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Tranquil Developer Preview v0.1.0 Release

Announcing the first public preview of Tranquil — an IDE with a browser for building internal business apps you own.

0 50 100 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 peak · May 2026
Search interest for “business automation”, worldwide, past 5 years — source: Google Trends

One side effect of the current agentic LLM tsunami is the focus it has brought to business automation.

Introducing Tranquil

Tranquil is workflow automation for teams and businesses that have outgrown copy-paste, scattered spreadsheets, and brittle scripts.

Built from the ground up Tranquil is a cohesive set of tools and concepts — from the studio you build automation tasks with to how you deploy and scale jobs in production.

The Problem

With peak AI hype in full turbo mode, the allure of a fleet of autonomous AI bots running around magically making your business run smoothly speaks less to their promised capabilities and more to how fragmented our digital world has become.

The duct-tape architecture of modern business knowledge work A precarious tower of blocks in the style of xkcd's Dependency comic. A wide slab labeled "all modern business knowledge work" rests on a teetering stack of blocks labeled CRM, ERP, Slack, email, invoices and billing, task board, support tickets, HR and payroll, forms, and a legacy database marked "don't touch, seriously". The seams are annotated with copy-paste, forwarded manually, ask Frank, nightly sync (usually works), question marks that always break on Fridays, and no one knows. Near the bottom, the whole right side balances on one tiny block: the spreadsheet nobody dared touch, from accounting, circa 2009. ALL MODERN BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE WORK CRM ERP SLACK EMAIL INVOICES / BILLING TASK BOARD SUPPORT TICKETS HR / PAYROLL FORMS LEGACY DATABASE (DON'T TOUCH — SERIOUSLY) EMAIL CHAINS MANUAL EXPORTS COPY-PASTE FORWARDED MANUALLY ASK FRANK NIGHTLY SYNC (USUALLY WORKS) ??? (ALWAYS BREAKS ON FRIDAYS) NO ONE KNOWS THE SPREADSHEET NOBODY DARED TOUCH (ACCOUNTING, CIRCA 2009)
with apologies to xkcd #2347

Daily pain points include:

  • Bouncing around many apps to accomplish a task
  • Dealing with a long list of logins, passwords, and authentication challenges
  • Keeping data deduped and up-to-date where it is needed
  • Writing long SoP’s to keep track of repeatable processes
  • Figuring out what app didn’t do what — when it was supposed to
  • Debugging broken bespoke calculations and scripts

The Gap

Code-first approaches involve adding code to the browser via extensions, deploying scripts to a server, writing excel macros, extensively customizing a Salesforce monstrosity, etc.

Knowledge worker-first approaches occupy the other end of the spectrum. Heavy business process management (BPM) tools have been a staple since the 90's. More recently SaaS apps have webhooks and email triggers which allow for light duty automation tasks (which can take you a long ways!).

The lack of commonality and overlap between these two opposite approaches creates significant friction between those "who need" the things done and those who "can get" the things done.

Tranquil bridges this gap and brings knowledge workers and coders to the same table.

  1. Code view: instead of bringing code to the browser, Tranquil brings the browser to your code.
  2. Business view: an integrated workspace to run your bespoke business automations as you interact with your daily business apps.
  3. Operations view: run your automations deterministically and durably.
Tranquil
An engineering-department-friendly-knowledge-worker-leverage tool.

Try It Out!

Get it here: https://www.tranquillabs.dev/releases/v0.1.0/

If I've peeked your curiosity there's enough infos on the website and documentation to get you rolling as a developer. Point your LLM at the machine readable installation instructions, check out a few of the supplied example automations, and create your first automation!

Postscript

If you are an organization that depends on your knowledge workers, gives them agency and responsibility, and believes in giving them the tools to be successful...

...Tranquil's goal is to be one of those tools.