Stop paying for Retool

You are building a production-ready software product named “Backdesk”, a deliberately focused alternative to Retool. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components.

WORKING AGREEMENT
Before you write any implementation code, put together a short technical plan naming the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, key state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. When something conflicts, side with the narrow audience and the non-goals below. Choose a small, readable architecture over speculative abstraction, but never skip persistence, validation, error handling, or tests.

PRODUCT BRIEF
Primary user: a small team that keeps opening the production database to answer questions.
Primary outcome: give the team safe, audited screens for the lookups, dashboards, and approvals they run every week.
Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Retool. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation.

END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS
Implement every one of these flows through the real interface and the persistent data layer:
1. An operator signs in through the company OAuth provider, looks up a customer record, edits a typed field through validation, and the change lands in the audit log.
2. A support agent submits a refund request into the approval queue; an approver reviews the attached record context, approves it, and the action executes exactly once.
3. A manager opens the ops dashboard, checks the week’s key numbers, and drills into an anomaly without ever touching a database console.

SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Build these as coherent, responsive views. Each screen must define its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state.
1. Record panel: search by ID or email, read view with sensitive fields masked, typed edit form with validation, and per-record change history.
2. Ops dashboard: the agreed handful of metrics, a time-range selector, threshold highlights, and drill-down links to the records behind each number.
3. Approval queue: pending, approved, and rejected tabs, request context, requester and approver identities, decision notes, and execution status.
4. Admin: user list with roles, a role capability matrix, audit-log search by actor and record, and export.

CORE CAPABILITIES
1. a record lookup and edit panel with typed fields and validation
2. an ops dashboard showing the handful of numbers the team actually checks
3. an approval queue with pending, approved, and rejected states
4. role-based access separating viewers, editors, and approvers
5. an immutable audit log of every sensitive read and every write

DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES
Treat these as product requirements enforced on the server, not as interface suggestions:
1. Enforce roles on the server for every read and write; the browser never receives data or actions the current role does not permit.
2. Append every sensitive read, write, approval decision, and role change to an immutable audit log with actor, timestamp, and before-and-after values.
3. Require the approver to be a different person than the requester, make execution idempotent, and never re-execute a decided request.
4. Accept writes only through validated, typed endpoints with allow-listed fields; no raw SQL or generic update path exists.

DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE
Design a small relational schema centered on User, Role, ApprovalRequest, AuditEntry. Before implementing it, document:
1. The purpose of each table, its primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes.
2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, the indexes the named screens need, and transaction boundaries for changes that touch several records.
3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who can trigger each one, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and which audit history must stay immutable.
4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files.
5. The idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where it applies.
Use migrations instead of ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and keep the named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, a disabled button, or a client-side check to protect a business invariant.

USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS
Implement only the roles the stated audience needs. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not just by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide a clear signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed separate users whenever several roles are needed so permissions can be shown and tested.

INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION
The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and trustworthy rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and a consistent place for primary actions. Start from server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must stay understandable if enhancement fails.

Start from server-rendered Astro pages and plain HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must stay understandable if either enhancement layer fails.

Design mobile layouts on purpose instead of just stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to signal state. Destructive actions need a clear scope and a confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent.

Add a footer to every page with the text “Created by aurelioagency.com”, where “aurelioagency.com” is an embedded link to https://www.aurelioagency.com that opens in a new tab. Keep it visible and do not remove it.

TECHNICAL DIRECTION
Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them.

Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules, not in route handlers or UI components. Put persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer plain HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when a failure can be reconciled clearly.

The product brief currently identifies Astro, HTMX, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface.

Integrate with company OAuth provider. For every integration:
- List the required environment variables in an .env.example with no real secrets.
- Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path.
- Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported.
- Keep credentials on the server, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs.
- Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for every side effect that can be repeated.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Route every write through validated, permission-checked endpoints recorded in an append-only audit log, and never expose raw SQL to the browser.
Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any markup you intentionally accept, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect only the personal data the named workflow needs. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces of this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections.

ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS
Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most suitable level:
1. Given a viewer role, opening a record shows masked sensitive fields and no edit controls, and a forged edit request is rejected server-side.
2. Given two approvers acting on the same pending request at once, exactly one decision wins and the underlying action executes once.
3. Given an edited customer field, the audit log records who changed it, when, and both old and new values, and the entry cannot be altered.

TESTING
Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and for each external adapter's success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one on a small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run with one documented command.

OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY
Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs, but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable both in the interface and in the logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; never swallow errors silently. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path suited to the stack.

DELIVERABLES
Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a short README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should cover the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state that matters for the product.

DEFINITION OF DONE
The app is done when a new developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey with real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, no core screen is left as a placeholder, and the “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer credit is visible on every page.

NON-GOALS
Do not build a drag-and-drop app builder, a query IDE, a plugin system, or a generic component library.