I've been a huge fan of low-code. At Acquia (the Red Hat of Drupal), I heavily advocated for the acquisition of Cohesion, which became Acquia’s low-

Low-code is dead. Long live…code? How I replaced low-code by an LLM.

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2024-12-28 17:00:03

I've been a huge fan of low-code. At Acquia (the Red Hat of Drupal), I heavily advocated for the acquisition of Cohesion, which became Acquia’s low-code site builder called Site Studio. Last year, I made a 'SaaS' template using Appsmith, and continued using Appsmith for the little things to this day.

Many low-code app builders are available today, like my favorite, Appsmith, which is powerful but harder to use, and Retool, easier but less powerful.

That said, the main reason I built the saas app template in Appsmith last year is that I wasn't convinced my skills were good enough to build a full Saas app in "insert your favorite combo of Node, Next, React, Vercel, supabase, etc." I've been building websites for decades, but like many others, I moved on to other skills before I could understand those technologies fully. I can write the code, I can change it, I can architect my database, I just don't have the knowledge to understand how all of them fit together into a single package, and I don't have the time to learn it all. I can even build my code for the functionality I want, but the combo of authentication, user management, managing state, social login, etc, has always terrified me and was the number one reason I've never built a Saas app.

So I set out to see - have LLMs moved forward enough to supplant my knowledge of the basic architecture, ability to disassemble problems, and build me a Saas app? Can I use an LLM to get me started with the authentication, login, registration, social, and the basic app so I can continue myself while borrowing from the structure to build functionality?