A response to Backstory to the Low-Code/No-Code Revolution (June 2024)
In June 2024 I kicked off my Low-Code/No-Code series with a history lesson. I have been building websites since 1995, so I had a front row seat. I wanted to show how each era of web development replaced a piece of expensive custom code with a product somebody else maintained.
It started with an observation I made back in the nineties:
“for the first time completely non-technical clients were having to buy what was essentially custom software.”
That was the root of so much pain. Ordinary businesses were suddenly buying software, and they were thrown into a world of jargon they didn’t understand and costs they couldn’t predict.
The trend I described
The story I told was a steady march away from custom code. Enterprise content management systems were too expensive, so my first company built its own CMS, which took a ton of custom code. Then Drupal and WordPress arrived. Then Squarespace and Wix. Then page builder plugins brought drag and drop into WordPress. I summed up the direction like this:
“website developers can offload the need for custom coded solutions in place of professionally supported products.”
That was true at the time, and it was good advice. Custom code was the expensive part, so the smartest move was to use as little of it as possible. Every product that replaced a chunk of custom programming was a win for the client’s budget.
The next chapter
Here is the chapter I didn’t know I would be writing. The trend I described rested on one assumption, that custom code is slow and costly to produce. AI agents broke that assumption.
Agents now write and revise custom code under experienced direction. That changes the math I laid out. When custom code was expensive, a supported product was almost always the better deal, even if it came with far more features than you needed and a few that got in your way. Now a focused piece of custom code, written for exactly what your site does, is often faster to build and lighter to run than the product it replaces.
So the story takes a turn. For thirty years we moved away from custom code because we had to. Now we can move back toward it, without the price that drove us away. We still rely on WordPress itself, and on well-supported plugins where they are the best tool for the job. But we no longer reach for a plugin for everything, and we don’t need a page builder to stand in for programmers.
We don’t have to accept the trade off between custom and affordable anymore. We can have both.
The gap that hasn’t closed
There was one part of that video I would not change a word of. I said:
“But while the communications gap will always need to be bridged, the gap between sophisticated expectations and ordinary budgets has closed over the decades.”
Both halves still hold. The budget gap has closed even further. Things that once required a large custom development budget now fit in a modest one.
The communications gap is still there. Clients still see features on other sites without knowing what goes into them. They still need someone to help them understand what they are buying and what will actually serve their goals. Agents don’t fix that. If anything, it matters more now, because when building gets cheap and fast it is easy to build the wrong thing quickly.
That is the work I have been doing since the beginning: planning, strategy, information design, and helping clients make good decisions. It is also how I would describe what my team does today. We plan the site, set the direction, let the agents do the building against our playbook and design standards, and then review and test every piece.
Thirty years of backstory
When I first saw what agents could do, it felt like the same pattern I had watched repeat since 1995. A slow, expensive step in the process gets replaced. The people who adapt pass the savings on to their clients. I wrote more about why I made this shift in my note on the next revolution.
The backstory continues. This time the revolution isn’t about avoiding code. It is about having exactly the code you need, and nothing extra.
¡Viva la Revolución!