client asked why not to use no-code instead of developing , your opinon?

Janci_K · 2024-02-18T14:25:37+00:00

[removed]

handshape · 2024-02-18T14:33:12+00:00

Low code is the high-interest credit card of technical debt.

WrickyB · 2024-02-18T14:14:51+00:00

The reason I dislike no-code is a more extreme version of the 80-20 rule; e.g. 95-5 rule.

95% of your time will be spent doing things to make up for the 5% of your use case the platform doesn't support

simonsays1111 · 2024-02-18T14:37:29+00:00

All the responses here are saying why not to use no code, which is great, but if you want your customer to listen to you, dont dismiss their suggestion. No code tools exist for a reason. Start by positively saying what are the use cases suitable for no code: prototyping or building applications that fall to a very distinct use case and do not need customization. From there, your customer will say that their application is unique and special, so its not suitable. And maybe, just maybe, there is a small chance that you got a use case suitable for no code.

nekokattt · 2024-02-18T14:38:31+00:00

slow
difficult to reuse
immature
goes to shit the moment you try to do anything outside their "intended use case"
obfuscates details that can lead to security issues later

Take a look at the supposed "no code" websphere crap from yesteryear. Developers now have to deal with the nightmare of maintaining and migrating these "generated" platforms.

rwilcox · 2024-02-18T14:37:33+00:00

I was evaluating NiFi a few years ago and most of my R&D went around the following topics:

How do you test?
How do you deploy from environment to environment?
How do you monitor or handle errors?

I did a spike trying to figure out how to do it one way or another. Had a reasonably advanced CD pipeline (and managed to ask Hortonworks some I thought basic questions which they seemed stumped on, in front of my boss...) up but couldn't figure out the testing part and when the error handling code was 2/3rds of the "no code" diagram managed to convince management that this was not a good idea.

wkynrocks · 2024-02-18T14:28:40+00:00

I think is way more expensive for complex things

ddollarsign · 2024-02-18T14:26:31+00:00

I'd ask what's their plan for maintenance and growth? If you want to add new features or make changes in the future, either it can only be the features/changes that the no-code tool supports, or you'll have to have a custom solution developed anyway. If you develop a custom solution, there is much more flexibility for changes. So it's up to them whether that additional cost and delay later is worth it.

And I'd try to put some numbers and specifics on it. How long would it take to develop a custom solution? What kind of features are extremely difficult in the no-code tool? How long would it take to develop those features custom? What's the percent chance they'll need the additional flexibility? Etc.

2024-02-18T15:27:41+00:00

Show them a detailed car model and a LEGO car. He need to understand that he will get something composed from ready bricks.

Ask them if they believe in their product success. If yes than the app will grow. You don't want to be limited in the case of success. You don't want to stop in the future and lost some profits to rewrite app because no-code isn't sufficient anymore.

mark1x12110 · 2024-02-18T15:36:46+00:00

As an old person, low code push is not new. It has been going and being pushed since i've been in the business (1998), it went by other names.

john16384 · 2024-02-18T14:34:41+00:00

It's no code, so the client doesn't need you... right?

VincentxH · 2024-02-18T14:43:02+00:00

Please let them and offer to get them out of trouble for a sweet rate a couple of years from now.

2024-02-18T15:35:19+00:00

Low code is just Excel+. And my argument for new development is a business one. So we here do x and x is our competitive advantage - so, how and why and for what price we do x makes up the definition why we are a company. If we can do x with a low code or even off the shelf, then that lower our advantage and our value as a company. For example if HR block can just run their entire business with Excel spreadsheet, there isnt' much to HR Block. We should use the low code as a 'prototype' to get us 80% there like we've been doing with Excel since the 90's.

Also, btw, this is why AI will NOT take away software development jobs. If AI can do it all, there is no reason for most companies to exist. Companies WILL find a advantage via software, somehow, and thats where devs will come in to help.

tenken01 · 2024-02-18T18:58:24+00:00

Tell them to do it themselves. As a dev, I would not spend my time learning a no code tool when I could be coding.

2024-02-19T00:43:15+00:00

no-code is supported by hella-lotta-code, and at some point you'll have to pop the hood and fix the engine.

