I think this view is really short-sighted. Low-code tools date back to the '80s, and the more likely outcome here is that low-code and agentic tools simply merge.

There's a lot of value in having direct manipulation and visual introspection of UIs, data, and logic. Those things allow less technical people to understand what the agents are creating, and ask for help with more specific areas.

The difficulty in the past has been 1) the amount of work it takes to build good direct manipulation tools - the level of detail you need to get to is overwhelming for most teams attempting it - but LLMs themselves make this a lot easier to build, and 2) what to do when users hit the inevitable gaps in your visual system. Now LLMs fill these gaps pretty spectacularly.

This makes the most sense to me too. My feeling is so-called AI is going to deliver on a lot of the things we're used to having shoddy versions of -- good natural language interfaces, good WYSIWYG type tools, all of this could turn the wix/squarespace/wordpress/etc landscape into something pretty good, rather than just OK.

In my most hopeful of futures, we've figured out how to do lightweight inference, and if the models don't run locally at least they aren't harming the planet, and all this AI tooling hydrates all the automation projects of the last 40 years so that my favorite tiny local music label can have a super custom online shop that works exactly the way they need without having to sacrifice significant income to do it.

I agree. I think that once your LLM hits a baseline level of computer science / programming "understanding" it can pretty easily work with whatever language. Using narrow DSLs and low code platforms could be a great way to constraint an LLM and keep it on the happy path.

Mendix is nothing more than MS Access for the Web.

> There's a lot of value in having direct manipulation and visual introspection of UIs, data, and logic. Those things allow less technical people to understand what the agents are creating, and ask for help with more specific areas.

A lot of value indeed, but not just for less technical people. Imagine ddd vs gdb. Usually some kind of visual debugging aid isn’t available in an environment because the ROI isn’t there, not because technical people love mental parsing or hate graphics. The LLM revolution is changing the calculus here: creating new tools and new visualizations is easier than ever. It would be unthinkable three years ago to create a visual debugging aid just to use it once, outside of truly gnarly and show-stopping bugs; now it could very well be feasible.

Anything no-code or low code has a data model, and an agent can manipulate it in ways that are compatible with the system design. Letting an agent loose on a problem, without a good pilot, just leads to poor designs.