GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine

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• Hacker News
• I knew this would be yet another garbage copycat library the moment I saw "new paradigm" in the title. When I actually looked at the webpage, I found I was not at all wrong.

  P.S. I genuinely don't want to hate on the work of motivated devs, creating something useful for the community, and trying to share it. That's a great thing, and we want more of it!

  But when some asshat comes in with an ai slop library that's redundant with a dozen other solutions (all of which people actually use in production to solve problems) ... and claims that they are creating new paradigms ... it feels to me like that makes things harder for every real new contribution.

  All the stuff we want is signal, and crap like this just adds ego-based noise that blocks the signal.

  by hungryhobbit
• The overuse of blue and purple gradient fills on the landing page is a telltale sign of AI slop.

  I’m sorry, maybe it’s shallow, but that makes me close the tab.

  by pavlov
• Don't judge a book by its cover. In this case, a library by its website.
  by manojlds
• i have the same sentiment.

  upon opening the site, I immediately got vibed feeling so I closed the tab.

  by criticalfault
• haha! Fair point! We are three old school programmers and have no idea on design, so yes for the website ONLY, we let Claude designed for us...

  If any designers come over to the comment section, we would love to hear from you! We'd love to improve our website with your advice.

  On the other hand, the code, we started coding this more than one year ago and we have poured our souls on it.

  If you can bare the AI obvious styling front page, I think you would like the framework

  by wtfdeveloper
• With a name like "Golem", I could see a more earthy color scheme with a much more subtle (essentially unnoticeable) use of gradients feeling real nice with this product.
  by bpev
• Why the name Golem?
  by manojlds
• Golems are mythological creatures that are brought to life with clay.

  For us, our library is the clay, and the result of what you code with it is the golem.

  by wtfdeveloper
• no direct support for svelte is a major turn off
  by vivzkestrel
• Date range picker doesn't work...
  by cmoski
• worked for me.
  by pylotlight
• You would be suprised to hear this, but we are actually thrilled to hear this! We are on our first weeks (v1.02), so if you have found a bug we would love to get our hands on it!

  Would you consider raising an issue here? https://github.com/golemui/golemui/issues

  You could be the first person to open an issue on this repo (other that the three of us)

  It goes without saying that this does work in our machines.

  by wtfdeveloper
• Is there no file input type?
  by typeofhuman
• Good feedback! Is actually on the roadmap :)
  by wtfdeveloper
• I always prefer declarative ways over all others, looks good to me!
  by lanycrost
• Thanks!

  Yes, that is basically the whole idea, to have all the benefits of a JSON like core BUT to give a dx layer on top that allows forms to be semantically defined.

  by wtfdeveloper
• The docs don't appear to cover progressive enhancement. Is this an oversight?
  by rich_harris
• Hi Richard,

  First let me admit that we are still giggling after seeing who send su this question! Big fans! :)

  That being said... GolemUI is a client-side form runtime, the visibility rules, validation, computed fields, and repeaters all run in JS.

  But we would be very interested in hearing from the community and specially ... from you! Do you think we are missing a big use case? Any advice?

  by wtfdeveloper
• Lots of my previous employers had "data structures to forms" tech. It's very useful.

  GolemUI looks like a nice open source version of this idea.

  Thank you!

  by mring33621
• THANK YOU!

  Being three devs here on a table reading comments and feeling nervous, is great to hear this kind of feedback, we really did pour our souls here.

  by wtfdeveloper
• This looks very much like many slopped up UIs I've seen over the past few years. Not saying the code is, but the design itself looks vibe coded?
  by smcleod
• I too am immediately fatigued by the insta-landing pages people pump out. react-create-app or whatever. no thought whatsoever because "design is a solved problem".

  pause for sighing.

  Ok that said, I mean it makes sense, people aren't good at all things, and getting a project to the finish line is laudable. Let's not flippantly dismiss the project because it uses trendy purple.

  For what it's worth, I would absolutely dismiss a project if the text content was entirely AI. But the design, well, I'm confident 90% launched projects use some JS SPA template thing. It's the state of the industry.

  by apsurd
• Well, If we have learned something from this post today is that we are terrible designers web designers :)

  We take this as actually great feedback, as we are indeed not good at all at web design, so we will try to improve it using all the feedback in this thread.

  That being said, you can bet we have pour our souls on the library code for this project.

  You can easily see this by looking at our commits.

  https://github.com/golemui/golemui/commits/main/?since=2025-...

  Note the date! 2025-09-01, that is the date of our first commit, 1962 commits later we published v1.0

  So you can see that the actual code for the library has been build very carefully, I think if you give it a go at our (not so great) website, and you actually see the features, that will impress you

  by wtfdeveloper
• How do you handle schema migrations? If someone has thousands of JSON form definitions stored in a database and the component API changes, is there a migration strategy or versioning system built in?
  by charucharu
• I don't think there is a simple answer to that, if moving from a big project to GolemUI or any other platform, the key would be to do it iteratively, first starting with a POC and then slowly intaking the rest of forms, if you were to consider doing a POC with GolemUi we will more than happy to help with this obviously :)
  by wtfdeveloper
• Ok, I love it.

  Can you simplify how form dynamism works? I skimmed the docs and saw 'states', but it didn't immediately click how it works.

  Do we build a tree of rules outside of the components? Are states attached to each component, bottoms-up, and then the form tree is managed by the library?

  by nilirl
• Depending on the DSL you choose (JSON or Programmatic) you declare reactivity slightly different, but pretty much, we have states and inlined expressions.

  If states didn't click initially that's fine, you can still cover a lot of ground using inlined expressions: https://golemui.com/dx/features/states/inline-when/

  Basically you can nest the states, so you can build a tree of states that way.

  Or you can leverage the DX to have fully reactive components.

  by wtfdeveloper
• Wonder why some technical decisions were made. E.g. i can make a dynamic form builder with Zod in ~1 week without AI. Why not do that? Why a custom engine?
  by ramon156
• Also a lot of the responses claim "we're not good web devs", yet you have a decade of experience. which is it? are you guys good or not?
  by ramon156
• How is this a new paradigm?

  This idea for JSON -> form has existed for a decade, one example: https://github.com/eclipsesource/jsonforms

  by verdverm