Noodl, and how NodeGX came from it

Noodl

What it was

Noodl had the canvas, the nodes, a live preview and its own optional backend. The company released the editor as open source under the GPL. Its public repository opened in January 2024 and saw its last change in July 2024.

Richard built client apps on Noodl, and before that on Bubble. When Noodl stopped, the people using it were left with a tool nobody was maintaining. Several forks appeared. The Low Code Foundation’s fork, then called OpenNoodl, was one of them, started in March 2024.

The pause

Two slow years

A handful of people fixed what they needed. In February 2026 a long plan to modernise the fork stalled. Nothing was touched for five months.

The question

Is the dream still alive?

In July 2026 Richard asked a hard question of the codebase. Is the dream still alive, and can this code carry it? AI coding tools had eaten most of the reason to drag nodes around a canvas. Asking Claude for an app is faster than drawing one.

The answer was that the reason had changed, not died. A visual graph is slower to author and easier to read. When an agent is doing the authoring, the reading is what is left for the person. By October 2026 the answer had grown. The graph, saved as plain files, is a blueprint the person keeps. An agent can build them an editor over it. They can export it as React code when they know they need to.

The revival

Rebuilt with Claude Code, from July 2026

From July 2026 the fork was rebuilt with Claude Code and renamed NodeGX. The first release, 0.1.3, followed in August 2026. The current one is 0.4.3, from 20 October 2026. In those four months the fork gained all of this.

• A build that works, with a test suite of thousands of specs run on every change.
• A desktop shell brought twelve major versions forward.
• A project format split into one file per component, so an agent can edit one page without reading the whole app.
• A written spec for every node. Every implementation is tested against it.
• An MCP server, so Claude Code can build in it.
• Its own backend: data, accounts, files, cloud functions and workflows.
• Code export to React.
• Six packages on npm, so an app can be built with no editor at all.

Every commit is public on GitHub, with the reasoning behind it in the repository’s own notes.