> So in an ideal world, what we need is tools that have a effort/complexity curve that is both visible, and looks like this:

[ Sigmoid curve image ]

Well... if we're just making things up, what we want is tools that have an effort/complexity curve that is just flat, at pretty much zero.

You can't do that though right? It's obviously impossible to make a programming language / system in which the effort doesn't scale in some fashion to the complexity of the task.

What the people selling no-code solutions are selling though, is the idea that a sigmoid like curve, or linear curve, or something might be possible, or maybe already is possible.

...but that is just made up.

It isn't possible with any current systems.

It's not clear that it's possible at all to have a system that works that way.

> The other main problem is how do you avoid the making complexity more expensive?

> This is less obvious.

It *certainly* is less obvious.

Honestly, it's probably provable that it's not possible to have something where the effort is asymptotically bounded as complexity approaches infinity. Fundamentally.

I'm not convinced that any current efforts in 'no-code' display a degree of realism toward approaching that problem at all.

The only real efforts in this space are currently:

- rust.

By having a very complex, very rigid type system, you can reduce the complexity of extremely complex systems (parallel computation) to being slightly less complex. It appears to scale reasonably well. It's not friendly, or easy, and requires rigid discipline that is enforced by the tooling. This is not a no-code solution, and the solution does not scale to no-code contexts.

- copilot.

By generating code based on simple high-level requirements, you can amortize the complexity cost by up-front spend in computational cost in the training and inference steps. This scales to low-code environments. The maintainability and cost effectiveness
of the solution are questionable, but this is probably the single closest no-code solution in play at the moment.

It's probably still several years away from being available and reliable enough to use for non-programmers, but this is an extremely promising direction of research.

- excel

Excel is the workhorse of the business. Simple coding approachable for numeric purposes (eg. accountants) has scaled well to general
note taking with light-weight coding for business purposes.

This is probably the most successful no-code solution out there, and really it's quite excellent. However, due to network effects, it's reasonably unlikely any other no-code solutions will succeed in this space.

Personally, the no-code solutions I've used have been pretty much: Build once, maintain never, you'll be ok as long as you don't try to do anything hard or custom. It'll be a constant work in progress until it gets too complex, at which point you will either throw it away and start again or commission a 'real' app based off of it.

...maybe that's ok.

I think, 'bin it, start again and you'll get 80% of the way there in a few days of prototyping' is as good as these tools will ever get, and maybe that's all most people need.

We'll see. Maybe AI generated code will revolutionize this space... but, I'm pretty sure none of the other efforts I've seen in it will.

They're all dead ends, that have been tried before, and failed before.