Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?
I think no code&#x2F;low code solutions certainly have a place, but the way they&#x27;re currently designed is not necessarily helpful (I&#x27;ve worked on replacing integromat and automate.io solutions in the past). Those solutions are fine, for the most part, but they&#x27;re main flaw is that in order to get anything done you have to integrate them with other tools&#x2F;software, which means that you&#x27;re limited by what parts of the api the developers exposed to the no-code. That and the abstractions they produce on the UI end can be confusing and difficult to navigate. That&#x27;s less their fault and more of an outcome from being a shiny new tool trying to do everything, but it results in a solution that doesn&#x27;t really work for the people who would go for a low-code solution in the first place.<p>A good model in my mind is Excel. The amazing part of Excel is that it can be used as a no-code tool, a low code tool, and extended with code macros. Even self-described non-coders who would otherwise be intimidated often use to extreme productivity. It&#x27;s extremely visual, straightforward, and self-contained for the most part. The fact that it&#x27;s so well documented as well is also hugely important. The no code solutions I&#x27;ve seen and worked with usually are fairly lacking in this regard, but excel has fairly clear documentation, the famous f1 key, and a support line[^1] which makes it a more default choice. The only problem is that integrating it with your other tools relies on either 3rd party plugins, a coder, or integrating specifically w&#x2F; other ms software.<p>[^1]: I had a professor state in a comparison between MATLAB and Python that the reason to choose MATLAB was that they had a customer support line. This wasn&#x27;t a CS professor, so you shouldn&#x27;t underestimate how much value is placed on talking to a human rather than RTFM by non-coders.