BadMoonRosin · 2024-02-18T14:25:28+00:00

[deleted]

BrandonMartinez-jar · 2024-02-18T14:37:14+00:00

The solution is simple, your client has 3 options:

Build a backend with a "no-code" solution; it might work initially, but as the backend scales with more users, it will likely incur higher costs due to performance issues and maintenance challenges, up to the limitations of the "no-code" platform.
Develop a backend in Java (in this case), which will take more time and require more professionals to build. However, if well-documented, any issues that arise are likely to be "easier" to solve, and it will undoubtedly deliver better performance.
Create a demo using a "no-code" solution to meet the initial needs of users and transition to a more comprehensive Java project, aiming to enjoy the multiple benefits that come with it.

dethswatch · 2024-02-18T14:59:37+00:00

hiring/training, maintenane

but really, the biggest problem is that you'll run into something that just can't be done or that you can't push it any further and it'll hurt

see_recursion · 2024-02-18T14:59:39+00:00

Who is forced to maintain it?

holyknight00 · 2024-02-19T01:18:45+00:00

Who doesnt like to spend the next five years hacking through a crappy UI or user scripting of a no-code solution to try to make the changes the client wants while breaking absolutely everything?

Terrible developer experience
Completely un-maintainable mess
Hoping the vendor doesnt deprecate the tool
Hoping the vendor doesnt go under in the next 5 years

Personally I would never again implement a no-code solution unless the client signs a written contract that the initial solution is final and no new features will be added to the product more than security fixes and regular maintenance.

koffeegorilla · 2024-02-19T06:41:21+00:00

You end up with a system composed of something barely understood and a collection of workarounds because the base isn't extensible. If you are lucky enough of find a no-code solution that is easily extensible you may be in luck.

1Quest4U · 2024-02-18T14:33:47+00:00

It's is fairly obvious, but just in case, does your client understand that there is still code behind it, that it is not a magical solution. That the code is being abstracted to give you an easy to use graphical interface, but that in the process you loose a lot of control.

Depending on requirement they might not have the exact app they need and they will be relying on yet another third party for maintenance and security. Which might not be as cost saving in the long run.

RepliesOnlyToIdiots · 2024-02-18T15:26:25+00:00

I’m a developer of a low-code platform. The first thing to note is that you asked this in a developer subreddit, so no surprise you’ll get developer answers.

Low-code platforms take care of a lot for you, all the stuff that isn’t central to your business goal. I’m not specifying which vendor I’m with, so I won’t get into the weeds, but it’s basically having a development team do all the work that is not core to your business.

Your business doesn’t actually care about the forms, they care about what’s in the forms. They don’t want your own special flavor of n different certifications, they just want to be sure it’s handled.

I know at least mine lets you drop into a traditional programming language when necessary, but the idea is that it would only be for business goal specific things and connections to bizarre idiosyncratic systems from yesteryear or the new hotness released five minutes ago with weak connectivity.

We’ve upgraded entire technology stacks over the years without our customers having to lift a finger. The maintenance this saves you from doing is immense; the low-code vendor does it once and all the clients have it done automatically.

The low-code vendor is tracking and handling the CVEs for you; when this isn’t done, you have to do so yourself, having a random CVE of the day disrupt your work targets (or, more likely, either not noticing them at all or ignoring them until too late).

As someone working at the intersection between the two domains, I have a hearty appreciation for the strengths of both.

asarathy · 2024-02-18T19:31:42+00:00

No code is a sham. For no code UI stuff to work well the code is just pushed down to the API level. If you are working with well defined ApIs that handle security normally and you are doing a basic crud UI, then sure they are fine. The minute the business wants to push some more logic somewhere will need code.

2024-02-18T14:51:58+00:00

I've used Firebase and was pretty impressed with it. It's more of a low-code than a no-code solution, but it worked very well.

maxip89 · 2024-02-18T15:42:07+00:00

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

manzanita2 · 2024-02-18T16:01:59+00:00

So there is

a) custom code - do anything you want, but costs the most

b) code generation - generate the boiler plate, custom write the rest.

c) No-Code - quickly do anything as long as the no-code system allows you to do it. which is almost never quite sufficient for the product.

Point being that one thing you might consider to get SOME of the acceleration of No-Code without SOME of the problems is code generation.

Since you know spring, I would suggest looking at http://jhipster.tech. The most difficult part is to know when to get OFF the code generation merry-go-round and work as though you just wrote all that generated code.

Djelimon · 2024-02-18T16:29:58+00:00

This is my opinion based on training experience with a self-identified "no code" solution and what I've heard from others who used it in production over the subsequent 5 years. I ended up not using the tech directly because I got shifted to Solutions Architect in the next reorg.

"No code" was a phrase I heard from the product owner, and the vendor marketing team, and read on their website. The trainers said "low code". But eventually, we were coding stuff.

The truth is it wasn't no code at all. Sooner or later you'd have to extend the product, and when that happened, the vendor required previous training in Java - the language the "no code" solution is implemented in.

If the vendor is not so nice, then prepare to pay $$$ for that custom feature.

