Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down

honeycodecommunity.aws

71 pointsnavels61 comments

Haha. I was an engineer on Honeycode in 2017. I initially joined the project because the best talent was flocking to finally make a frontend builder for developers. When I was there, the vision was there (allow people to build apps with spreadsheet skills), but the execution was all over the map: we had engineers mostly interested in getting promoted, so it was super political. I remember that every team had their own redux store (including one for the navbar, one for the login screen, one for the home screen, etc.). It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer!

Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing).

Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics.

Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.

I get your concerns with no-code, but would you not agree that an Open Source alternative - with long-term viability - is a better investment.

> It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer!

At Amazon, really? :-)

I will be happy to use a no-code platforms that lets me eject out into a standard application. Otherwise, I'm just learning and depending on a proprietary system.

Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-trivial. It requires serious commitment to learn all the techniques the designers came up with.

So most people who use these tools use them for for simple or short-lived apps and side projects, which they could now use web frameworks, but just want to try something new, because they know it's trivial.

Do any allow ejecting?

I would assume exposing their spaghetti that comes with such a platform is a big concern.

Let alone managing bringing things back in after someone gets creative.

I've used WYSIWYG UI dialog editors (mostly the one MSVS used to bundle with C# in... I wanna say 2012?) that maintain their entire state as somewhat-editible two-way code (so if I modified the code, at least within a constrained envelope, it would be reflected in the editor and remain WYSIWYG editable).

Does that count?

If so, I think the lesson is you need to keep the no-code side way, way less ambitious than is theoretically possible in order to keep everyone sane and you might actually have a useful tool that doesn't dig you into a big hole.

Yeah, I had similar experience with https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ in java swing. You can use the drag and drop for most of it, and if you need to hand edit some code, it mostly works and is reflected in the gui tool.

I thought it was pretty productive and honestly sort of miss that kind of development

Definitely agree with you in terms of limiting functionality built on top of WYSIWYG UIs. 2 years ago I developed a non-trivial app using Retool and it became an unmaintainable spaghetti monster "code" base. (Side note: Retool was pretty solid, my application was just way too complex for it)

The result was I wasted 6 weeks of time when I should've just spent 2-3 days prototyping and then throw out the tool once I had a good idea of what we actually wanted. In the end if didn't matter since the project died anyways :/

PM at Retool, agreed this is hard problem. Like you said, most projects fail so Retool can help you validate and get to success or failure faster. But yeah totally agree that performance, making diffs cleaner, and code search are some things we’re really working on.

That counts to me. Very interesting.

If your workflows are exposed to their UI using an API, you can get your workflows out.

Whether it’s worth it vs rebuilding them bespoke is a different question. Or you have to have an ETL layer between your SaaS vendor and whatever open source workflow runner you’d eject to.

There are some open source data flow languages that are really just GUIs for code expressed in text that is run through an interpreter.

Mendix does allow this. It runs on JVM containers so from their own "action blocks" you can just say "Call Java action" and execute your code there. There is a java api that you can access from there. Pretty neat and that's how most plugins are built.

On the client side you can do something similar with javascript.

I worked with some platforms that does. However, those usually position themselves as a code generator more than a full application builder.

- Amplication: Last I checked, they allow defining data structure & endpoints etc. before exporting to Nest.js Boilerplate with niceties. They sync to a separate branch on GitHub, so you can use it alongside writing actual logic into the boilerplate, and merge new changes from Amplication to the main branch. - Draftbit (React Native based Mobile App builder). The builder is not very great, they lack a bunch of features. They make up for this by allowing the developer to add custom JS code very easily. You can write your own Custom React element inside the editor, and with a little massaging things can fall into place. I'm not saying this approach should be abused, though. The team told us once that some of their big clients are mobile dev agencies that mostly just use the platform to Storyboard & bootstrap some UI before doing the actual logic in their own code. - FlutterFlow (Mobile App builder). I'm biased because I'm still in the progress of helping a client fixing their mess on FlutterFlow. FlutterFlow's code output is really spaghetti. The developer UX on the builder is horrible, so in the end I still opt to eject and deal with the spaghetti code.

> Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-trivial.

IMHO, this holds true if we replace “no-code” with “AI code generation”.

Maybe, except folks have been trying to get no-code working for literally decades; AI code gen is new and still learning…

Which means it is even further from viable than no-code and it is more vaporware, and less proven.

Completely agree. No code is great for simple CRUD apps but unfortunately, anything reasonably complex requires code. This is why we ended up building Appsmith which is an open source "low code" application builder. You can write custom JS code across the board & customize your application to build more complex apps. Makes getting started easy but also keeps you going for a long time.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Appsmith.

Then why build nocode platform? Just build frame work with components

Because a framework with components is just basic UI building blocks. There's a lot more that goes in building a full-fledged app. Layouts, page design, dynamic data, business logic etc. A low code builder like Appsmith helps devs orchestrate all of this much more easily.

What is Amazon Honeycode:

> Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows you to quickly build mobile and web apps for teams—without programming. Build Amazon Honeycode apps for managing almost anything, like projects, customers, operations, approvals, resources, and even your team.

Until 2 weeks ago. I worked at AWS Professional Services.

Most of the time, when a new service is introduced, we were given all sorts of go to market videos to watch and were asked to find use cases for it for our customers.

I never heard anything about Honeycomb coming from anyone on the service team. I worked on a popular company sponsored open source project. We looked into integrating with it and I said hell no.

We’re you in marketing?

No, I was in the consulting department doing hands on keyboard work. I specialized in “application modernization”. It’s a combination of cloud architecture and enterprise development/architecture[1].

We were sone of the closest to the customers. Getting customer adoption for new service is always big deal. You can see when a new service or feature is introduced where part of the marketing is showing what customers are actually using it.

[1] No I’m not looking for a job and this isn’t self promotion. I have more than enough work.

I should really keep a running list of apps I hear about for the first time (or don't remember hearing about) when the shutdown announcement shows up on HN.

Same with all the human obituaries.

People don't always have the incentive to market themselves, but startups/products do.

I wonder how long no-code is going to stay relevant in the age of AI. It feels like the segment of "what a novice with no-code can do that a novice with an appropriate AI tool can't" is ever-shrinking and the tail of "what specialized use cases AI can cover that no-code can't" continues to grow.

No-code platforms are really DSLs wrapped in a nice UI. No-code platforms that are more open and developer focused typically let you actually dump out the app as a big bundle of config/DSL (e.g. a custom JSON format).

Maybe using LLMs to generate DSL code will produce better (and more maintainable) results than fully-fledged languages?

Yep. All the no-code systems I've ever investigated are essentially expert systems, and if there's one constant over the history of AI boom and bust cycles, it's "statistical models absolutely demolish expert systems every time".

I use n8n for managing ChatGPT's API and to connect it to other APIs like gmail. It helps abstract away the authentication side of APIs which can be very cumbersome to manage.

It also helped me better understand the chatgpt API. N8n allows you to code in raw javascript or python which has allowed me to branch out to pure python.

I would say that no-code low code has a place as a stepping stone, that can allow other invested parties besides developers to manage inter departmental flow and build a blueprint that can be redone with actual engineers in the preferred manner.

Seems to me that the demand would still be there, it’s just that AI would replace/augment whatever rules engine is mapping the UI into running code.

We’re in peak hype cycle for AI. You’re always doing to need cut and dry, deterministic processing of structured data. That’s what low-code is for in many cases.

You’ll hit a simple wall with AI, as with any tool, where you need domain knowledge and language to tell the thing what to do. The difference will probably be more SMEs who can tell the computer vs developers and product managers figuring out what the business wants.

Look at stable diffusion prompts. There’s an art to constructing the prompts - it’s just another form of programming.

IMO low code with AI could be the future, we also at DronaHQ are integrating AI capabilities in every possible way like having a dedicated Ask AI feature for database querying, writing JS code or connecting with AI tool APIs quickly and helping our users to decrease the building time as much as possible.

