51–60 of 160 posts
My favorite part of "low code" was the conciseness of conveying what the process was and the expected outcome.
I think this view is really short-sighted. Low-code tools date back to the '80s, and the more likely outcome here is that low-code and agentic tools simply merge. There's a lot of value in having direct manipulation and visual introspection of UIs, data, and logic. Those things allow less technical people to understand what the agents are creating, and ask for help with more specific areas. The difficulty in the past…
A lot of value indeed, but not just for less technical people. Imagine ddd vs gdb. Usually some kind of visual debugging aid isn’t available in an environment because the ROI isn’t there, not because technical people love mental parsing or hate graphics. The LLM revolution is changing the calculus here: creating new tools and new visualizations is easier than ever. It would be unthinkable three years ago to create a visual debugging aid just to use it once, outside of truly gnarly and show-stopping bugs; now it could very well be feasible.
I work on a 'low code' platform, not really, but we do a lot of EDI. This requires a bunch of very normal patterns and so we basically have a mini-DSL for mapping X12 and EDIFACT into other objects.
You guessed it, we have a diagram flow control tool.
It works, yes I can write it in Javascript too... but most of the 'flow control bits' are really inside of a small sandbox. Of course, we allow you to kick out to a sandbox and program if needed.
But for the most part, yeah I mean a good mini-DSL gets you 90% of the way there for us and we dont reach for programming to often.
So - its still useful to abstract some stuff.
Could AI write it by hand every time? yes... but you still would want all the bells and sidepieces.
I don't see LLMs as competing with low code at all. Low code solutions make it easier for LLMs to setup something working and robust.
who needs SaaS
Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive it.
That'd cover 99% of LOB app needs and allow me to actually get shit done without tools that dissolve in my hands or require hordes of engineers to keep running or have to negotiate with a bullshit generator to puke out tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable javascript crap.
We have achieved nothing in the last 25 years if we can't do that. Everyone who entered the industry since about 2005 appears to be completely braindead on how damn easy it was to get stuff actually done back then.
Fuck all this pointless noise, verbose analysis, LLMs and other associated crap. Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive it. That'd cover 99% of LOB app needs and allow me to actually get shit done without tools that dissolve in my hands or require hordes of engineers to keep running or have to negotiate with a bullshit generator to puke out tens of thousands of lines of unmaint…
Embrace Oracle Apex.
Fuck all this pointless noise, verbose analysis, LLMs and other associated crap. Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive it. That'd cover 99% of LOB app needs and allow me to actually get shit done without tools that dissolve in my hands or require hordes of engineers to keep running or have to negotiate with a bullshit generator to puke out tens of thousands of lines of unmaint…
Low-code has become especially important now with LLMs for several reasons, especially in terms of stability, maintainability, security and scalability.
If the same feature can be implemented with less code, the stability of the software improves significantly. LLMs work much better with solid abstractions; they are not great at coding the whole thing from scratch.
More code per feature costs more in terms of token count, is more error-prone, takes more time to generate, is less scalable, more brittle, harder to maintain, harder to audit... These are major negatives to avoid when working with LLMs... So I don't understand how author reached the conclusion that they reached.
But if I can get my AI to use an off the shelf open source flow orchestrator rather than manual coding api calls that is better.
>the cost of shipping code now approaches zero. Is this a commonly held assumption?
The people saying that never specify what code is being deployed. I can get assembly from /dev/urandom for cents on the TB.