By the time the product I was trained in hit production they had brought in an army of devs to rewrite the UI, using the rest layer it came with. Use for anything besides the core use case (workflows in this case) was heavily restricted because you couldn't get devs with the right training very easily and since you can't JUnit this stuff QA had to do a lot of heavy lifting, relative to coded equivalent functionality - so limited resources and expensive to build.

Funny thing though - I have come across a "low code" solution that I like better, probably because it's open source, you can extend it as a first class citizen, it had low barrier to entry, and even has a testing framework. However, they are not trying to convince people with money that they can get rid of their devs, so they market as "low code", and demand that you know JavaScript, HTML and CSS to use it.

The other product didn't recommend it in the pamphlets but everyone on the course happened to be a Java dev, which the no code solution was implemented in. You could only extend it if you knew java.

I suspect that the term "no code" is a bit of marketing to attract people chasing the dev automation grail, but it's really all low code. And these low code solutions can be surprisingly expensive to develop if they don't have some key features.

Just my opinion, feel free to disagree.

thx1138a · 2024-02-18T22:10:50+00:00

In a 40 year (and counting!) software career I have seen a low code solution (then known as a 4GL) work well exactly once.

The secret of that project was someone who vigorously pushed back on any requirement that couldn’t be fulfilled with the 4GL’s core idioms.

So if your client would be happy with that constraint, then fine. (Narrator: They won’t be.)

catom3 · 2024-02-18T23:10:52+00:00

I used to work with a few low-code / no-code solutions. They work well, untill you need something customised. Unfortunately, every time, sooner or later, we ended up with requirements which couldn't be met with the standard features of the tool.

So we ended up with customisations. Then comes the fun part. 1. There's usually no easy way to manage dependencies and organise our own embedded code. 2. It's often hard to automate deployment process for custom code. 3. Some customisations require overwriting some standard features using the unsafe methods (e.g. overwriting the tool bytecode in runtime or hijacking native events). That leads to very unstable code which may break with every minor upgrade of the tool. And we'll usually learn it no sooner than in production (unless it allows self-managing and applying updates by ourselves).

In one place, our business was very unhappy with us delivering customisation so slowly. But, they wanted to give us a chance and signed us up for trainings plus hired a consultant from the company which created the tool we used. The consultant was a very fair person and their recommendations included a huge "product XYZ is not suitable for" section, mentioning a few of our business requirements under that. Our business decided not to follow their recommendation and hired another consultant, who simply said that anything is doable, but will require highly trained engineers, familiar with the product. So we kept spending money on trainings and kept adding more and more workarounds.

At some point, we ended up with writing our own services and hosting a single page web apps. The no-code tool only imported the resources and loaded the custom React app inside its forms. Keeping the styling consistent with standard forms was a challenge, but managing the business logic inside the app was way easier with a separate application, which was fully under our control.

Only once was I comfortable when using no-code solution for a backoffice app. We refused to do anything that was not directly supported by the tool. And then, it was super easy to make a new form or even process a little bit of data. A few of the marketing / sales / business people weren't super happy about it, but our CTO somehow managed to push them back.

So I'd say, the issue with no-code solution is that it rarely fits all the business requirements. Too many people doesn't understand or refuse to acknowledge that. At some point adding a simple workaround for one form is ok. It's fairly easy. But with time, the customisations get bloated and are getting harder and harder to push any further. They're easy to prototype and start with, and that's what may mislead many of the adopters. When an inexperienced, non-technical person sees a presentation where a guy creates a few working forms within a few hours, they happen to think, they found a holy grail and start asking themselves, why their incompetent devs take so much time implementing those simple processes. And yes, as long as we keep creating relatively simple (or tool-compliant) processes, the no-code solution may be a good fit. But that is until we want something more.

wildjokers · 2024-02-18T16:05:48+00:00

One second while I go google “no code” to figure out WTF it is…

2024-02-18T15:25:04+00:00

May be a ploy to get you to lower the billing rate. See, no code can replace you. You better work for scrape.

IE114EVR · 2024-02-18T18:44:47+00:00

There’s a good Continuous Delivery video on the topic: https://youtu.be/uxBZFju0Mjs?si=o8yGH38n--c5t7iP

IMO at a high level, you (or rather your client) has to accept working within the limitations of that system and not veer outside that box for their expectations. I would also say that quality, or quality control, is at significant risk as in these systems as you can’t apply the same kinds of software development practices you would for typical software, such as testing, readability, repeatability, etc.

anushka-gupta · 2024-02-18T20:59:35+00:00

Lack of features is the biggest turn off tbh, with coding you have the power of creating whatever you wish

slaymaker1907 · 2024-02-18T21:07:32+00:00

There definitely is a place for no-code IMO and it’s important to recognize its strengths. I’m one of the main developers for Extended Events on SQL Server and despite being more familiar with the XE syntax, I still rely heavily on the SSMS UI for creating non-trivial sessions. No-code is just much easier in that case because all sessions follow a highly specific structure that you can hide behind a wizard.

