Debuggable AI generated internal tools
Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, on building an end-to-end internal tools platform
Airplane is betting that AI will make code generation cheap, which makes readable, reviewable code the real bottleneck. In Airplane, the generated internal tool lands as normal React, JavaScript, or Python that can live in a monorepo, go through code review, and be debugged like any other app. That matters most on tools that touch production data, where teams need to inspect exactly what a button click will do before they trust it.
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The practical contrast with Retool is not speed of first draft, it is speed of auditing and fixing. Retool won many teams by making admin panels fast to assemble, but its apps often mix drag and drop components with scattered JavaScript snippets, which makes tracing state and data flow harder than opening one code file and stepping through it.
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This is especially valuable in the core internal tools workflow, read some live company data, diagnose a problem, then take a write action like refunding an order, changing account settings, or running a script. Airplane started from script based operations and then added Views so the whole read and write loop could live in one system with permissions, audit logs, and notifications.
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The wider category keeps converging on developers as the real buyer. Retool’s biggest competitor was often React, not another startup. Appsmith also frames React as the baseline alternative. That makes Airplane’s pitch more specific, keep the speed benefits of an internal tools platform, but preserve the portability and inspectability of ordinary code that developers already know how to maintain.
As AI writes more of the first draft, internal tools platforms will split into two camps. One camp will optimize for instant generation and easy prompting. The other will optimize for generated output that engineers can trust on live systems. Airplane is positioned for the second path, where the winning product is the one that turns AI generated apps into code a team can safely review, edit, and own for years.