14
7 Comments

I ran a no-code app in production and realised what no-code really needs to do

  1. 3

    Nice article Saumitra, my summary would be "when users hit the limit of a no-code tool, they can't do anything about it".

    While it is valid, I wanted to share my point of view:

    1. "No-code tools" are abit better than "Site Builders". Basically, they both adding and styling blocks to made a page. Though, no-code tools intended to build more than a websites (i.e allow users to manage query, data, and custom events)

    2. Similar to "no-code tools", programming languages create their own rules and syntaxes. When hitting its limit, programmers can't do anything about it either. For example, there is no Pointer in JavaScript or many other high level languages.

    It's just "no-code tools" have more limits. Since its new, and its nature was intended to design for non-programmers.

    P/s: Since the term "no-code" is getting popular, I also think many Site Builders use that term to call themself

  2. 1

    Brilliant!
    Connecting data and make some transformations is relatively easy, think of Zippier, but implementing logic is hard, at the end of the day you need to code it. Think of all frameworks, even when you get everything out of the box, almost always you will need to code something yourself to customize it the way you want, I bet this will always makes it harder for no-code tools to generalize people problems, and when the try to make it more flexible like a programming language does, then it will be even harder to use by the normal / non developer people, and the only people would get benefit from it the people who can code, back to square one.

  3. 1

    The comparison to logistics and the last-mile problem is brilliant!

    I agree that the promise of no-code is misleading. You'll always reach a point when you need code to cover a specific use-case. The way I see how to close the gap of missing capabilities is to build a low-code platform with a rich set of primitive blocks but also a flexible API. Then you could invite independent developers and let them implement (and monetize) more specialized blocks. In fact, this is what Shopify already did. Shopify focused on the e-commerce highway while letting independent developers handle side roads in form of apps. This is also what Airtable may achieve with their marketplace.

    1. 1

      By the way, @saumitra1993, which website/app builders did you have in mind writing your article?

      1. 1

        I have mostly worked with appsheet, so that was the one I had in mind.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments