Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

zackliscio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 160 posts

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#101

Post by dgxyz »

fock wrote: post #94
dgxyz wrote: post #55

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…

look at grist! I played around with it and it seemed quite awesome.

Not even remotely near Access 2.0 from 1994.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#102

Post by dgxyz »

cheschire wrote: post #63
normanvalentine wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit to having joined the industry after 2005. Can you say more about how easy it was to get stuff done back then? What was actually easier? Was Access just good and you didn't need to deal with building web apps?

Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what wa…

It did scale fine. We pointed it at SQL Server.

Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#103

Post by dgxyz »

pphysch wrote: post #65
dgxyz wrote: post #55

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…

> MS Access for the web with an SSO This is essentially Rails and Django and so on

That's not even remotely close to the idea. It's conceptually entirely different.

I'll note that Access existed in a completely usable form before the www even existed.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#104

Post by mmasu »

storystarling wrote: post #99
sergiotapia wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly suggest you expose functionality through Graphql. It lets users send out an agent with a goal like: "Figure out how to do X" and because graphql has introspection, it can find stuff pretty reliably! It's really lovely as an end user. Best of luck!

I tried this recently and found the token overhead makes it prohibitive for any non-trivial schema. Dumping the full introspection result into the context window gets expensive fast and seems to increase hallucination rates compared to just providing specific, narrow tool definitions.

a friend (and colleague, disclaimer) pushed this recently to github. It passes data through a duck fb layer exactly to avoid context bloat:

https://github.com/agoda-com/api-agent

worth taking a look to see multiple approaches to the problem

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#105

Post by agent013 »

Low-code tools have guardrails that keep things predictable - you know what a Retool app can and can't do. AI-generated internal tools are just... code. Code that will need updating when APIs change, when requirements shift, when the person who prompted it leaves. "We migrated everything in a couple of sprints" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Check back in 18 months when half those tools have drifted into unmaintained states and someone has to figure out what handleEdgeCase_v3_final_FIXED.js was supposed to do.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#106

Post by csomar »

cheschire wrote: post #63
normanvalentine wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit to having joined the industry after 2005. Can you say more about how easy it was to get stuff done back then? What was actually easier? Was Access just good and you didn't need to deal with building web apps?

Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what wa…

I think it's just nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated past. We do lots of things today that would've been impossible with Access and that we now take for granted. For example, most people today expect to access their system from anywhere via the internet; pulling up a specific invoice on their phone, for instance. That just wasn't possible with Access 2000. And if you tried building a web-accessible system on top of its database, you'd essentially be starting from scratch anyway. The reality is that the web is complicated because we want endless possibilities while staying fully connected.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#107

Post by cheschire »

dgxyz wrote: post #102
cheschire wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what wa…

It did scale fine. We pointed it at SQL Server. Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.

What you just described is a sample size of one. I spent ten years supporting a 30k+ person company and never saw Access used in reasonable ways. It was always on a network share, data always stored in the local file instead of SQL, “engineering” done entirely by a power user that got a book on MS Access at the bookstore instead of by anyone with actual engineering experience.

There’s a reason people in IT hate Access. It’s not because the technology. It’s because of what organizational bad habits the technology enabled.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#108

Post by mikewarot »

Please note that we had two independent working low code systems, back in the 1990s.

Back then, a domain expert could fire up either Delphi or Visual Basic 6, and build a program that was useful for them. If they needed more performance, they would hire a professional programmer who used their work as a specification, and sanded off the rough edges.

These days, Lazarus is the open source follow on to Delphi. It'll work almost anywhere. I've run it on a Raspberry Pi Zero W! The only downside is the horrible documentation.

Microsoft went off the rails with their push towards .NET, sadly.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#109

Post by dgxyz »

cheschire wrote: post #107
dgxyz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did scale fine. We pointed it at SQL Server. Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.

What you just described is a sample size of one. I spent ten years supporting a 30k+ person company and never saw Access used in reasonable ways. It was always on a network share, data always stored in the local file instead of SQL, “engineering” done entirely by a power user that got a book on MS Access at the bookstore instead of by anyone with actual engineering experience. There’s a reason people in IT hate Acces…

Sample size is irrelevant. The problem is bad people, not bad software.

It ran a 50 seat ERP system that managed over 1000 suppliers and 500 customers, did all invoicing, inventory/stock management, logistics and financials. In the hands of clue that is.

They did replace it with SAP eventually but this was at a 15x per seat cost multiplication.

There is still is a lot of stuff hiding out there that works like that which is used daily and has few issues. You just don't hear about it because the people building and operating it really don't give a crap and have no enthusiasm - it's a tool to do a job. As it should be.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#110

Post by dgxyz »

csomar wrote: post #106
cheschire wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what wa…

I think it's just nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated past. We do lots of things today that would've been impossible with Access and that we now take for granted. For example, most people today expect to access their system from anywhere via the internet; pulling up a specific invoice on their phone, for instance. That just wasn't possible with Access 2000. And if you tried building a web-accessible system on t…

Most businesses don't really operate like that though. That's what has been sold to us as an idea and we are blinded by the environments we work within in the tech industry. Really a hell of a lot of it is bums on seats in offices still.

One of the hilarious things I've seen recently was an ex partner of mine's hair salon paid for a SaaS booking system. It's a pile of junk. Doesn't work properly, screws up scheduling and finances and generally costs more time that it does some other way.

They literally went back to a paper bookings diary and just phone or whatsapp people if there's a problem.

Post reply on HN