kkoppenhaver

(Biased due to me leading the DevRel team at Retool, that said...)

I've recently been a big fan of Claude Code for building lots of these kinds of tools, but then I always ran into the "what now" problem. Our IT team certainly wasn't going to just deploy my randomly-built tool and give it access to our systems, so there was a whole other process to go through to get the things I was building out to the team.

That's basically solved with Retool, because all the resources and data connections are already provisioned and can be centrally managed and governed. By the time I have an app built, it's already built on top of our existing permissioning structure and I can deploy it to the whole team.

With the tooling we launched today, I'll actually find myself starting in Claude Code, sketching out what we're going to be building and having CC go into my Retool account (via MCP) to find what data I actually have available, before deploying the whole thing onto Retool at the very end.

To me, that's still a flow that's going to work in 2027!

Full disclosure: I'm a Technical PMM at Retool, which makes me a little biased, but I'm also a developer who’s seen these sorts of projects from both sides.

I generally agree with most of the commenters here, that you need a team of just a couple experienced people to start building your in-house platform. But when you're constrained with that small of a team, building something full-code can make it tough to find the momentum you need to get any one solution over the finish line.

If you already have a solid software development process or a team already in place, maybe going with full-code could work. On the other hand, we have a customer that replaced a custom-built React dashboard that was powering their whole business with an app entirely built in Retool, and let them work with the team they already had in place. Empowering the entire team is one the reasons Retool exists. They’ve been prototyping new features incredibly fast, even the non-technical folks on their team can contribute, and they haven’t had to worry about managing freelancers or attracting and hiring a team.

You've got a lot of choices ahead of you and a lot of good advice here in the comments. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] if I can help sort through any of it!