Just to be clear, porting a drag-n-drop interface to VS Code is not meeting developers where they are.
Interesting point. Personal opinion here - I do not think that drag and drop is only for non-developers. A great example of this is the gaming industry in Unity/Unreal engine. These tools are effectively low-code but also incorporate drag and drop to allow developers to build whatever they can imagine but faster. Drag and drop should be an extension to the developer’s arsenal, not be the only way a developer can interact with the system.
* what I want now is a little more and a product I plan to move from prototype to production soon (tm)
As I said in a peer comment, I get the game engine analogy, it's close, but there are enough differences that it doesn't carry enough weight to make it a point of justification. They've also had over a decade plus to develop and get lots of complaints. But note, there are 2-4 options in the game dev space, because it is so hard to build a compelling experience. Low code. / drag-n-drop is littered with shitty products and race to the bottom competitors. Also, my statements can generalize to DnD based solutions for more than frontend, to things like node red, iffft, zapier et al
Since Excel is on the front of HN, I'm reminded that Excel is the OG and most successful low code product in history
As a backend focused dev who's very interested in low code, I've tried them all and they fall short after the honeymoon. Most recently Plasmic.app, had (has) great promise once their product matures. They nailed the developer facing workflow. The problem is twofold, (1) that the UI is big, slow, and buggy (2) the code that comes out the other side is super heavy. A blank component added 50% to my bytes shipped.
The hard question to answer is what does that interaction point look like? Why is the backend dev even tasked with doing the frontend?
You'll face a point where you will have to decide who your paid product is for, and every drag-n-drop for developers has pivoted to non-developers, because getting something that most developers actually love has proved impossible to date.
