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RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

zackliscio.com

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Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#31

Post by geodel »

tptacek wrote: post #17
antirez wrote: post #16

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.

Well, where I work these two trends are merging. Enterprise bloat plus LLM bloat. And leadership is "excited" about how much more code / applications IT can deliver this year

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#32

Post by RyanHamilton »

therealmocker wrote: post #9

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…

Very correct! Why internal dashboards keep getting rebuild: https://www.timestored.com/pulse/why-internal-dashboards-get... It took me a few years to home in on the exact idea you've captured and I work in this exact area. There's a middle layer between UI team and notebook experiments that isn't worth companies building themselves.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#33

Post by CodeCompost »

spankalee wrote: post #7

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…

Mendix is nothing more than MS Access for the Web.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#34

Post by nicohorn »

rahilb wrote: 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!

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#35

Post by tptacek »

geodel wrote: post #31
tptacek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can produce a shitload of useless bloatware and not come close to the bloated uselessness of a large-scale enterprise software platform.

Well, where I work these two trends are merging. Enterprise bloat plus LLM bloat. And leadership is "excited" about how much more code / applications IT can deliver this year

They should be! I think this is going to be a pretty transformational couple years for IT. To be honest, I've spent a bunch of my career being kind of skeptical about IT (software developer chauvinism), and I think the rug is getting pulled out from under that mentality.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#36

Post by zackliscio »

rahilb wrote: 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.

It would probably have been more accurate to say "the cost of writing code" -- and you're totally right about the rise of other duties (and technologies) that expand to fill that gap.

As a dev team, we've been exploring how we grapple with the cultural and workflow changes that arise as these tools improve--it's definitely an ongoing and constantly evolving conversation.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#37

Post by _pdp_ »

discreteevent wrote: post #29
_pdp_ wrote: post #23

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…

> What do you think an LLM is if not no/low-code? 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 abstra…

Low or no code tools abstract away the idea of code being used. You are working with high-level concepts like workflows or in the case of coding assistants PRDs, etc. These coding assistants produce code but if you don't read the code at all it might as well not exist and frankly users who use Lovable (like may 10yo to make a website) have a vague idea that there is code behind all of this but frankly it does not really matter. So these are technically low-code tools - not in a traditional sense like workflows but still low code tools.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#38

Post by evv »

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, "We can no longer lock in customers on proprietary platforms". In which case, too bad!

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#39

Post by zackliscio »

davidpolberger wrote: post #27

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…

Sorry to hear about the customer churn, but the MCP-first strategy makes sense to me and seems like it could be really powerful. I also suspect that the bring your own agent future will be really exciting, and I've been surprised we haven't seen more of it play out already.

Agree there will be a place for no-code and low-code interfaces, but I do think it's an open question where the value capture will be--as SaaS vendors, or by the LLM providers themselves.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#40

Post by fragmede »

rahilb wrote: 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.

It's those who are shipping easily who are stupid. And what I mean by that is you can just ask the LLM to use the browser to get API keys and then use them to deploy. That's how the cost of shipping is zero. A hefty amount of YOLO code on top of YOLO deploy. I mean, you could also have the LLM build you a CI CD pipeline, but that's not YOLO.
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