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.