Hacker News Thread: Is no-code a future of web development?

In January 2021, there was a thread on Hacker News entitled Is no-code a future of web development?

Some extracts from the comment thread:

On Salesforce:

We can look to Salesforce for how this will likely play out - they aren’t the only no-code platform out there, but they are big and have been around a while, so their dev culture has had a long time to evolve.

In that world, most devs work primarily in the no-code portion of that platform, maybe with some basic coding skills. That group does the majority of app dev work. But there is a smaller percentage of people who do write code, and who do the work that goes beyond what the no-code features can do.

On non-developer usage:

For relatively simple projects it’s already happening, I recently booked a doctors appointment online using a site built with a no-code tool. Turns out the physician built it himself and admitted to having very little in the way of technical knowledge. Not so long ago he would’ve had to have hired a fullstack developer for the job.

Would a hospital booking thousands of appointments in a given day be able to get by with the same no-code solution? No, but there’s only going to be so many of them.

On usage in the enterprise:

These kind of no-code or low-code tools are VERY common in enterprise, like SAP, Salesforce, CMS solutions, IBM Tivoli products, and on and on. But companies are starting to realise that those tools often have some hard limits on what you can do and the problems they are solving get so complex that hacking the tool around to solve the problem becomes unsustainable. If anything even enterprise companies are pivoting away from this kind of tool towards custom-built software.

Reading through the comments, the general theme is: “these tools will be able to solve smaller problems, but they will eventually fall short.” The question is, where is that line, and how fast is it moving?