The Death Of Low-code. Long-live Prompting.

Armed with Claude Opus and a large Matcha, I spent the weekend with Retool to play around and understand how low is low-code?

There’s a sharp learning curve with any new tool. First thing I noticed, it was hard to find what I needed, but I spent over an hour trying to make a basic REST API connection. I had to play around with the authorization headers because I couldn’t figure out what format it needed from me.

I found myself longing for a ChatGPT where I could ask it what I was doing wrong and it would fix it for me. Instead, I was stuck Googling and looking in Retool forums for my answer.

You actually need to know a lot of coding…

I had to write a lot of code to get the data that I needed and in the format that I needed. Unless I was using the raw data returned from an API call, I had to write actual code. Obviously, an LLM is your best friend here.

There are no debugging options when writing code! Not even a console.log(). So, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how global/local variables are defined in Retool, how to reference a row that I selected, how state works, etc. These are all things that you need to know when you’re coding, but having to re-learn how they work in the context of a low-code tool was tough.

On the bright side, writing code is super easy because I could use Claude wherever my knowledge failed.

So what does this mean for no-code/low-code tools?

With Devin or Github Copilot, you get an agent that helps you code, so there’s an opportunity to become a better/faster engineer. The future of coding will be prompting, and that’s what the future of no-code tools looks like as well. Each tool will have their own copilot that you can prompt to build stuff for you. I should no longer have to go through Retool forums to figure out how to turn select rows red. I will ask Retool to just do it for me. Note that I’m not asking Retool how to do it, but to do it for me.

But, this leaves us with the question of: if code, low-code, and no-code converge on prompting, what’s the difference?