Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing).
Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics.
Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.
At Amazon, really? :-)
Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-trivial. It requires serious commitment to learn all the techniques the designers came up with.
So most people who use these tools use them for for simple or short-lived apps and side projects, which they could now use web frameworks, but just want to try something new, because they know it's trivial.
IMHO, this holds true if we replace “no-code” with “AI code generation”.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Appsmith.
I would assume exposing their spaghetti that comes with such a platform is a big concern.
Let alone managing bringing things back in after someone gets creative.
Does that count?
If so, I think the lesson is you need to keep the no-code side way, way less ambitious than is theoretically possible in order to keep everyone sane and you might actually have a useful tool that doesn't dig you into a big hole.
On the client side you can do something similar with javascript.
- Amplication: Last I checked, they allow defining data structure & endpoints etc. before exporting to Nest.js Boilerplate with niceties. They sync to a separate branch on GitHub, so you can use it alongside writing actual logic into the boilerplate, and merge new changes from Amplication to the main branch. - Draftbit (React Native based Mobile App builder). The builder is not very great, they lack a bunch of features. They make up for this by allowing the developer to add custom JS code very easily. You can write your own Custom React element inside the editor, and with a little massaging things can fall into place. I'm not saying this approach should be abused, though. The team told us once that some of their big clients are mobile dev agencies that mostly just use the platform to Storyboard & bootstrap some UI before doing the actual logic in their own code. - FlutterFlow (Mobile App builder). I'm biased because I'm still in the progress of helping a client fixing their mess on FlutterFlow. FlutterFlow's code output is really spaghetti. The developer UX on the builder is horrible, so in the end I still opt to eject and deal with the spaghetti code.
Whether it’s worth it vs rebuilding them bespoke is a different question. Or you have to have an ETL layer between your SaaS vendor and whatever open source workflow runner you’d eject to.
> Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows you to quickly build mobile and web apps for teams—without programming. Build Amazon Honeycode apps for managing almost anything, like projects, customers, operations, approvals, resources, and even your team.
Most of the time, when a new service is introduced, we were given all sorts of go to market videos to watch and were asked to find use cases for it for our customers.
I never heard anything about Honeycomb coming from anyone on the service team. I worked on a popular company sponsored open source project. We looked into integrating with it and I said hell no.
We were sone of the closest to the customers. Getting customer adoption for new service is always big deal. You can see when a new service or feature is introduced where part of the marketing is showing what customers are actually using it.
[1] No I’m not looking for a job and this isn’t self promotion. I have more than enough work.
Maybe using LLMs to generate DSL code will produce better (and more maintainable) results than fully-fledged languages?
You’ll hit a simple wall with AI, as with any tool, where you need domain knowledge and language to tell the thing what to do. The difference will probably be more SMEs who can tell the computer vs developers and product managers figuring out what the business wants.
Look at stable diffusion prompts. There’s an art to constructing the prompts - it’s just another form of programming.
It also helped me better understand the chatgpt API. N8n allows you to code in raw javascript or python which has allowed me to branch out to pure python.
I would say that no-code low code has a place as a stepping stone, that can allow other invested parties besides developers to manage inter departmental flow and build a blueprint that can be redone with actual engineers in the preferred manner.
To our valued customers: After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end the Amazon Honeycode beta service, effective February 29, 2024. New customer sign-ups and account plan upgrades are no longer available. Existing customers will be able to use Honeycode and your Honeycode apps as normal (and add team members to your existing account) until February 29, 2024, when the service will be discontinued. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Honeycode or any of the apps you created in Honeycode. To learn more about this change, and how to download your data, visit the Community Discussions.
The services I've recommended to clients are too often low quality, overcomplicated, expensive, shit alternatives to the better open source solutions...
And to add insult to injury, imagine having built something with a service like this and it being deprecated in such a short timeline...
Shutting down on Feb 29, 2024
In beta phases no-code always looks extremely attractive because you can fudge it and get a fair portion of the functionality with only some of the complexity - but as you start to emulate more and more your "no-code" language just turns into "code".
https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-commu...
It’s interesting that this was posted there instead of as a blog post, but I guess it was in beta.
Like a lot of AWS stuff but not this.
