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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

> * the workflows are poorly if at all documented.

Ideally it would be easier to understand if there's less code involved. Things should be more declarative, or the low-code solutions would generate good descriptions for what is actually happening.

> * the work is still 100% done by engineers either way, I've never seen a low code or DSL be picked up by non-engineers. (I am also skeptical towards DSLs)

Or worse: "Why does this connection to this server fail with SSL Certifcate Invalid? Oh, nm, we'll just uncheck the SSL validation box."

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“Ideally” is quite a word, highly subjective.

But really you are missing a key piece of the puzzle, it matters less what is happening and more why. Sure a low code tool could churn out a textual description to say if the value of some variable is < some threshold branch to X else branch to Y, but thats generally easy to figure out, why is that threshold important, that’s a question that requires understanding the intention of the user of engineer who set it up, that’s not something you can just puke out of an auto-doc tool.

I would go so far as to say the inability to capture intention is one of the sharpest edges for low-code tools, it makes the solutions built on then extremely brittle and creates silos of knowledge.

Expanding on that further this is why most auto generated documentation is worth the effort put into it.

All programming languages are some sort of abstraction to the underlying machine language. Low code is just "one more abstraction to machine language".

Previous art in this area would be Lotus Notes (1990's), Hypercard (1980's), and Lotus 123 (1980's).

Low code should be as close to a speaking language as possible. Declarative ideally. e.g. "Create a read-write rest framework for the database table named orders".

An engineer would then go, "Oh, so you know you're missing permissions from the LDAP groups", and then solve that problem, and then figure out how make the LDAP groups map to the low code framework.

That's kinda the sorta thing we do already.

It should be easier to understand but lowcode designers seem to like making you jump between 30 different screens instead of having it all in one place. Unspooling a lowcode implementation has got to be one of my least favorite activities.

I think it would be too dense to have everything in one page. I don't remember any example of having it all in one page. Excel for example hides it all in modals.

What if you told IT months ago the reason their TLS setup is incorrect?

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