I wanted a GUI that looks modern and snappy, minimal, not like 2003 MS Excel with dozens of buttons and dropdowns everywhere. I also wanted it to have a smart autocomplete that actually knows a schema, not just keys of the current collection, but their types and enum values. I wanted to type find({status: "}) and see "pending", "active", "cancelled" in the autocomplete suggestions.
As a tech stack, I chose Tauri for the shell, Bun for the sidecar running the MongoDB driver and a tRPC server, and react, tailwind, react-query for the UI. The installer is around 33 MB.
Also it has a built in MCP server that allows your AI tools to fully control the app: write queries, build charts, organize workspace, find and restore tabs that you once closed etc.
Using the combination of tauri + bun sidecar + trpc with react-query was the best decision: - startup under 2 seconds - end-to-end type safety without a need to update client interfaces on back-end changes - client optimistic updates are super easy to do, so everything feels instant