I think solutions like Plasmic, Refine, and React-Admin probably have a strong place in this AI future. They combine being able to work LLM-first while still offering agility by providing a solid foundation to build on. Otherwise you're stuck to the whims of untested AI slop for everything from security to component design. There's a reason people writing AI code still use libraries and it's the same reason we used libraries pre-AI. They're tested, they're stable, they have clear documentation. Just because the cost of code is zero doesn't mean the cost of software systems is zero.
RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
71–80 of 160 posts
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#72I'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…
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!
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.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#73> 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.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#74Never 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.
This ABP framework sounds like a low-code tool to me. The ability to focus only on business logic is basically the entire premise of low-code. Your argument actually supports the opposite conclusion as the author of the article. You're suggesting that LLMs work better if they can only focus on the business logic without having to get tangled into the weeds of technical details.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#75Dumb 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…
Agreed. Libraries and frameworks definitely adhere to a 'low-code' philosophy.
Your last idea makes sense as well to some extent. I think for sure, once you abstract away from the technical implementation details and use platforms which allow you to focus only on business logic, it becomes easier to move between different platforms which support similar underlying functionality. That said, some functionality may be challenging for different providers to replicate correctly... But some of the core constructs like authentication mechanisms, access controls, etc... Might be mostly interchangeable; we may end up with a few competing architectural patterns and different platforms will fit under one of the architectural patterns; which will be optimized for slightly different use cases.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#76> 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.
I think the answer is that by the time AI can replace every function you do, it's also replaced everyone else and the world will either already have or will need to change radically.
I personally hope that the future becomes a UBI consumer-as-a-job thing, minus too much of the destructive impact that current consumerism has on the world.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#77"While it’s possible low-code platforms will survive by providing non-technical users with the kind of magical experience that’s already possible for developers with AI coding tools today" - that magical experience is available to non-technical users today already. The last barrier is deployment / security / networking / maintenance, but I'm assuming here are a lot of startups working on that. In a way, low-code has…
This is well put.
Existing tools already do a great job if you just want a magical looking prototype but they're not versatile enough for real production applications where those other aspects you mentioned actually matter (deployment, security, networking, maintenance, scalability, lock-in factor, costs...). Existing tools have focused on creating a 'magical' experience at the expense of all the critical stuff that needs to go under the bonnet.
There's a parallel with LLMs as well. You could build great prototypes with LLMs coding fully autonomously from start to finish... But if you want to build a real production system (beyond a certain low degree of complexity), currently, you NEED human involvement. The reason why you need human involvement is because there's just too much complexity, too much code to manage for a real production system. None of the existing low-code tools actually solve that problem of reducing complexity whilst maintaining production-readiness.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#78Never 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.
This ABP framework sounds like a low-code tool to me. The ability to focus only on business logic is basically the entire premise of low-code. Your argument actually supports the opposite conclusion as the author of the article. You're suggesting that LLMs work better if they can only focus on the business logic without having to get tangled into the weeds of technical details.
Its is not low code, its open-source, modular application development framework built on .net. You can use it as Headless backend with your own UI. We use it like that with our own Next JS front end. You can drop down to raw EF, SQL, custom auth flows (We had written a custom invite based user signup and custom Openiddict app for plan based claims for JWT based feature management) or rip out entire modules if needed. Low-code hides complexity behind a platform as per my understanding. ABP exposes everything as code. You can always go lower.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#79Yes… 90% and no 10%.
Speaking as someone who spent 8 years building nocode tools, had two exits, and stepped out of the industry last year: I’m not bitter, and I’m not cheerleading either.
For apps—where “nocode” is basically an App template /API template builder it was always 50% useful, 50% marketing to sell you extra services. You still need an advanced builder mindset: people who think like engineers, but don’t want to write code. That’s a weird combo, and it’s really hard to find consistently.
For business logic, it’s almost the opposite. Nocode can give you a clean, visual UX—a clear map of how the logic is connected instead of a spaghetti mess in code. That value sticks around wherever “explain how this works” matters. Not everywhere, but definitely enough places for a real market.
a twist of that could be a hybrid that explains how it was built, has some quick controls, and not just typing prompt. e.g. NoCode agentic UI.
Re: RIP Low-Code 2014-2025
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people saying that never specify what code is being deployed. I can get assembly from /dev/urandom for cents on the TB.
I heard about this thing, "stable diffusion" which turns random noise into images. I just didn't think it was turned into executable images...
That's more or less what American Fuzzy Lop does, now that you say that...