI frameworks of Apple, Android, even TUIs to produce native apps? What I would have expected is a fully deterministic runtime, compiler, or library approach to solving this, not an agent-driven "solution".
Tools like Hyperframes have already demonstrated the value in catering to agentic-first dev while offering manual inspection and editing interfaces.
Agents aren't equally good at all languages/tools, and just having a lot of training data on one ecosystem isn't enough to optimize the experience. If you read the announcement thread from the CEO there are several points made such as formal safeties against invalid states and build error messages that token-efficiently teach the agent correct usage.
> What does "agent native" mean?
https://github.com/expo/exact#1-agent-native defines it
Agent native is said once in this readme, following an immediate explanation and specific features.