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RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

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Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#61

Post by normanvalentine »

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…

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?

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#62

Post by mkoubaa »

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…

Anything no-code or low code has a data model, and an agent can manipulate it in ways that are compatible with the system design. Letting an agent loose on a problem, without a good pilot, just leads to poor designs.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#63

Post by cheschire »

normanvalentine wrote: post #61
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…

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 was connected to it. And don’t even get me started on the awful recorded macro code or insecure VBA.

Excel is arguably worse, if only because it was more accessible for less patient people. But at least Excel doesn’t offer you an entire armory of footguns at quite the same scale as Access did.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#64

Post by ryanackley »

Low-code tools for actual developers is dying but AI might be the thing that makes low-code take off for the broader market. Software development will look very different five years from now. It could be filled with knowledge workers with no CS education using no-code tools and AI while the hardcore engineers still build technology that they build on.

A strong advantage a platform like retool has in the non-developer market is they own a frictionless deployment channel. Your average non-developer isn't going to learn npm and bash, and then sign up for an account on AWS, when the alternative is pushing a button to deploy the creation the AI has built from your prompt.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#65

Post by pphysch »

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

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#66

Post by subpixel »

ryanackley wrote: post #64

Low-code tools for actual developers is dying but AI might be the thing that makes low-code take off for the broader market. Software development will look very different five years from now. It could be filled with knowledge workers with no CS education using no-code tools and AI while the hardcore engineers still build technology that they build on. A strong advantage a platform like retool has in the non-developer…

I'm not a developer but I figured out Claude Code agents and skills and use surge.sh to share things out as needed.

In my company I feel like the last to this party,

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#67

Post by sreekanth850 »

Never really saw the appeal of low-code. We use ABP framework on the backend, and it take care of 80% of the boring work out of the box with battle tested codebase like multi-tenancy, user management, permissions, OIDC auth, auditing, background jobs, etc. With that handled, you mostly focus on core business logic. Combined with AI for speeding up, shipping a production ready system in months is very realistic.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#68

Post by siliconc0w »

I'm not so sure. IMO agents are actually a huge unlock for low code tools because before you had to teach a disinterested human how to use your new DSL/tool. But Agents are a lot more patient and enthusiastic. So you can have the agent generate the low-code instead of the human.

You could try to generate the business tools straight from the conventional toolsets but the problem is that agents are still far to unreliable for that. However, just like humans, if you dumb down the space and give them a smaller, simpler, set of primitives - they can do a lot better.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#69

Post by lioeters »

evv wrote: 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…

React, Next, Laravel, Rails.. In fact, all higher-level programming languages from C on up are low-code solutions.

Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025

#70

Post by socketcluster »

siliconc0w wrote: post #68

I'm not so sure. IMO agents are actually a huge unlock for low code tools because before you had to teach a disinterested human how to use your new DSL/tool. But Agents are a lot more patient and enthusiastic. So you can have the agent generate the low-code instead of the human. You could try to generate the business tools straight from the conventional toolsets but the problem is that agents are still far to unrelia…

100%. This matches my observations exactly.

The idea that "Now that AI can churn out massive amounts of code quickly and for little cost, we should just forget trying to minimize the amount of code because code is now basically free." Is magical thinking which opposes what is actually happening.

The key insight that's missing is that code creation is the cheapest aspect of software development; reading the code, maintaining the code and adapting the code to new requirements is by far the most difficult and time-consuming part and the speed of code creation is irrelevant there. The smallest trade-off which compromises quality and future-proofing of the code is going to cost multiples the next time you (or the LLM) needs to look at it.

People with industry experience know very well what happened when companies hired developers based on their ability to churn out a large volume of code. Over time, these developers start churning out more and more code, at an accelerating rate; creating an illusion of productivity from the perspective of middle-managers, but the rate of actual new feature releases grinds to a halt as the bug rate increases.

With AI, it's going to be the same effect, except MUCH worse and MUCH more obvious. I actually think that it will get so bad that it will awaken people who weren't paying attention before.

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