The Brutal Truth About Why No Code is Absolute Garbage and Will Never, Ever Replace Developers

Why you are being fooled.

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Let’s get into it.

How many of those articles have you read in the last few months about “why no code is the future” or “why no code will make developers obsolete”?

I’m sure I’ve seen at least 20.

Stop the fear-mongering

And you know what the funny thing is? It’s ridiculous. The majority of them, if not all of them, aren’t software engineers themselves, and they simply have no idea what they’re talking about.

They use the old media clickbait headlines with fear-mongering, such as “I’ll lose my job,” “It’s not worth learning to code,” and so on….

Any software engineer knows that no-code tools will never be able to replace a damn software engineer, and while I don’t consider software engineers to be landing page builders, it’s clear that landing pages will be a no-brainer in 2022 when everyone can use a template or whatever to create their landing pages.

The problem with no code

So, before I get too technical and start throwing jargon at you, let me first explain why no code is garbage for various reasons.

You see, if you want anything decent, almost anything that has to do with solid UI, complex custom designs, complex data handling, and custom stuff in general, you’re doomed if you try to build it with a no code tool.

It’ll be a long road to a painful, brutal wake-up call when your engineers or you realize you’ve hit a big stumbling block, similar to trying to expose Putin’s corruption in Russia without being imprisoned or poisoned. And then, whoa, re-create everything from the ground up? This time, the right way, most likely.

Don’t believe me?

Consider the following example of a real-life scenario:

Company X has a product idea for a news platform, they received funding for it, and the founder thought going no code would be a great idea because he/she read on Medium why it’s so awesome and the future. Anyway, they get to work on it, and after a few months of agonizing over how to meet the design requirements with a no-code tool, it’s finally time to launch.

The company launches the web app that pulls news from a well-known cryptocurrency API. The company does excellent marketing and it takes off like a rocket, gaining hundreds of thousands of users in the process. Now it’s time to add new features, because what company can grow without producing more and better products?

Oh boy!

As a result, the managers and founder believe it would be fantastic to implement a system that allows users to self-write cryptocurrency articles as well as comment on and clap for other users’ posts, like Medium.

Now we arrived at the roadblock ❌

I can only imagine the pain, haha.😅💀

You’ll need a way to allow users to create posts, which will most likely include a custom text editor as well as complex components such as SEO settings, preview images, tags, and so on. The next step is to add a new feature to all of the posts that allows people to like and comment on them. Did you forget that you’ll need a database and your own REST API to make this work? And to make it fast, optimized, and, most importantly, scalable, which it wasn’t at the beginning either.

If this web app has been built entirely without code up to this point, congratulations on a disaster; you will need to rebuild the entire web app, this time in CODE.

“Ehh, we can just add those features to the no-code tool,” you might think.

No, you can’t; there is no no-code tool that allows for highly customized designs, server and database integrations, and complex data management in the application. You can’t make Medium with a no-code tool, for real.

And let me tell you, even if you could, it wouldn’t be a good idea. For starters, you’d have to hire experts in this no-code tool, which aren’t likely to be plentiful, and would almost certainly cost much more than regular web developers.

Let’s look at some of the technical reasons why it won’t work:

1. Quality assurance of the application

If the entire web app is. built with custom functionality such as data handling and state management (to be honest, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to do this without code), what experts, QA’s, systems set up, pipelines, e2e tests would be applied here?

2. Collaboration between many developers (or should I say no code builders)

Let’s return to the cryptocurrency news app. Assume there are 12 developers/builders working on it at the same time. If there wasn’t already a git for that tool, a pipeline integration, and all of that, How could 12 people build different features of the app at the same time? What happens if one builder works on the article clap component while another works on the article-like component, and they want to merge them? Somehow everything would be needed to be converted to code and managed that way, which takes away the purpose of dealing with no code.

And his thing would be insanely difficult to build because you’re essentially doing drag-and-drop design and drag-and-drop business logic; how will you know if one component doesn’t break in the other when it merges? This leads me to my third point.

3. Modularising of shared components and business logic

Okay, let me just say that no code seems to be harder to maintain and scale than code to build complex large applications. Imagine all of your components, shared logic, and so on were drag and drop stuff, and if something breaks because of some strange thing, you may have no idea what it is, because it’s not code, you can’t see what’s going on, you can see the visuals but not the core. I’d say that building Medium.com with no code would be 10 times more difficult than doing so with code. It would undoubtedly be a nightmare (and I mean if there even was a tool that allowed you too).

You see, you’d still need expert developers who know how to create large, scalable apps, so the same architecture would be used, but with an additional layer of complexity. Imagine a medium-sized codebase with 1000s of modules of code in a well-structured architecture; now imagine converting those 1000s of modules into drag-and-drop modules; ouch.

3. Custom complex designs?

What if you need a text editor like the one I’m using right now? What if you need to include quotes, headlines, images, and other content? No code can do that for you; however, if there was a large ecosystem like NPM where developers coded plugins for this tool, that would be possible. I’d love to see a no-code tool with exceptional capabilities, but I don’t believe one will be available for a very long time.

4. Performance of applications and accessibility

Many no-code tools, in my experience, are slower than others, have issues with accessibility, have numerous issues with data handling, and have strange design bugs. Because you have no control over how it actually works under the hood, because it’s no code :D

And last but not least:

Psst, making a no-code tool requires highly skilled developers.

Let’s say the next mega 100X no code tool was created; it would require 100s of expert-level developers and even more developers to create the no code tool’s ecosystem; this would simply increase the demand for developers.

Conclusion:

No, no code will not make developers obsolete or cause them to lose their jobs. For a long time, it will not be an option for creating real-world complex Production apps.

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