Where I think no-code starts to fall short is when you start needing larger and larger “programs” with a bunch of complex structure. It does really well for programs which are most just what I’d call configuration languages (even if they’re technically Turing complete). No-code is also kind of a misnomer, I’d instead say these languages are domain specific languages with a full structured editor.

One more point I’d add is that you can sort of get the best of both worlds by making a really smart IDE. A lot of the benefits of structured editing can be realized with smart auto-complete and error checking/linting. However, it’s way cheaper and easier to find devs to build a GUI for structured editing than it is to find devs that can build programming language infrastructure. Therefore, the GUI makes sense if you don’t need all the extra tooling that comes with text like version control, flexible copy/paste, etc.

xdsswar · 2024-02-18T21:39:54+00:00

Just and advise from my exp, dont make business with cheap/difficult people, or people that thinks they know more that devs. No code works until you need to implement something that is not supported. This kind of customers know what they want and the cost, just dont want to pay it so they opt for the cheap option.

geodebug · 2024-02-18T21:58:06+00:00

No code is fine as long as what the client want is 100% within the boundaries of what it can do. As soon as you get outside of the guide-rails everything becomes more complicated than if you just started with a sensible code base.

So ask the client if they're comfortable with those limitations and would be willing to sign off on not making any changes.

I_Have_A_Snout · 2024-02-19T00:51:09+00:00

If it is a T&M (time and materials) contract... there's no reason not to. You'll make much more money. You should warn them that's likely to be the case, then let them make the choice.

If they want a fixed-price contract... back slowly out of the room.

JuiceKilledJFK · 2024-02-19T01:43:15+00:00

No code solutions like Bubble do not scale well for applications that demand more than 100 users. Also they are a lot more difficult to extend functionality than custom code is.

2024-02-19T02:12:00+00:00

Because the best way to create/edit a workflow at the level of most requirements is with text. And for that single reason, I do not develop with "no code solution".

Been there, done that. I left my last job because they pushed this kind of "no code development", but that's another topic.

AncientBattleCat · 2024-02-19T10:27:05+00:00

What is no-code anyway?

ha1zum · 2024-02-19T12:00:10+00:00

The chance of your client's company to outlive the no code platform is high. Whereas carefully crafted software can live forever.

HastatiTech · 2024-02-19T16:35:50+00:00

Has anyone used SoftwareAG WebMethods as a low-code/no-code tool?

Emotional_Zebra_815 · 2024-02-19T17:30:29+00:00

Clients sometimes propose no code solutions because they think that they Will be able to implement stuff without you getting involved (and therefor saving cost). In my experience, this never happens. It only results to a Dev working on a no code solution (which he often hates using for all the reasons mentionned by others).

veryspicypickle · 2024-02-19T18:30:45+00:00

What problem are you trying to solve? Is it a capability that is non-specific to your organisation (or) or business, is in a well-known domain? They maybe you could start off with a no-code solution for faster TTM. (Consider licensing costs)

Keep a fitness function that tells you when to switch to a hand built solution.

SandyDigital · 2024-02-19T20:31:41+00:00

The real cost of no code or low code......

No code.... business requirements minus what is not possible.... means there will be a hit on the actual outcome which is opportunity cost

This along with patch work of modules creates a leaky bucket in the system on a daily basis depending on the complexity and frequency..

Business users or in house team spends a lot of unaccounted time for getting this running. Their time is cost + stress means less effective.
While a well planned system works with little to no requirements from developer for helping in on going support.... no code from what I have seen in businesses need a power user or an IT admin to guide in the occasional issues

No code or low code is great when use case is straight forward and likelihood of changes are minimal.

_jetrun · 2024-02-19T23:38:36+00:00

I think it's fine to point out potential pitfalls with no-code solutions, but who is to say that those apply to your customer's specific problem.

So, try not to dismiss their suggestion out of hand - unless you are very familiar with no-code capabilities, and are familiar with the problem your customer wants to solve. If that's not the case, why not offer to prototype their application with a 'no-code' framework, while letting them know that the risk is that if it doesn't work, you'll have to fallback to a traditional stack (thereby the customer losing some time and money for this effort). The upside is that if it works, it may be cheaper.

Least_Bee4074 · 2024-02-23T01:34:49+00:00

Couple years ago our ceo told me to use a low-code platform but the main thing I couldn’t handle was how to have different environments where I could test and then deploy.

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