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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Just because there are these abstractions layers that happened in the past does not mean that it will continue to happen that way. For example, many no-code tools promised just that, but they never caught on.

I believe that there's a "optimal" level of abstraction, which, for the web, seems to be something like the modern web stack of HTML, JavaScript and some server-side language like Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript.

Now, there might be tools that make a developer's life easier, like a nice IDE, debugging tools, linters, autocomplete and also LLMs to a certain degree (which, for me, still is a fancy autocomplete), but they are not abstraction layers in that sense.

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I love that you brought no-code tools into this because I think it's interesting it never worked correctly.

My guess is: on one side, things like squarespace and wix get super super good for building sites that don't feel like squarespace and wix, (I'm not sure I'd want to be a pure "website dev" right now - although I think squarespace squashed a lot of that long ago) - and then very very nice tooling for "real engineers" (whatever that means).

I'm pretty handy with tech, I mean last time I built anything real was the 90s but I know how most things work pretty well. I sat down to ship an app last weekend, no sleep and Monday rolling around GCP was giving me errors and I hadn't realized one of the files the LLMs wrote looked like code but was all placeholder.

I think this is basically what the anthropic report says, automation issues happen via displacement, and displacement is typically fine, except the displacement this time is happening very rapidly (I read in different report, expecting traditionally ~80 years of displacement happens in ~10 years with AI)

Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.

Excel is hardly "no-code". Any heavy use of Excel I've seen uses formulas, which are straight-up code.

But any heavy use of "no-code" apps also ends up looking this way, with "straight-up code" behind many of the wysiwyg boxes.

Right, but "no-code" implies something: programming without code. Excel is not that in any fashion. It's either programming with code or an ordinary spreadsheet application without code. You'd really have to stretch your definitions to consider it "no-code" in a way that wouldn't apply to pretty much any office application.

> Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it.

If you've found any Excel guru that don't spend most of their time in VBA, you have a really unusual experience.

Huge numbers of accountants and lawyers use excel heavily knowing only the built in formula language. They will have a few "gurus" sprinkled around who can write macros but this is used sparingly because the macros are a black box and make it harder to audit the financial models.

I've worked in finance for 20 years and this is the complete opposite of my experience. Excel is ubiquitous and drives all sorts of business processes in various departments. I've seen people I would consider Excel gurus, in that they are able to use Excel much more productively than normal users, but I've almost never seen anyone use VBA.

Excel is a programming system with pure functions, imperative code (VBA/Python recently), database (cell grid, sheets etc.) and visualization tools.

So, not really "no-code".

That’s technically correct but it’s also wrong.

No-code in excel is that most functions are implemented for user and user doesn’t have to know anything about software development to create what he needs and doesn’t need software developer to do stuff for him.

I would disagree. Every formula you enter into a cell is "code". Moreover, more complex worksheets require VBA.

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