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Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

I’ve spend a few decades in non-tech enterprise including 7 years in the public sector, and I’ve never seen a low-code solution work at all. Even extremely simple automation flows require at least some degree of software engineering. Looping isn’t intuitive at all, he’ll even conditions aren’t.

What has completely changed the field is LLMs. We now have employees of every sort building small Python scripts which actually work. Even installing Python and getting it up and running is something the LLMs help with. Obviously almost all of it is terrible, and none of scale, but for 90% it, it never has to run outside the personal computers of the employees who write it. Now the challenge becomes keeping the knowledge (and scripts) when employees change jobs. Though to be fair, the knowledge bit was always a challenge.

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I’ve never seen a low-code solution work at all.

I've worked quite a bit in civil engineering and GIS, and most places I've worked at have made very good use of a 'low-code' tool called FME for automation and ETL tasks. I even reach for it myself for many tasks, even when I am fully capable of doing exactly the same task using for example Python. For the right tasks it is simply the most productive solution.

That being said even with these tools you still need to know how to 'program', at least conceptually, and it's not like just anybody can pick up a tool like this and be productive. The basic concepts of control flow and algorithms still apply and work the same way.

I've never heard of FME before, but I don't do any GIS work. Are you referring to this?

https://www.tensing.com/en/software/fme

Tensing looks like they specialize in GIS.

Right software, wrong company. Tensing appears to be a FME reseller and consultant. https://www.safe.com is the company that makes FME. While they started in the GIS world, and this is very much where their roots and core user base is, they've expanded greatly over the past few years into becoming a more general automation, data processing and ETL tool.

Ah, cool. Thanks. This must be for serious industry w/ deep pockets. There's not even a sign up link for individuals.

Yea, sadly they've gone full enterprise over the past few years. Once upon a time they were a small scrappy software company with both a price list and order form right on their website as well as a free Home license which let you use FME for 'play' and training at home. Now it's all "cloud hosted", "contact our sales team" and "dynamic subscription prices, tailored to your needs". Still it's a fantastic pieces of software once you manage to buy it.

For what it's worth I seem to recall base licenses started at roughly $3500 per user for the desktop version of their software last time they had a price list.

Those scripts work, until they don't and the people who generated them cannot even ask the right questions to an LLM, and people who can actually maintain them get overwhelmed by the side-quests of keeping them in order, because everything that gets some use become a dependency for the business.

So we're not losing our jobs?

Maybe long term we will lose our jobs but medium term there will be huge demand for people who can clean up the mess which was created by people who used AI to generate code without understanding what they did.

The only question is: does anyone want to do that job (and I doubt that the "maintenance" job will be better paid than the job for originally writing the code)?

I think it will be well paid but not fun at all. I have done similar work and at least cleaning up after bad human developers is often well paid. But time will tell.

> at least cleaning up after bad human developers is often well paid.

I wish!

"This was written by Bob, who's a certified genius. Unfortunately Bob left us to go backpacking across Chile. Can you make just this one tiny change for us?

...

What do you mean, billing for a full day? Bob used to be able to dive right in and make changes like this in 5m!"

Sigh... This os exactly the curse...

Bad coders leave managers with wrong expectations and saddle us with their smoldering piles of garbage and now we have to convince Mr. Manager why we it's impossible to match Mr. Monkey's pace.

We are literally stuck paying off someone else's debt, and it's soul crushing, because you know Mr. Manager won't understand anything technical, and the true culprit, Mr. Code Monkey is already long gone, and we are the sucker holding the bag, getting blamed for late features and slow delivery.

The life lesson I learned is: don't pickup someone else's code, you'll assume all liability.

Only time can tell.

The solution is obvious of course: just train an LLM that is intimitely familiar with the product and integrate it directly!

...

The second coming of Excel, basically.

Shhhhhhhh.

Do you have any idea how much I made in Fintech converting spreadsheets that'd exceeded the TA's ability to hack/keep it all in their head and/or quit?

Favourite included a single cell that had, I am not kidding, something like 150+ nested if statements.. and there was a dateTime bug in it somewhere :D

A friend did very well positioning himself as a data engineering consultant that could come in and quickly improve poorly thrown together data pipelines, wonder what the equivalent is for these :)

Wasn't fintech but was fin something. Several weeks into trying to port a Excel workbook with a zillion tabs, some VBscript from stackoverflow and other nastiness and being unable to replicate the results. I discovered the "consultant" who help them create this insane thing had turned on the "allow circular references"[1] option and choosen a number of iterations that "Seemed to make it work"

Yay! for non-deterministic financial modeling.

Also was really fun trying to explain to the folks who hired me why I couldnt get the results they wanted to see.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/remove-or-allow-a...

ha wow, read about a guy having to clean up after some data scientists that'd figured out how to use circular references and an iteration limit to do crazy, hard to replicate stuff, (thankfully) never ran into it myself but I bet that was a 'fun' time for you !

Here's to hoping we both never have to dip back into that world again :D

The best low code solutions I’ve seen from the end user perspective are ones that create sane looking skeleton code for you and have an eject button for when you hit the boundaries of what the tool is capable of. The eject button is a one off operation that switches the low code solution to a traditional code based solution, and is irreversible. Bootstrapping and prototyping quickly is a great use case for low code tools in the phase where long term code maintenance is not really important.

Such a model is not easily monetized which is why you don’t often see this model in the wild. Draftbit is one company I’ve seen that uses this model: https://draftbit.com/pricing. Note I am not affiliated and have not used the software just find it interesting to see this model actually out in the wild.

I currently work in the public sector in the UK and my experience is different. I see quite a lot of PowerAutomate going on to automate tasks and to create simple SharePoint apps.

It’s been some years since I left the public service, PowerAutomate didn’t really exist back then. It may be an exception to what I said, I do know my current organisation had a few of those Apps running. I wasn’t much involved in the process, but they were basically discovered because of their cost and later shut down. Since I know basically nothing about this process, the PowerApps would have been made by non-developers since I know all the developers in house. I’ll assume they also must have worked.

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