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The Mallet

👋 Hello, Retool community!

Until last week, building outside of Retool meant going through MCP. You’d send a prompt, and Retool’s own agent did the work. The CLI, now in public beta, hands that job to your own coding agent instead: Claude, Cursor, whatever you already run locally writes the app directly on your machine. Once it’s done, Retool takes over. Permissioning, resource connections, and deployment happen the same way no matter which agent wrote the code.

A vibe-coded app still touches production data, and speed doesn’t change what it needs to run safely. Whether your agent builds through MCP or writes code locally through the CLI, Retool enforces auth, access policies, and audit logging at the platform level, so your faster builds are also governed and secure. MCP will still be better for some use cases—we wrote about how to decide which tool to use on the blog.

Learn more about CLI in our announcement and docs.

And ICYMI: our CEO David Hsu was a guest on the AWS for Software Companies podcast earlier this month talking about all things vibe coding securely. Check it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast platform. We also covered his guest appearance on the WSJ’s Tech Council Summit on the blog.

🚀 What’s new

Browse our new App Gallery

We just launched a running collection of real apps built in Retool—dashboards, consoles, forecasting tools, and more—organized by use case. Every app is live, editable code running on demo data, (not just a screenshot) so you can click and edit each one to see how it actually works before you build something similar of your own.

AI visibility for Enterprise

A new centralized settings page shows AI credit usage and BYOK token usage, filterable by instance, model, user, and feature. Enterprise admins (and delegated users) can also pull the same data through the new Get AI credit usage API endpoint.

Manual file management for app building

Add or delete folders, frontend components, and backend functions directly from the Code tab, no need to prompt the agent or spend credits.

Embed apps in iframes

Apps can now be embedded in other apps, in classic apps, or on outside websites via iframe. Org admins set the Content Security Policy rules that control which pages are allowed to frame your app.

New AI models

GPT 5.4 Mini, GPT 5.4 Nano, and GPT 6 Astra through OpenAI, Claude Fable 5.1 through Anthropic and Amazon Bedrock, and Gemini 3.8 Flash through Google and Vertex AI are all now available for AI resource queries.