[PinkPigeon]

I've recently been building a business directory using Bubble.io. It took me about half a day to do tutorials and another half day playing around just to learn the platform. After that, I was able to build this business directory, including Stripe payment integration, some reasonably advanced Google Maps and search / categorisation functionality.

Building the same thing from scratch would have taken me two weeks or so.

I am saying this as someone whose main job is providing a CMS, so I am familiar with having to create a simple enough interface for non-technical users to use my CMS.

Hats off to Bubble.io for achieving such a usable interface for being able to knock up an app this quickly.

At the same time it is clear that some actions which would be painfully simple to perform in code take a lot of clever thinking and hacks to convince bubble.io to do it.

It also won't scale and if it breaks for no reason, it'll be nearly impossible to fix it.

If it doesn't provide a certain bit of functionality, you have to add your own CSS / JS and that's where it becomes clear that my extensive knowledge in web development contributed to my ability to use this no-code tool a lot.

Ultimately, I think a no-code tool can be a great way to enable programmers to build things quickly, but I think the ability to think like a programmer is still worth learning.

I'd be surprised if these tools could replace anyone building complex applications in the near future.