A response to Welcome to the Revolution! (June 2024)
In June 2024 I kicked off a new video series called Join the Low-Code/No-Code Revolution! The opening video made a bold claim:
“But not anymore. Over the last four or five years No-Code frameworks have almost entirely removed the need for coding.”
I then listed the benefits clients gained from having low-code frameworks driving their websites. Lower development cost. Flexibility, because a framework comes with “all sorts of options for content expression under the hood.” Features that kept evolving because plugin vendors competed with each other. And the one closest to my heart: no friction between strategy, design, and the working website.
Every one of those benefits was real. So it’s worth going through them one at a time, because the next revolution keeps all of them and drops the compromises that came along.
Cost
“First, and most obvious, when you eliminate the need for coding, there will be tremendous development cost savings.”
In 2024 the way to eliminate coding cost was to eliminate coding. Today the way to eliminate coding cost is to have AI agents do the coding. The savings are even greater, and we get custom code instead of a general-purpose framework. Development used to be the largest share of a website budget. It is now a small one.
Flexibility
“So while a website may initially only use a handful of those features, there are many others standing by whenever the need arises.”
I presented that as a pure benefit. It was also the source of the bloat. Those features standing by were loaded, updated, and maintained on every site, whether they were ever used or not. We accepted the extra weight because adding a feature later by hand was expensive.
Now adding a feature later is quick. So we don’t need thousands of options standing by. We build what the site needs, and when the need changes, the agents build the next thing. The flexibility is still there. It just doesn’t come with a backpack full of code you’re not using.
Continual improvement
“All that valuable R&D and product development is included in their modest plugin license fee.”
That was a genuine advantage, and for the big, well-maintained platforms it still is. But it also meant your website improved on someone else’s roadmap, with someone else’s priorities. Today the improvements that matter most are the ones made for your site specifically, and those have become far less expensive to make.
No friction between design and development
This was the benefit I cared about most. I told the story of starting in 1995, when all you needed was basic HTML and a GIF, and how quickly the web became so technical that designers had to hand their ideas off to programmers. I wrote:
“Things have come full circle, I can again mold and model and play with ideas directly on a functioning website.”
Low code gave me that, within the limits of the framework. Agentic development gives me that without the limits. I can describe what I want, see it working in the browser, react to it with the client, and change it again, with no handoff and no ceiling on what the design can be. It has come full circle a second time, and this time the circle is bigger.
The resistance, again
In that first video I warned that if you had web developers on staff, you should “get ready for some push back.” I told the story of photographic type houses disparaging digital typography, only to go out of business within a few years.
I now find myself in a funny position. This time the disruption is coming for the very frameworks I was championing. I could resist it. Instead I’m doing what I’ve done every time the tools changed since the early nineties: try the new thing, see what it can do, and pass the benefits along to clients.
The low-code revolution was real. It made great websites affordable. Now there’s a better way to deliver every benefit it promised.
Welcome to the next revolution.
¡Viva la Revolución!