Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

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Actually the cloud does just magically design and run a backend for your application. This is what Etsy, Ebay, Amazon Marketplace, Alibaba, and the smaller players in this space really do - they provide no-code solutions for people who want to sell goods and services and don't care about web technology.

This has been happening for decades now. Even in 2000 you could pay a hosting company $not-much to give you a basic templated site hooked into a payment server. It didn't work all that well, but it worked well enough to provide the commodity service most small business owners wanted.

I still see people saying "You can't automate this" - when magic AI automation isn't even needed to do the job and the job is already being done.

Of course this kind of no-code won't build you a complete startup. But how often do you really need a complete bespoke startup? For a lot of business ideas a no-code service with some simple customisation and a very basic content engine is all that's needed.

You do not need docker etc for any of this. Or at least, you don't need to deal with docker personally for any of this - just as you don't need to deal with your web host's VM technology.

So while I don't completely agree with OP, I think it's astoundingly naive to believe that the current level of hyper-complexity cannot possibly be shaken out.

In fact current stack traditions are almost comically vulnerably to disruption - maybe not this year, but I would be amazed if the landscape hasn't started to change within ten years.

I think it's difficult to say how many merchants went from hosting their own e-commerce site that engineers built for them from scratch, and transitioned to Etsy, Ebay, etc., laying off the developers they hired in the process. Without numbers to back myself up, I would say that there are certainly many more developers and engineers working on E-Commerce today than ten or twenty years ago. Services like Stripe certainly help businesses focus less on setting up common parts of a website or online business, but that just leaves people more time to focus on the "business logic" that is unique to them.

The "current stack" may certainly be ripe for disruption. But I'd predict that rather than put developers out of work, it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold who may not have had the resources for developing their own solutions beforehand. There will always be companies with the resources to demand custom solutions to fit their particular business needs.

>> it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold

When we look at various platforms, we see that big business and startups are extracting all of the repeatable, low-risk tasks of most businesses(supply chain, customer service(bots), manufacturing(on demand), design(partially automated design services) etc), leaving businesses to do mostly marketing and betting on products/services, and getting less of the rewards.

So what we end up seeing, is either less small businesses(i think kaufmann institute showed stats about that), or tiny companies with almost everything outsourced - and tiny companies usually require little custom internal software(they often use their supplier IT system).

I think this is covered by the GP's point about history. Each era in the history of software has automated many things that would have required lower-level custom development before. But this has never resulted in less demand for software. Rather, people have always upgraded their expectations and demanded even more powerful software. It sounds to me like you're saying the demand will go down, but I doubt it because that's never happened before.

Of course if there were some breakthrough on the supply side and we could automate the software dev process itself, which I guess is what the article is saying, that would change everything. But that's beyond a silver bullet, that's a silver spaceship. So I doubt that too, and the GP's right to point out that every generation has had its version of this prediction also.

> But how often do you really need a complete bespoke startup?

You don't always. But if you can identify software deficiencies and fix them, that is an advantage. You don't even have to be a "startup". I work for a company that has opened a wide variety of "lifestyle" businesses with the angle of "we can build simple software targeted towards our problem that makes us run more efficiently than the competitors". And it has worked pretty well, at least for the past 20 years or so.

But you need to include tech in the high level decision making process. Which means you need at least one person competent in both business and technology so that you can properly weigh business needs vs technical difficulty.

With HIPAA, PII, and other regulations I'm not so sure that no-code solutions are the future. There is a lot of nuance in what businesses want. Plugins to WordPress may be an intermediate example, though very quickly one is approaching programming by configuration, theming, or assortment of plugins. And Darwin help you if things go sideways.

On the other hand, why would I want to code to those regulations? Seems like a good way to mess something up and get sued.

A no-code site that meets spec and transfers liability would be great.

Is it possible to outsource liability though? For example of a hospital chooses a vendor without even looking for HIPAA compliance then can they really claim they're not liable when their use of the vendor's service runs afoul of the rules?

Smart vendors will learn what their customers (the hospital) liabilities is, and handle it for them, and charge them money for it. (To go a step further, the vendor could offer insurance on it, or make it part of the sales contract.)

Stripe does this for PCI. You sign up, use their toolkit, and then PCI is just handled for you. There are some no-code solutions using Stripe as the backend. That is not be a legal transfer of liability, but it's a level of exposure that the lawyers are comfortable with.

Also importantly; HIPAA is not PCI and not all regulations are created equal. Clicking a few buttons to setup a website, and then clicking a few more, in order to accept money and take credit cards is a far cry from setting up the IT infrastructure for an entire hospital.

>... and not all regulations are created equal.

Which is why I doubt no-code solutions will prosper since needs and regulations vary so much that they'll be either so many different solutions or monsters to configure.

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