We Were Rebuilding the Same React Forms Again and Again So We Built Shadcn Form Builder
If you've built more than one React application, you've probably spent far too much time creating forms.
Over the last few years, I've built SaaS products, dashboards, internal tools, and landing pages. No matter the project, the same pattern kept appearing:
Create inputs
Configure validation
Connect React Hook Form
Write Zod schemas
Style everything with shadcn/ui
Repeat
Again and again.
After building dozens of forms, I started asking myself a simple question:
Why am I rewriting the same foundation every time?
The Problem Wasn't Coding
The actual business logic was rarely the hard part.
The time-consuming part was always the setup.
Even a simple user registration form required:
Form fields
Validation rules
Error messages
Type definitions
Form state management
UI components
Individually these tasks are straightforward.
Together they create a lot of development overhead.
When you're building products quickly, that overhead becomes frustrating.
The Idea
I wondered if developers could simply describe a form in plain English and receive a production-ready starting point.
Something like:
Create a customer onboarding form with company name, email, phone number, industry, and team size.
Instead of generating a mockup, the tool would generate actual React code.
That became the foundation of Shadcn Form Builder
I didn't want another visual form builder.
I wanted something developers could actually use in production.
What I Wanted the Tool to Generate
The generated output needed to include:
shadcn/ui components
React Hook Form integration
Zod validation
Clean, editable code
Most importantly, developers should fully own the generated code.
No lock-in.
No proprietary runtime.
Just code.
What Surprised Me
The biggest surprise wasn't the code generation.
It was how much faster product development became.
Instead of spending 30–60 minutes creating a new form, I could generate a structured starting point in seconds and focus on customization.
The tool doesn't replace developers.
It removes repetitive setup work.
That's a very different goal.
Lessons Learned Building Developer Tools
Building for developers is interesting because developers are skeptical by default.
And honestly, they should be.
Most tools promise to save time.
Very few actually do.
I've learned that developers don't want magic.
They want:
Predictable output
Clean code
Familiar patterns
Full control
That's why generated code matters more than generated interfaces.
Developers trust code they can read.
Beyond Forms
While working on the builder, I realized forms are only one piece of a larger workflow.
Most applications also require:
Dashboards
Tables
Navigation
Authentication screens
Settings pages
Marketing sections
That's one reason we've continued expanding our collection of Shadcn Blocks and Components alongside the form builder.
The goal is simple:
Reduce repetitive work so developers can spend more time building actual product features.
What's Next?
We're continuing to improve the quality of generated forms and expand support for more real-world use cases.
The vision isn't to replace development.
The vision is to eliminate the repetitive parts of development.
If we can save developers even a few hours every week, that's a meaningful improvement.
Final Thoughts
Building products often teaches you the same lesson repeatedly:
The best tools aren't always the ones that do something impossible.
They're the ones that remove friction from things you already do every day.
For me, forms were one of those things.
That's why I built Shadcn Form Builder.
I'm curious:
What's the most repetitive part of your development workflow that you'd love to automate?
