I haven’t been following the no-code “movement”, but it seems to me that this is really a revolt against abusive software development practices justified by UI/UX and of course data lock-in. It seems that people really want editable, transparent, and composable pipelines for common tasks. This is the GNU philosophy for the command line.
Little story: I did a lot of work with Army grunts trying to avoid getting blown up. The main tool was excel. Software shops kept delivering junk that nobody used. The acquisitions guys loved a slick demo and that’s pretty much all it did. They’d come in and install a new server cluster, which means a bigger server room, which means more cooling, which means a bigger generator, which means more diesel trucks, which means more convoys on the road, which means more getting blown up. New grunts would tool around on it for a month and then get a novel task they had to use excel for, and never go back. The acq guys had such disdain for the ‘users’ that they couldn’t imagine that they actually knew WTF they were doing. The slick demo went on to win the DCGS contract, and now they’re stuck with ‘easy’ where they need flexible, customizable, fast, simple (all the way down the stack).
So yeah, now I get it. It’s more like, no-UI than no-code.
I would say people want to get rid off developers. The way it usually works is that somebody has an idea useful for humans, but they don't speak code. They then need somebody who knows bits and bytes, but unfortunately probably does not understand the actual idea or its purpose. So what ensues is the developer trying to make a stupid machine do something that somebody else envisioned, as a sort of idea to code compiler. This is not always true -- especially for startups -- but it is I think for the no code part. Now if the developer could concentrate on giving the tools where his expertise is relevant to the people with ideas everything would be amazing. If it can work.
Little story: I did a lot of work with Army grunts trying to avoid getting blown up. The main tool was excel. Software shops kept delivering junk that nobody used. The acquisitions guys loved a slick demo and that’s pretty much all it did. They’d come in and install a new server cluster, which means a bigger server room, which means more cooling, which means a bigger generator, which means more diesel trucks, which means more convoys on the road, which means more getting blown up. New grunts would tool around on it for a month and then get a novel task they had to use excel for, and never go back. The acq guys had such disdain for the ‘users’ that they couldn’t imagine that they actually knew WTF they were doing. The slick demo went on to win the DCGS contract, and now they’re stuck with ‘easy’ where they need flexible, customizable, fast, simple (all the way down the stack).
So yeah, now I get it. It’s more like, no-UI than no-code.