[therealmocker]

Interesting article -- my take on low-code has always been less about how much initial development time the application takes to code, and more about how it can ease the long term maintenance of an application. With AI tooling it is going to be easy for companies to spin up hundreds of internal applications, but how are they accounting for the maintenance and support of those applications?

Think about the low-code platform as a place to host applications where many (not all) of the operational burdens long term maintenance are shifted to the platform so that developers don't have to spend as much time doing things like library upgrades, switching to X new framework because old framework is deprecated, etc..

[RyanHamilton]

Very correct! Why internal dashboards keep getting rebuild: https://www.timestored.com/pulse/why-internal-dashboards-get... It took me a few years to home in on the exact idea you've captured and I work in this exact area. There's a middle layer between UI team and notebook experiments that isn't worth companies building themselves.

[goalieca]

Auth is a pretty classic case where it’s not hard to make your own account create/login form but it’s really hard to make a good one that does all the “right things”.

[ajayvk]

Authentication and authorization are important requirements for internal tools. Low-code platforms support authn/authz for app access. Building internal tools with code is much easier now with GenAI, but ensuring proper RBAC access controls remains a challenge.

I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun to try and solve internal tooling deployment challenges. OpenRun provides a declarative deployment platform which supports RBAC access controls and auditing. OpenRun integrates with OIDC and SAML, giving your code based apps authn/authz features like low-code platforms.

[whstl]

I'd say it's relatively easy to make one that “does the right while also also the wrong things”. By wrong things I mean things that make it complicated enough to turn it insecure.

The advantage of third-party tools is that it's hard to get new features in there, so they retain their simplicity. You don't get some rando C-Level or IT guy demanding new auth features to make it messy.

[zackliscio]

This is a good example, but the build vs buy decision in this case also includes viable open source options, which become even more attractive when LLMs reduce the implementation + maintenance barriers.