I built an app for work in 5 minutes with Tasklet - and watched my no-code dreams come true

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Tasklet is billed as a chatbot-style AI agent authoring, hosting, and deployment tool.

A knack for interfacing with any system, API or not, could be its unique superpower.

Once your integrations are in place, Tasklet can build UIs on top of them in minutes. By now, most people I know — friends, family, and colleagues — have experienced AI in some way, and many are generally impressed with its utility. There's also a healthy amount of skepticism to go along with those positive impressions.

As skeptics go, I'm a harder customer to please than most. I've mentioned Tasklet.ai before. In one article about how Microsoft was turning Entra into part of the organizational agentic AI control plane, I cited Tasklet's existence as evidence that AI agent authoring and deployment would one day be child's play.

Now that I've had sufficient time to put Tasklet to use, I can honestly say that, in my 30 years as a tech journalist, I've never been wowed by a technology the way Tasklet has wowed me. My first Tasklet agent Tasklet is hardly just an agentic AI authoring, hosting, and deployment platform. In fact, once you head down the path of creating your first agent, you'll begin to wonder about the official definition of an AI agent.

Perhaps it's my background as a developer, but after creating my first Tasklet agent, I wasn't sure whether what I'd built was an AI agent or just software any programmer might write. With one big difference: I didn't write a stitch of code. Also: How to build better AI agents for your business - without creating trust issues Using natural language, as shown in the video below, I simply told Tasklet what I wanted my first AI agent to do and where to find the data, and it went off and took care of business (cleverly prompting me for input when it needed it).

The result of my first effort is an agent that notifies me when it's time to reapply wax to my bike chain. For cyclists, wax is an alternative to traditional chain lubricant. If you're a cyclist like me who rides more than 5,000 miles per year, you know how easy it is to ride too far (usually over multiple rides) without giving your bicycle's drivetrain the care it needs.

My new chain lube agent not only notifies me (over email) when I've ridden 125 miles since the last waxing, it also lets me know when it's time to have the chain professionally cleaned and rewaxed at my local bike shop. Here's what's extraordinary about how Tasklet built my agent: I only had to tell it where to find my cycling mileage log (an online service called Strava) and which of my bikes to watch for elapsed mileage (my Specialized Tarmac SL6 road bike). It not only built the code to keep track of my miles and send me an email when it was time to rewax or service my chain, but also handled all the integration code to tap into my cycling log on Strava.com.

Also: How Claude Code's new auto mode prevents AI coding disasters - without slowing you down For comparison's sake, I asked Anthropic's Claude to do the same thing, and it complained that Strava didn't have a Model Context Protocol (MCP) interface. It gave me a workaround that wasn't nearly as slick and frictionless as Tasklet's approach. Incidentally, if you need an agent to send emails or texts to someone other than yourself, Tasklet will do that too.

But, for anti-spam reasons, users other than yourself must opt in to receive those messages. On the surface, all of this may sound trivial. I assure you that it's not.

The no-code dream comes true For the last decade, under the moniker of "no-code software," the biggest tech titans, funded by billions of dollars, have been racing to be the first to deliver this sort of utility: a platform that writes software and automagically handles whatever integrations are necessary to make that software work. As the former editor in chief of ProgrammableWeb (once the official journal of the API economy), I've seen countless no- and low-code tools that attempted to deliver on this promise, but never did. Now, here's Tasklet making that dream come true.

Also: I built an iOS app in just two days with just my voice - and it was electrifying "

If you just tell Tasklet where the data is, it will automatically figure out how to get that data and bring it into the app, whether there's an official API (application programming interface) or not," Tasklet founder Andrew Lee told me. "

In fact, I'm not even sure why we need MCP anymore." Wait. I spent 15 years covering the API economy, and here was this founder telling me it all could have been a waste of time?

Lee wasn't suggesting a bit of disruption. He was suggesting eliminating a ginormous segment of the technology business! And what about all the work that went into making MCP the OData-like standard API of the AI industry?

Is AI that good — especially Tasklet's AI — that we can just throw all of that away? Surely, he must be mistaken. But as I thought about it more, it made perfect sense.

If AI should be capable of anything, it should be capable of poking around the border of any network service, discovering all of its interfaces (official or not, for all you cybersecurity pros out there), and then enabling any other software — even software it develops like Tasklet does — to access that data. (For the record, if you watch the above video closely, you'll see how, with my approval, Strava issues an OAuth token to Tasklet in order to gain access to my cycling log.) This is when I began to wonder what Tasklet really is. A natural language-driven no-code software solution?

A revolutionary new integration layer for mashing up multiple services into a single app? An AI agent authoring, hosting, and deployment tool? Yes, yes, and yes.

But wait (you guessed it) — there's more. Also: How to get free AI headshots that don't look fake - with Nano Banana 2 While I was testing Tasklet, Lee notified me that they had just released a new feature called Instant Apps. It's one thing for an agent to go off and do something and then build a report or send you a text or an email on some periodic or triggered basis.

But what if you wanted a full-blown app that included your own custom-built front end? Tasklet has you covered. I'm a big Notion user.

In fact, after I ditched Evernote for Notion (I love Evernote, but it just got too expensive), I asked Tasklet to migrate all my Evernote data into Notion. Actually, I didn't need Tasklet to handle the migration because Notion has its own import utility. But I wanted to see how Tasklet handled mashup scenarios involving two or more disparate online services.