Hacker News Reader

Comment by shireboy | Hacker News Reader

The most important requirement IMO is his last: a clear off ramp. Export to code would be nice, but what I think the market really wants is to go back and forth between a coded and no coded experience. Let me start a quick app in nocode editor, open in code editor to tweak something and add feature I know I can do quicker in code, then let my non-tech coworker adjust as needed, but then I edit in code when he breaks something. And be open source, popular, pluggable, etc like author suggests. All the benefits of no code, all the benefits of code, with no walled garden.

A guy can dream at least.

View on HN

Power Automate Desktop (PAD) does this, actually.

If you select a set of actions from a "flow" in the PAD low code UI, copy to the clipboard, and paste into a text editor, you'll get the code for the original steps in a language called Robin[1][2], a DSL for Robotic Process Automation.

If you paste a selection of Robin code back into the PAD UI, PAD automatically generates the corresponding low code steps.

Public work on the Robin language appears to have ended in 2021. I seem to recall having read that MS acqui-hired the team and shut down the public-facing side of the project, but I may be misremembering that part.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20210306173947/https://www.robin...

2. https://gitHub.com/robin-language/robin

Power Query does the same with its M language.

Recorded steps in the GUI generate code that can be manually edited.

You should def check out windmill.dev.

They center more around code, and then builds app and flows based on the code/scripts you create. It's been a really pleasant experience for me. The first time I looked at the product I did not quite get it. But when I tried it I was hooked. It was not what I expected but what I needed.

You can have your code in git and use vscode and push scripts up to windmill if you like, I do and like it. You CAN also edit flows and apps from vscode. But I'm quite sure you do not want to - meaning it's JSON you will change and not the underlying svelte scripts.

I actually started using windmill after I described my pref. low-code solution on HN and what I felt was missing and got a response back saying that I was describing windmill.

That looks really interesting, may have some features not in my current toolbox (not sure, don't want to assume I understand their terminology) and seems to check most of the boxes for me - thanks for the pointer, I'll have a play.

The foundation of the "off ramp" to me is an RDBMS - I've been evaluating these tools by pointing them at the same db and working on the same app which has been very illuminating. It might be a bit trivial for HN, but I really should write it up properly somewhere.

It's not a traditional low-code environment, but I recently played with Codux which has a nice balance of this - at least for me, who doesn't have a lot of React experience.

It's critical, I agree.

I'm happy if the data and its constraints are in a robust RDBMS - OK, Postgres! - that is something I can build on, in parallel potentially.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com