21–30 of 160 posts
LLMs can assist you to write a shitload of useless bloatware, or can assist you to take something existing and complicated, and create something minimal that is almost as good. It's up to you.
You can produce a shitload of useless bloatware and not come close to the bloated uselessness of a large-scale enterprise software platform.
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.
Yes, If the low code solution has a good interface for LLMs. There are enough low code / no code solutions with a pure graphical interface and nothing else. Dinosaurs.
What do you think an LLM is if not no/low-code?
And all the other components such as MCPs, skills, etc this is all low-code.
And who is going to plug all of these into a coherent system like Claude Code, Copilot, etc which is basically a low code interface. Sure it does not come with workflow-style designer but it does the same.
As far as the vibe-coded projects go, as someone who has personally made this mistake twice in my career and promised to never make it again, soon or later the OP will realise that software is a liability with and without LLMs. It is a security, privacy, maintenance and in general business burden and a risk that needs to be highlighted on every audit, and at every step.
When you start running the bills, all of these internal vibe-coded tools will run 10-20x the cost the original subscriptions that will be paid indirectly.
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.
Great to see your name here, Zack. I think the problem with low-code is that its a catch all that spans between primarily data-storage-and-use work (Airtable, quick base, Filemaker, etc), the primarily app-alternative platforms (retool, Mendix, etc, and the ETL tools. To me, AI changes the inflection points of build vs buy a bit for app platforms, but not as much for the other two. Ultimately, AI becomes a huge consu…
Things I built for internal use pretty quickly:
- Patient matcher
- Great UX crud for some tables
- Fax tool
- Referral tool
- Interactive suite of tools to use with Ashby API
Much easier to just have a Claude Code build it all out for real.
The next generation of Calcapp probably won't ship with a built-in LLM agent. Instead, it will expose all functionality via MCP (or whatever protocol replaces it in a few years). My bet is that users will bring their own agents -- agents that already have visibility into all their services and apps.
I hope Calcapp has a bright future. At the same time, we're hedging by turning its formula engine into a developer-focused library and SaaS. I'm now working full-time on this new product and will do a Show HN once we're further along. It's been refreshing to work on something different after many years on an end-user-focused product.
I do think there will still be a place for no-code and low-code tools. As others have noted, guardrails aren't necessarily a bad thing -- they can constrain LLMs in useful ways. I also suspect many "citizen developers" won't be comfortable with LLMs generating code they don't understand. With no-code and low-code, you can usually see and reason about everything the system is doing, and tweak it yourself. At least for now, that's a real advantage.
Interesting article -- my take on low-code has always been less about how much initial development time the application takes to code, and more about how it can ease the long term maintenance of an application. With AI tooling it is going to be easy for companies to spin up hundreds of internal applications, but how are they accounting for the maintenance and support of those applications? Think about the low-code pl…
Auth is a pretty classic case where it’s not hard to make your own account create/login form but it’s really hard to make a good one that does all the “right things”.
Low code is not disappearing - it is simply changing. What do you think an LLM is if not no/low-code? And all the other components such as MCPs, skills, etc this is all low-code. And who is going to plug all of these into a coherent system like Claude Code, Copilot, etc which is basically a low code interface. Sure it does not come with workflow-style designer but it does the same. As far as the vibe-coded projects g…
An LLM is not low code. It's something that generates the thing that does the thing.
Most of the time it generates 'high' code. That high code is something that looks like hieroglyphics to non developers.
If it generated low code then it's possible that non developers could have something that is comprehensible to them (at least down as far as the deterministic abstraction presented by the low code framework)
I'm a co-founder of Calcapp, an app builder for formula-driven apps, and I recently received an email from a customer ending their subscription. They said they appreciated being able to kick the tires with Calcapp, but had now fully moved to an AI-based platform. So we're seeing this reality play out in real time. The next generation of Calcapp probably won't ship with a built-in LLM agent. Instead, it will expose al…