When I started at Retool, I had some trouble moving from learning the basics to building the impressive kinds of apps and workflows I was finding across our corporate intranet.
I was surrounded by greatness but didn’t know how to accomplish the same things, just like someone onboarding at any of our customers with a significant Retool installation. I understood the Retool developer loop but couldn’t always get it spinning.
I wanted an EXPLAIN button on every Retool app I saw. And while that wouldn’t be helpful to everyone, I couldn’t shake the notion that the best way to learn Retool was to use the resources and components already popular in an organization.
Our developer relations team built Retool Explainer to take you from peer inspiration to personal innovation. As an educational tool built within the scholarly virtual halls of Retool University, the Explainer takes messy JSON exports of Retool apps and workflows and analyzes your app with Retool AI. With a little bit of your help, the Explainer can then author an insightful (if slightly imperfect) tutorial describing how to build the very same app.
Because it’s part of Retool University (which is a separate environment from your Retool instance), the Explainer is blissfully unaware of your company’s resources or credentials.
Retool Explainer understands the projects you upload by analyzing your queries, the components you select and how they relate to the queries, triggers, interactions, and transformations inherent in all Retool projects.
To generate its write-ups, Retool Explainer uses the latest material from Retool documentation, our Center of Excellence, and our blog, Cache, as a vectorized knowledge base of Retool development knowledge.
Any sufficiently advanced Retool project expands to using workflows, and our Explainer has no different magic: we use workflows to maintain a relevant & up to date corpus. While we currently use OpenAI’s o3-mini model to generate tutorials, a wide cast of LLM characters is drawn from creative titles and chat.
The Explainer strives to produce technically accurate, sufficiently entertaining material for Retool developers who already understand the basics.
The Explainer comes with a small archive of “public” AI-generated tutorials. These aren’t written by humans. They are imperfectly precise but communicate the kind of analysis that the Retool Explainer excels at. Of course, you’re welcome to try and build, remix, or chat with these projects yourself!
You’ll find that the Retool Explainer works best with your best. Here’s a refresher on exporting your projects to JSON. I hope you’ll train your next Retool developer with the Retool Explainer.
Did you generate a fun tutorial you think would benefit other developers? Share your projects in the community showcase!
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