Ditching the drag-n-drop: The No-Code Revolution No One Saw Coming
You don’t have to become a programmer anymore. AI gives us all an insanely fast and (almost) free dev team at our fingertips.
For three decades, many startups tried to make app-building accessible to everyone, whether through low/no-code tools or by teaching people to code. But now, with the game-changing power of LLM-led AI, things are different! You don’t have to become a programmer anymore. AI gives us all an insanely fast and (almost) free dev team at our fingertips.
The feeling of empowerment
In 1995, I was a kid stumbling over Borland Delphi. As opposed to my previous attempts at learning C++ and Bash programming, Delphi wasn’t complicated — it was an adventure! I quickly created ‘Kvakkmann,’ a neat platform game featuring a jumping duck, and a network chat for our LAN parties. I felt like superman. I could do anything.
By 2022, nearly 30 years later, I felt that thrill again, this time on chat.openai.com. Suddenly, there was a radically new path before me. I could brainstorm app ideas, watch code materialize, do a copy-paste into Databutton, fix a few issues, hit ‘deploy,’ and just like that — app finished.
Both Delphi way-back-then and ChatGPT made me feel empowered. Empowered to put my ideas to life, empowered to create — empowered despite my lack of skills and my constraints. It felt amazing, fun, and meaningful. But, equally important, it made me create tools that have had an impact on my friends, community, and company. The world is full of people who can make an impact.
Making people feel empowered matters.
The dawn of a new area
At Databutton, we’re talking to users every day. Most aren’t super technical; but they’ve spent years working with no-code tools like Bubble and Webflow. Interestingly, when we talk to them, ChatGPT has already changed the way they build apps. Today, they copy+paste from chat.openai.com into Databutton, and are loving the experience. Many don’t even read the generated code, but simply see it as some gibberish that needs to be copied and pasted for things to work. It’s a fascinating trend, and it seems to be growing by the day.
At the same time, we’re seeing firsthand how LLMs like ChatGPT are revolutionizing tasks through their ability to interface with diverse services — it’s not just about browsing the web or ordering pizzas, but also about executing code. One of the standout examples has to be OpenAI’s code interpreter, which is inching incredibly close to giving everyone access to a personal junior data scientist.
The era of the Data Scientist seems to be coming to an end, but that’s a conversation for another time.
Today, it’s becoming unmistakably clear that the apps of the future will be constructed through conversation. Not through drag-n-drop, and not through coding.
While the no-code movement focused on enabling people to build apps without code and the code movement focused on making that ever easier, we’re now entering a period where it’s less about building without code, and more about humans directing while AI does the building. This paradigm shift is sending ripples through the open-source world, with new initiatives popping up and quickly gaining momentum.
It’s a safe bet we’ll see a flurry of startups and more established companies alike scrambling to create the assistant platform that will underpin future app development…
What’s less certain is the velocity of this progress.
Today’s LLMs face real challenges due to constraints like context window lengths and the need for pinpoint accuracy, making the development of these assistants tough. The coding for an entire app doesn’t fit within the current context windows, preventing an LLM from grasping it all at once. Plus, there’s the fact that writing executable code demands a much higher precision than crafting solid marketing text.
But the speed of progress is astonishing.
Databutton
We started Databutton to empower people to create, despite their lack of coding skills and despite their constraints. That mission has never been more important or more within reach. The dawning no-code revolution and our mission are a perfect fit. Thus, with Databutton we aim to enable an ever growing number of creators to put their ideas to life.
Today, we enable people with some technical skills to build AI enabled apps from idea to distributed app. Tomorrow we will enable anyone, regardless of technical skills.
Are you interested in making your AI app ideas a reality? Sign up at www.databutton.com and let us know what you think on Discord.
