Views Turned Airplane Into App Builder
Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, on building an end-to-end internal tools platform
Adding Views turned Airplane from a narrow script runner into a full internal app builder. Before Views, Airplane handled the write step, like deleting data or running an ops job, but users still needed another tool to search records, inspect rows, and decide what action to take. Once Airplane could do both the read step and the write step in one place, it could sell not just to engineering teams with runbooks, but also to support, ops, and compliance teams that live inside admin panels all day.
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The product gap was concrete. A support rep might need to search for a user, inspect matching rows, then run a deletion or update. Early Airplane only handled the final script execution, so teams paired it with Retool or an in house tool. Views closed that gap and made Airplane a complete workflow surface.
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This is where the category gets much bigger. Most internal tool demand is not pure automation, it is putting a UI on top of production data so employees can read data and safely take actions. Retool built its business around that admin panel use case, and customers often compare these platforms less against each other than against building the tool directly in React.
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Views also changed who could use the product. Script driven tools mainly serve engineers and SRE style users. UI based internal apps spread into support, operations, compliance, and product teams. That matters because the majority of seats in mature deployments tend to be app users, not the developers who created the tool, which makes expansion much easier once the UI layer exists.
The next step is for internal tools platforms to replace more point solutions, not by matching every feature, but by being fast enough to build the exact workflow a team needs on top of its own systems. As code generation improves, the winners will be the platforms that combine fast UI creation, safe actions on production data, and developer friendly extensibility in one product.