No Entry!

Since I joined the LinkedIn train (Choo! Choo! All aboard the lame metaphor express!) in earnest, I've seen a significant number of posts about the use of No Code, the descendant of WYSIWYG software from the 90s.  Those of you who are old enough to remember may recall tools like WordPerfect that simplified word editing on a PC, but still didn't quite display the format in its final form.  It required a certain finesse and technical know-how to ensure the document was formatted correctly.  

That knowledge became obsolete with the prevalence of Word and similar tools (although, I'm still at a loss for how to correctly create margins using the siding ruler bars), allowing more users access to more powerful tools and enabling a legion of Boomers and their offspring to claim computer literacy (at one point my mother was better at MSDOS than I was).

This concept naturally moved over into the world of coding in an attempt to lower the barriers of entry into application development as the internet took hold.  In its more recent iterations, this has popped up in the form of tools like Bubble, Notion, and FlutterFlow.

I've addressed the No Code phenomenon in the past, but I thought it was worth revisiting as I help someone else bootstrap their business idea and go through the tool selection process to determine what's most efficient in what's currently a 2-person enterprise.

I think No Code would have a much greater footprint if it weren't swallowed whole by LLMs and Agentic AI tools that claim not only to be No Code, but also No Human (with predictable results).  I find both to hold the same promise - what people have referred to as getting from iteration 0 to 1 on a business idea - but one is far cooler than the other.  Sure, you can drink water out of a glass, or you can drink it out of a Stanley mug.

Both No Code and LLMs claim to "democratize" software development, but I think it's worth evaluating that word in relation to both concepts.

If you're looking to start a business or write a simple app, NC and LLMs can certainly create the first iteration of an application.  And that's a huge change from even 10 years ago, when you needed to convince some software developer to write code on your behalf and then listen to every esoteric tirade on why Clojure is the language of the future, when all you wanted to do was collect memes of Lolcats.

Now, on the 1st iteration, you don't have to worry about humoring a software developer - a tough task even when they're in the best of moods.  You spend a few hours clicking and voila - you can haz cheezburger.

From that perspective, these tools do democratize software by allowing a greater percentage of the populace access to systems that used to reside solely in the hands of experts, and that's something to celebrate. 

But No Code achieves that by paywalling the source code on their site, so you need to fork out money to take possession of your app, if you decide to abandon their systems.  You're otherwise stuck with their implementation and platform limitations.  This isn't necessarily the worst thing for an initial product (the going advice revolves around "you're just going to throw the first iteration away anyway"), but, if you wanted to keep that starter code and build off of it, it throws a wrinkle into the mix.  There's also a good chance that the code generated by an NC solution will be a rat's nest of maintainability.

LLM makes you pay upfront via token consumption for the output, so, one way or the other you're paying.  The code is more coherent, and you can tinker with it during creation, but, it, too, suffers from maintainability.

Now, given your particular business idea, it may be worth the cost.  Cursor, the top AI Agent at the moment costs $40/month for their business plan.  If you've got a solid business plan, spending $500/year for - ostensibly - a software engineering department, seems more than reasonable.

But, to get on my ideological high horse, democratization doesn't mean "providing for the masses at the expense of the experts." It's usually something more akin to correcting an artificial imbalance.  

Streaming, for all of its warts today, did start out as a more cost-conscious alternative to cable (and, surprisingly, still is).  And it's not contradictory that after "liberating" users from cable, streamers looked to entrench their own barriers to prevent continued balance (it's not good, but it's not contradictory).

That, in particular, is what disturbs me about the use of the word democratization today.  It literally means "power by the people," but, in a business sense, it's used as a means to devalue existing institutions, segment them, and then reconsolidate them for someone else's profit under the cynical guise of empowering the populace.

Intent matters significantly, even if the outcome is identical.  Even I, as a software engineer, appreciate the ability to get a business idea off the ground without needing to shell out $10K to someone with my skill set, and welcome these tools provided people are realistic about their limitations. 

But that's different from framing the issue as bypassing all of those pesky, selfish engineers who spent intensive time honing their careers to make a living.  Market forces and technology advancements can make entire industries obsolete, but that's a fact of life that should be addressed honestly and carefully, not something that's cynically couched as unshackling the populace from an oligarchy.  

[I'm also still not concerned with career path of software engineering.  Getting from 0 to 1 isn't necessarily easy, but engineers' work almost exclusively entails getting from 1 to beyond.  Even firms that specialize in building proofs of concept can sell their expertise on getting from 0 to 1 faster or getting you prepped for the steps beyond on a more stable footing as these tools become more ubiquitous.]

And I'll end by paraphrasing a quote from Jurassic Park (and parents everywhere) - just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

There are reasonable positions between Luddite and tech zealot that don't require a full-stop in forward progress, but that encompass positions that aren't based solely on your immediate desire and a wistful belief that things will get better because they always have.  The sun will rise every day.  Until it doesn't.  

Until next time, my human and robot friends.