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AI in app building

Learn how to utilize AI when building and editing apps.

You can use AI in various ways throughout the app building and editing experience.

To use the following AI features in Retool, Retool AI must be enabled in Settings > AI. On this page, admins can also toggle each individual feature on or off.

Assist​

Assist Availability
Cloud Public beta
Self-hosted Edge 3.283 or laterPublic beta
Self-hosted Stable Expected in Q3.5 release on October 21, 2025.

Assist is an app generation assistant within the app IDE that helps you interact with and build apps. Assist can perform the following tasks:

  • Generate apps from scratch.
  • Edit existing apps.
  • Tell you about the purpose and functionality of an app you're editing.
  • Answer questions about Retool.

Learn more about Assist.

Ask AI​

Ask AI is an assistant that is scoped specifically to queries. Look for the

Trigger Ask AI by clicking the icon in the query editor or use / when editing a query.

You can instruct Ask AI to perform a number of actions with JavaScript, SQL, and GraphQL queries:

  • Generate: Write a new query using natural language instructions.
  • Edit: Edit an existing query using natural language instructions.
  • Explain: Add comments to explain what each part of a query does.
  • Fix: Identify and fix errors in an existing query.

Because Ask AI has access to your data schema, Ask AI can accurately reference your data and UI components.

Read more about Ask AI.

AI-Generated README​

Instead of manually writing a README, you can use AI to generate one. The LLM evaluates the purpose and functionality of the current app and writes a detailed and fully-formatted README that is added as a page in your app.

Read more about AI README generation.

Queries and components​

You can also use AI as part of your app functionality, enabling end users of your app to interact with AI.

AI Actions​

The Retool AI resource enables you to write queries that instruct AI models to perform different actions:

  • Text actions to generate, analyze, and classify text.
  • Chat actions to generate responses based on message history.
  • Document actions to extract text from PDF documents for use with AI Actions.
  • Image actions to generate images based on the provided input.

Read more about AI actions.

Components​

Retool provides two components that allow you to interact with AI in a chat-style interface:

Read more about the chat components.