NocoBase 3.0 alphas quietly add an AI Portal for agent-written frontends

NocoBase is shipping a major release almost silently. According to a dev.to analysis, the open-source no-code platform has published thirteen 3.0 alphas since July 30 — the latest, alpha.13, on August 31 — with no announcement, even as 2.2 went stable on August 23 with its own post and the beta line moved on to 2.3. The documentation, though, is already live, and it shows what the quiet line is for: an AI Portal that makes NocoBase the backend foundation for frontends written by AI coding agents.

Four release lines, one unannounced

npm's dist-tags, cited by dev.to, show four lines in flight: latest at 2.2.5 (stable), beta at 2.3.0-beta.6, alpha at 3.0.0-alpha.13, and a v1 tag at 1.9.74. Asked on the project forum whether a major update was in preparation, a staff member would say only to stay tuned for the release. One quirk for anyone scripting against releases: alphas 1 through 3 exist only on npm; GitHub Releases starts at alpha.4.

Two packages are the whole difference

The dev.to post compared the dependencies of @nocobase/preset-nocobase, which bundles the built-in plugins, across the three lines. Version 2.2.5 and 2.3.0-beta.6 carry an identical set of 104 packages; 3.0.0-alpha.13 carries exactly two more, with nothing removed.

The additions are plugin-multi-portal, a Portal manager for running multiple portals each with its own layout and menu, and portal-template-default, a React and shadcn/ui template for building standalone frontends backed by NocoBase.

Release notes are a noisier instrument. Portal-related changes cluster entirely in the first ten days — nine across alpha.4 through alpha.8, between July 31 and August 10 — and none after August 11. Later alphas absorb work shared with the 2.3 line: AI employees, client-v2, Workflow and Multi-space, with alpha.10 alone running to roughly 11,000 characters of notes. Package composition is the cleaner signal.

What the AI Portal is

NocoBase's documentation already carries an 18-page AI Builder section, and its AI Portal Quick Start requires 3.0.0-alpha.6 or newer. The framing, as summarized by dev.to: AI vibe coding can produce good-looking pages but struggles to connect them to a real business system, or ends up rebuilding authentication, permissions and collection design from scratch. NocoBase's answer is to supply that foundation itself — authentication via OIDC, SAML, CAS, LDAP, SMS and others, collections and external data sources, CRUD REST APIs, field- and record-level access control, workflows and file storage — while the AI agent writes the pages and business logic in React, served from the AI Portal entry.

The no-code mode is not being replaced. The docs present two ways to build a UI side by side: no-code portals at /v/name, configured in the UI and stored as database configuration, and AI Portals at /x/name, built from React source that can be committed to Git. The no-code path suffices when the page structure is standard or non-coders need to adjust pages themselves; the AI Portal targets custom interactions and complex business systems.

The early portal changes sketch the intent: seeding AI, admin and mobile portals on a fresh install, routing an application-wide default portal, per-portal access permissions with a rejection message when access is missing, AI-mode portals included in backup and restore, and copying a prompt from an AI portal's card to connect a coding agent.

Where the source lives, and a default to watch

'Lives locally' turns out to mean the developer's machine, not the server. Portal source exists in three places: a local dev workspace, a source store, and deployed artifacts. The CLI workflow is pull, dev on a local port 5173 server, push with a commit message, then deploy. The prerequisites double as operational requirements: Node.js 22 or newer, pnpm, the alpha build of the NocoBase CLI, and an AI agent — Claude Code, Codex and Cursor are named in the docs themselves.

One default deserves attention. Source storage starts as nocobase rather than a Git repository, which means no version history; a bad change can only be rolled back by overwriting everything. The docs advise moving long-lived portals to Git early.

Verified against a running instance

These findings were checked against a fresh install of 3.0.0-alpha.9 using the official Docker image and PostgreSQL 16, with 2.1.23 alongside for comparison, then re-verified against the alpha.13 packages: portal seed data, path assignment and template version were unchanged. Everything here describes an alpha — documented, but unannounced, with no guarantee the final 3.0 will look the same.

Why it matters

Rather than treating AI coding tools as a threat to no-code platforms, NocoBase is betting it can be the substrate underneath them: the hard-to-get-right layers of authentication, permissions, data modelling and APIs, with agents writing the frontend on top. The two-package diff shows how deliberately narrow that bet is — 3.0 is essentially a multi-portal manager plus a React template. For teams already running agent-written code, the model maps onto existing practice, apart from the version-control gap in the default source storage. The open questions are timing and delivery: the portal work finished a month ago, the announcement has not come, and stable users on 2.2 see none of it yet.