thank you for taking the time to write this out. This is exactly the kind of harsh but true reality check we were hoping to get by posting here..

With regards to the accessibility point, you're right, marking the email field invalid as you type is not accessible. GolemUI allows you to specify different validation trigger modes via form config: 'blur', 'change', 'submit' and 'eager'. We should change that to 'blur' in our demo.

Regarding server-side vs. client-side validation, we fully agree. Because our library is strictly a frontend tool, we see them as complementary features that can coexist.

With regards to progressive enhancement and the full-stack approach, well, is a much harder architectural hurdle for how our engine currently works, but you have given us some food for thought. We will think about these features.

Seriously, thank you for the feedback!

First let me admit that we are still giggling after seeing who send su this question! Big fans! :)

That being said... GolemUI is a client-side form runtime, the visibility rules, validation, computed fields, and repeaters all run in JS.

But we would be very interested in hearing from the community and specially ... from you! Do you think we are missing a big use case? Any advice?

After the rollercoaster of what this post have been, I can guarantee you that we will indeed consider this very seriously.

Check the website in a few weeks, I would hope that by them we have had enough time to intake all the feedback from this post, specially from this comment.

:)

Thanks

Yes, that is basically the whole idea, to have all the benefits of a JSON like core BUT to give a dx layer on top that allows forms to be semantically defined.

- Library design - Forms - Components

We have more than 50 years experienced combined in there.

We are terrible at

- Web Design

I hope that settles it :)

___

You can see our first commit here

https://github.com/golemui/golemui/commits/main/?since=2025-...

Note the date! 2025-09-01, that is the date of our first commit, 1962 commits later we published v1.0

So you can see this has been well thought

___

So the answer to how much has the library code vibe code is none of it...

That said, this is not an excuse for those bugs! We are already working on the fixes, many thanks for raising this!

We take this as actually great feedback, as we are indeed not good at all at web design, so we will try to improve it using all the feedback in this thread.

That being said, you can bet we have pour our souls on the library code for this project.

You can easily see this by looking at our commits.

https://github.com/golemui/golemui/commits/main/?since=2025-...

Note the date! 2025-09-01, that is the date of our first commit, 1962 commits later we published v1.0

So you can see that the actual code for the library has been build very carefully, I think if you give it a go at our (not so great) website, and you actually see the features, that will impress you

https://golemui.com/dx/form-definition/overview/

Have a look specially at the tags and selectors

Being three devs here on a table reading comments and feeling nervous, is great to hear this kind of feedback, we really did pour our souls here.

If so, I think you can see this on our github commit log:

https://github.com/golemui/golemui/commits/main/?since=2025-...

Note the date! 2025-09-01, that is the date of our first commit, 1962 commits later we published v1.0

So you can see this has been well thought

If states didn't click initially that's fine, you can still cover a lot of ground using inlined expressions: https://golemui.com/dx/features/states/inline-when/

Basically you can nest the states, so you can build a tree of states that way.

Or you can leverage the DX to have fully reactive components.

For us, our library is the clay, and the result of what you code with it is the golem.

Well, we are very experienced developers, which is code for.. we are old... Old as from the time where websites had banners moving across the page, so that might have influenced our choices.

But these suggestions are gold to us as we have no expertise on design, so thanks AGAIN