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RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

zackliscio.com

121–130 of 160 posts

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#121

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…

> There's a lot of value in having direct manipulation and visual introspection of UIs, data, and logic

Yes. In the GIS industry for example, nothing has fundamentally changed with the introduction of LLMs. They may make the same processes more efficient e.g. though automated building of workflows. AI has significantly improved classification work of course but it's still using the same principles (we've been doing ML longer than most industries). Geocoding will get cheaper and easier but it's still geocoding.

GIS software allowing standard visualisation, export and map production will bet a lot better because of LLMs. It's an area where the sheer complexity and number of formats was overwhelming, but now a GeoTiff parser can be built in a day or two.

The article was making a bit of a sweeping statement based on a single datapoint: they didn't need Retool anymore.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proper REST API would also work without all the extra overhead of GraphQL. People may dislike XML, but it is easy to make a REST API with and it works well as an interface between computer systems where a human doesn't have to see the syntax.

REST + Swagger I'd say

Why would you need Swagger with REST?

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#123
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

REST + Swagger I'd say

Swagger is critical. The graphql schema.json is very very good at helping ai's figure out how to use the service. Swagger evens that advantage.

How does Swagger help with REST though? By design, REST supports schemas and is self documenting, Swagger seems redundant.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#124
post #24

> the cost of shipping code now approaches zero Does anyone actually believe this is the case? I use LLMs to ‘write’ code every day, but it’s not the case for me; my job is just as difficult and other duties expand to fill the space left by Claude. Am I just bad at using the tools? Or stupid? Probably both but c’est la vie.

Same here. I use Claude Code everyday, very useful, but nowhere near to where I don't have to jump in and fix very simple stuff. I actually have a bug in an app that I don't fix because I use it as a test for LLM's and so far not one could solve it, it's a CSS bug!

I use Cursor daily, I have worked on Agents using LangChain. Maybe we are doing something wrong but even ysing SOTA models unless we explicitly give which mcp tool to call, it uses anything - sometimes - while other times it can do a passavle job. So now our mandate is to spell everything out to LLM so it doesn't add a non existent column like created at or updated at to our queries

I've used every SOTA for day to day work, and at best they save some effort. They can't do everything yet

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#127
post #38

Dumb question: whats the difference between "low-code" and "libraries+frameworks"? Usually the point of a library or framework is to reduce the amount of code you need to write. Giving you more functionality at the cost of some flexibility. Even in the world of LLMs, this has value. When it adopts a framework or library, the agent can produce the same functionality with fewer output tokens. But maybe the author means…

Low code means you have to pay a company every time someone in your organisation runs an app.

Libraries + Frameworks doesn't mean that unless you're bonkers.

LLMs + Libraries + Frameworks means you might pay to build the application, but running it is only going to be the cost of where it's running.

You're exactly right.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#128
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…

Yeah. Absolutely. Access and Visual Basic was the one low code platform that really worked.

The Apache foundation or someone ought to target that as a proper Open Source setup.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#129
post #73
post #24

> the cost of shipping code now approaches zero Does anyone actually believe this is the case? I use LLMs to ‘write’ code every day, but it’s not the case for me; my job is just as difficult and other duties expand to fill the space left by Claude. Am I just bad at using the tools? Or stupid? Probably both but c’est la vie.

Exactly the point I was going to make. Shipping something requires knowing how to ship it, monitor it, and fix it. Writing code is the "easy" part and kind of always has been. No one triggers incidents from a PR that's been in review for too long.

LLM's can help with all of the above. Deployed an app with a backend, frontend, docker database and more with gitea on my NAS just yesterday. Have little knowledge about how it did it. Now I have a git remote to which I push and the app updates itself.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#130
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok funny anecdote: I once did a special assignment for the CEO of Mendix to build a convertor for MS Access apps to Mendix. So, yes, I can confirm that this is roughly true ;) I wrote a short post about it on my blog: https://blog.waleson.com/2022/10/access2mendix.html

And long before that i built an ms-access UI on top of an Oracle 6 database, so yes, MS-Access was one of the client-server era low-code tools. Like powerbuilder, Oracle Forms, etc. (Hi jouke!)

Nice seeing you here Andrej!
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