This is funny because "AI" has even less of a proven track record of efficacy in enabling non-coders to build applications than "no-code" and yet you're already giving it more credibility. It is just as likely that it doesn't work either.

Another downside to all these no-/low-code tools. You're dependent on the provider to maintain their service, and if they inevitably stop after a few years, you're on your own.

Surely AWS could commit a developer to spend a week or two writing a basic wrapper, even if it's a MVP-ish set of node or python scripts that lets folks download their apps. Or for a more AWS-specific solution, export them to EC2 instances.

Where do you arrive at a week or two as an estimate for taking a cloud platform and making it self-hostable, even as an MVP? I know nothing about Honeycode, but I would bet that it's piecing together a bunch of AWS services behind the scenes rather than being something you can just stick on an EC2 instance.

Wouldn't even need to be the same application, just something that lets the existing data form a functional application. Could even plug into Amplify, Step Functions, etc

Isn't what you're proposing an entirely new product? How could an engineer put that together in two weeks?

No, just a wrapper really. As you said, most of the heavy lifting is done by the AWS services. It needn't be high quality at all; just something that someone could download to not lose all of their work.

Of course I meant "two weeks" as something more or less metaphorical - could be 16 weeks, and a 2-pizza team, given the amount of time until Honeycode shuts down. I just think Amazon has the resources to do that.

If I was a competitor like Retool I'd be building a migration tool right now.

I suspect literally nobody used this tool.

Totally untrue. i know this for a fact.

I'm kind of shocked that Glitch is still around after all these years.

It's pretty much "dead" though, right?

Personally, I think commercial open source (COSS) technologies are pretty much the only solution to this problem. This way you aren't beholden to a company stopping their service and leaving you on your own. COSS ensures the project is maintained and if it isn't you can always self-host and migrate on your timeline instead of a vendor mandated timeline.

Banner from the linked forum:

To our valued customers: After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end the Amazon Honeycode beta service, effective February 29, 2024. New customer sign-ups and account plan upgrades are no longer available. Existing customers will be able to use Honeycode and your Honeycode apps as normal (and add team members to your existing account) until February 29, 2024, when the service will be discontinued. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Honeycode or any of the apps you created in Honeycode. To learn more about this change, and how to download your data, visit the Community Discussions.

That's cool end date!

More and more I (ex MAGMA Cloud engineer) become disillusioned with their garbage propietary services.

The services I've recommended to clients are too often low quality, overcomplicated, expensive, shit alternatives to the better open source solutions...

And to add insult to injury, imagine having built something with a service like this and it being deprecated in such a short timeline...

FAQ here: https://archive.is/KBpyh / https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-faq/2...

Shutting down on Feb 29, 2024

They need to make this warning more prominent throughout their website. The main site, honeycode.aws, doesn't mention this at all until the user tries to create an account. Someone can easily waste a few hours reading their documentation and marketing materials before learning the product is deprecated

Looks just as complicated as programming.

For a no-code solution to reduce the complexity of the programming environment it's built on top of it needs to reduce the functionality of that environment (outside of free-wins, which we've mostly already eliminated in modern languages).

In beta phases no-code always looks extremely attractive because you can fudge it and get a fair portion of the functionality with only some of the complexity - but as you start to emulate more and more your "no-code" language just turns into "code".

That is why the sweet spot is internal company apps. They can be less polished and just need to be useful enough but not SaaS level generic.

The announcement for this is actually here:

https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-commu...

Certainly gives another meaning to the word 'no-code'!

It’s really impressive how ubiquitous discourse seems to be as forum software.

It’s interesting that this was posted there instead of as a blog post, but I guess it was in beta.

I was a user of this. But didn’t find it that useful! So if others had my experience traction would have been super low.

Like a lot of AWS stuff but not this.

Damn. Never heard of it but it looks cool!

I got this email too and I don't even remember signing up for it or what it was.

Anyone else detecting a touch of irony in a nocode product becoming a nocode deployment?

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