Low Code Scares Me

The "low code" and "no code" promises have been around for the better part of a decade. I still haven't seen them pay off. For every Rippling and Webflow, there are dozens of...less great tools. And don't get me started on the lockin and specialization necessary.

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[rangledangle]

So many of these tools spend their time convincing people that code is the hard part. Then down the road you learn the hard way that the code was never the hard part.

[ytlongbeach]

non-technical management always wants a mock up as soon as possible, then say "let's use the mockup for production". lol

[readywhen]

I started in no-code and ended up in all-code. From day one I had these "if only the tool allowed me to do Z on top of ABC...XY"-moments.

[kolaysgames]

it all comes down to the fact that you can remove coding from engineering, but you can never remove engineering from engineering

[dtkedtyjrtyj]

I heard a rule of thumb a while back: The first 80% of your app takes 80% of the time. The remaining 20% also takes 80% of the time.

[yurisich]

And yet there's no mention of WordPress, the final boss at the root of all low-code evil. "Shenanigans under the hood" doesn't even begin to describe what some of these plugins do, and the only reason you're involved is because they're "90% done" and just need you to do one tiny thing for customization...

[PoringPoring]

100% true. We onboard a low-code tool for automation/alert. The perks are the out of the box integration with different apps/tools like TEAMS. It works like a charm. But when we want to customize/transform data, it couldn't handle it. Either it takes MINUTES or timeout. Something that is easily accomplish with Python or PowerShell within seconds. :(

[alexgado]

Excel gurus.
I’ve met sooo many brilliant people waste sooo much time building complex stuff using excel and VBA instead of a proper programming language and a real database…

[Sancarn]

We need more videos out there critical of low-code! Thanks for covering it! Our company is convinced Power Platform is the way forward. It kills me inside.

[mikekent]

I’m a fan of Googles Appsheet. It's useful for building small tools to solve problems at work or make our processes more efficient. I like that it connects easily to a variety of databases including Google sheets out of the box and has enough customisability for a work app. It also makes it easy to set up automations when data is added or changed.

A big gotcha though is that if you want to build in logic then you have to learn how to use their "expressions" which is like it's own language

[pjosxyz]

webflow is the gateway drug to full stack

[milisha]

I used to be skeptical, but right tool for the right job. We've got about 4 no-code production applications that we've had no problems with.

It's not so much the development time that's most enticing; rather they come out of the box with most things corporate environments need (AD integration with a Auth provider, claims based security out of the box, did well in a pen-test, included auditing, logging, in-product tech-debt monitoring etc). But where they shine are simple CRUD applications.

We learned quickly for anything more complex, we call a web-service we've coded and underlying back-end, and let the no-code do the UI.

Very rarely we'll have to do something extra fancy on the UI, but since the tool generates React under the cover we haven't had too much difficulty extending it. That said, having the tool not break things during upgrade has been an issue, and requires full regression testing. But that holds true of upgrading any UI framework up a major version, so isn't so much a no-code issue.

[michaeljones]

This depends on how the low code tool is implemented. If it's implemented in a code first way then extending the code with a good set of code extension apis is incredibly easy. If the low code abstracts away all the complexity and is more complicated configuration, then this absolutely applies.

[thomaskmfdm]

A client I work with has went full low-code in some of their mission critical apps and nearly all feature requests to that team now fall in that 20% that is near impossible to implement. As a result every feature that needs a change from that team takes 3 quarters to get live due to their huge backlog. Half of their changes also have bugs due to all the hacks they had to do in the low code platform to get their requirements working. Despite this they keep expanding its use due to the sunken cost fallacy around licensing costs for the tool. It's an impressive train wreck.

[tevo_za]

I am in the position of having picked up a low-code side project while being a fullstack engineer by day.
I hate that side project with a passion, and constantly fantasize about rewriting it with a 'full' programming language. Great video thank you.

[Basta]

It's one thing to assemble Ikea furniture. Its another to combine Ikea furnitures together build a Frankenstein's monster of a furniture piece. At that point, just learn carpentry well.

[TheNewton]

low-code tool usage still comes down to these tools being passive traps and whether users are capable of: #1 algorithmic thinking then #2 translating that thought process into a custom PROPRIETARY abstraction.
The right use cases are companies that have done, and continue to do, the work into documenting processes in an agnostic format to describe ongoing automation needs ; this can get the easiest benefits while softening vendor lock-in.
But almost every other use case makes a severely under funded mess in a niche ecosystem they have no control over.

I have never seen one of these tools help it's customers document their process needs in a platform agnostic way.
So the trap is set because the pain of getting out get's higher and higher because there's no actual source of truth.

[JT-mrdb]

Very true about finding developers to maintain a low code system, like Out systems for example. It's astonishingly hard. Many enterprise companies are feeling this.

[vulbyte]

i learned to code because of shopify actually.
i found building websites with purely ui very frustrating and i ran a business where at the time i had to upload and 100 pictures a day with some processing. and shopify only let me add items one at a time. this led me on the dev journey im on today.
thank you no code for making me want to code

[Ostap]

What a joy if you rely on a low-code solution that gets suddenly unsupported. Not that they went out of business, but just didn't bother to create an update tool to convert from old no-longer-supported version to new. Not a tiny company I am referring here.