People have been building low code or modular software components for decades - at all layers of the software stack- eg compilers, languages, frameworks, libraries, components, platforms, extensions, you name it..

Just some examples over the years

Odoo, flutter, eclipse, enterprise java beans, wpf, n8n, package manager based approaches, microsoft power apps, app builders, supabase,

Which one is ikea?

software is an abstract quantity dependent on nothing but human whim, tech progress, and popularity and cost to build, and changes year over year - you cannot build a ikea like collection or library of components when everything changes year over year like a house or sand and no one agrees on anything

Now if you could pick and choose a few things and have a CRUD app maybe -but most people have reqs that need specific workflowsand that breaks the analogy

To me, AI iteration is biggest revolution of the past few years- ai might allow fuzzy modifications to largely built stacks to work something like an ikea style approach

Yes AI solves this issue in the best way. It's really good at adding features that have already been built many times, but in a way that's customized to your needs and code style.