Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#201

Post by habeyer » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 11:50 PM UTC

schwartzworld wrote: post #196

habeyer wrote: post #183

Low/no-code tools as replacements for devs is never going to happen. But as an " aid " to empower developers... absolutely. The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't " hard " as much as it's super tedious which is generally a good target for disruptive automation. Of course one of the big challeng…

> The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious. I think the take that frontend isn't hard is extremely outdated. Responsiveness and a11y are nuanced problems with huge surface areas. As designs get more complex, keeping all these things in check requires tooling t…

I misspoke.

It's not Front-End dev as a whole, just the "pushing-pixels" stuff.

There's a ton of difficult FE work (esp. state). It's just that when it comes to a lot of the "basic" styling and responsiveness there's a lot of tedious work that should be automate-able (just like any framework or library, the goal is to reduce unnecessary work, not to suggest that the work is trivial).

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#202

Post by sam0x17 » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

habeyer wrote: post #193

sam0x17 wrote: post #38

They are already. I consult for a lot of hyper-early-stage YC startups as they formulate their plans and I've had two separate clients in the past 6 months go the no-code route to build their MVP. At first I was against it, but having seen these clients go through it I would say it is much cheaper and less risky and gives developers an extremely good blueprint for when the founders inevitably decide to go beyond the…

It was low-code for the back-end as well or just front-end? Back-end feels really risky to me, because visual logic builders are just so limiting compared to code.

It depends on the application. In this case both clients were using a no-code system used by big fintech players like Goldman Sachs that costs $150k for a one year license.

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#203

Post by soco » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 9:16 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #153

burlesona wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually the strongest case in favor of "no code" tools IMO. Get the PM to spend time actually modeling what they want, as close as they can get, in no-code tools. They get to bash their head against the wall for a while until they give up and bring in engineering. But now (a) the PM actually has some intuition around how complex things are, and (b) their no-code solution is probably a better approximation of…

That's an interesting perspective. No-code tools to enable businesspeople to write good specs.

That's just the start. Soon the business people will become overwhelmed and pass ALSO this task to the developers.

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#204

Post by soco » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

drewcoo wrote: post #109

sbf501 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automobile engines are also very complex, but no one talks about no-mechanic cars. In highschool where I grew up, the bottom academic 50% of boys ended up being mechanics of one type or another. At one point in time, being an auto mechanic was an elite, rare profession, and that complexity was encapsulated as something that low-performing academic students could bank on for a career. I see the exact same thing with c…

Low code isn't about tinkering under the hood. It's about going places. Most cars have automatic transmissions now. Cars don't have manual chokes anymore. They're reliable enough now that most people don't need to know anything about repair, engine or otherwise, whereas that used to be widespread knowledge.

Most cars do exactly the same thing, while programs there are not two the same.

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#205

Post by danielvaughn » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 11:54 AM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #172

hkleppe wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is. I get your point. But without low/no-code tools I would argue a lot of simple workflows have to be implemented using code. These usecases, where the technology-side is simple, is a good fit for low/no-code platforms IMO

The magic will always be in deciding where to stop using low/no-code and start using actual code. domain specific and opinionated low/no-code tools with clear boundaries on what the tool can and can't do would be a good thing but the markets would be small and that's a bad thing. I've seen teams spend a lot of time in low/no-code tools and either it grows more complex than actual code or they resort to the escape hat…

Agreed. The cynic in me hears business execs saying “we want non-programmers to be as effective as programmers”, and what I really hear is “we don’t pay these people nearly as much, can we get them to do it instead?”

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#206

Post by themoonisachees » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 12:05 PM UTC

fizzynut wrote: post #95

aeruder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. I worked at a company that really went in hard on Agilent Vee for hardware testing in the early 2000's. Absolutely a thing where a manager saw a "Hello World"-like demo and was so impressed that they went 100% full buy in. Besides the obvious UI issues (like the fact that you couldn't really zoom out, you could just pan around your code), we had a bunch of engineers that still needed to do things like "get the…

Yeah the main issues with visual programming are: - Logic tends to take up a lot more screen space than real code - There is no defined way to read the code. In real code you start top left and read left to right and down, but in visual code if there are lots of "paths" then your eyes end up darting around everywhere.

The single most important point that is keeping visual programming from ever being taken seriously in corporate settings is the fact that there are currently no version control compatible with it (for good reason). You can't collaborate without version control.

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#207

Post by alephnil » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #115

pid-1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, most kids I know only interact with devices that feature strong guard rails like phones and tablets. Those kids are generally more ignorant of how software systems work than someone who grew in the 2000s.

Exactly! I was going to comment on the same phenomena. We now have a "digital native" generation coming of age for whom the only thing they have known is a ubiquitous internet. We might expect that they would be more intimately familiar with the workings of the technology that has surrounded them than we could ever be. Yet the opposite seems true, and I think you've put your finger on a primary reason — they've only…

You saw the same with cars. Back in say 1950, most car owners would know how to do basic maintenance and repairs, both because the cars was mechanically simpler, but also less reliable. With higher reliability and more complex cars, that is no longer the case. Now the same thing is happening with computers.

Re: Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?

#208

Post by sporkland » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

First: I feel like it already has, and did so way back in the day. Excel and Access (modern version Airtable) are no/low code tools that drastically expanded the set of things that business users/domain experts could do without a "programmer", and have likely supplanted a number of that would have been developed by "real developers" if they didn't exist.

So the question is how much of that power can you push to those end users vs what needs to be held by "proper developers". I could see tools like advanced versions of co-pilot expanding the scope of what people can do to the point where only very high scale, very universal things are built by "proper developers".