Thread by @smdiehl

So let's talk about "no-code" this morning. Sure, it's a silly buzzword and pretty much every time our industry has tried this for the last 30 years it's always ended badly. But why? (1/)

We can go back to the IT literature from back in the 2000s and it was clear that Forrester et al thought that developers were soon going to be a thing of the past. Frame-based development and GUIs would enable management to simply encode their business intent directly. (2/)

Truth has a way of asserting itself and in hindsight the entire premise was absurd. The most succesful examples from that era were things like FrontPage ... which in hindsight was a generally terrible idea. (3/)

But the real question is why people can keep going to IT managers and investors with this absurd idea "stop writing code", over and over throughout history and keep getting an excited response. (4/)

If you went to any other profession and told them that the core activity they do all day can be replaced it would be comical. If you tell doctors and said we're going to move to No-Medicine or architects to No-Building you'd be laughed at. (5/)

But the truth is that no-code is a a rhetorical proxy for not talking about the real problem in IT. Software is simply too expensive and risky for most companies to build internally. (6/)

There's a good number of US tech companies where platforms and code are an asset for the company. For most companies around the world custom code is a liability, not an asset. The cost of maintaining it and retaining talent to maintain it exceeds its returns to the business. (7/)

Which is why the management trend for the last 15 years has been to simply outsource all development to external vendors and structure the liabilities in terms of support models and contracts. Counterparty risk is a lot more quantifiable than software engineering risk. (8/)

Now a great many companies run almost all of their infrastructure out of Excel and have burned insane amounts of money on vendors and consultants to do anything more advanced. Most companies can barely stand up a web app or database if their entire operation depended on it. (9/)

No-code is the brutal economics of software manifest in a fairy tale to sell to management that will inevitably make things worse. The real question is how do we reduce the cost of software through better program composition, protocols and engineering — not buzzwords. /end rant