It's like excel. Yes excel is used for all sorts of messy things its not ideal for, and would be better built by a programmer. But the excel file teaches the developer what their co workers actually need the product to do. It's not wasted time, it's invaluable.
Of course, that's a management issue - but managers who are easily taken in by consultancy sweet talk about the power of these frameworks are not always the most likely to understand the problems they cause or have the wisdom or resources to clean up afterwards by doing what you suggest.
Projects that start at an empty white board are much harder, which scope creep and higher failure rates
I mean I get what you're saying but finding one senior dev and onboarding him into the business and using him as a litmus test for most of your ideas as your concept evolves seems like the more sensible and cheaper option.
The no-code could easily fall into the same category, as valuable hashing-out process.
Any "proper programmer" should know this.
They seem to be talking about building real production systems using no-code.
Building a prototype using no-code can be faster (at least in some cases) than coding them. Esp. if you consider the cross-org coordination needed to get an allocation for dev team.
Needless to say the Rube Goldberg machine of Zaps was impossible to debug and all the data and metrics ended up being wrong for the whole quarter.
We ripped it all out and had to start fresh.
And those "few months of wins" can mean millions of dollars in revenue for the business that would have been lost with a longer time to market. If it works, it works. And if it breaks, it can be plugged up until something can replace it. But nothing can replace lost time in a competitive industry.
My first job out of university was to work on a compliance tool after someone used yahoo finance for exchange rates in a business critical spreadsheet. The losses were large enough to threaten the viability of the company.
Picking pennies in front of steamrolles is a pretty good description of putting no code in production.