{"id":736,"date":"2023-04-13T14:57:20","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T20:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/?p=736"},"modified":"2023-04-13T14:57:20","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T20:57:20","slug":"llms-vs-low-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/2023\/04\/13\/llms-vs-low-code\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pending Collision of LLMs and No-Code\/Low-Code Platforms"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently had a couple different clients bring up the concept of “prompt engineers,” speculating on a future where engineering would be less about the creation of the code itself and more about the process of creating and curating AI-generated prompts.<\/p>\n

The framing about what these prompt engineers might theoretically do felt remarkably similar to the stories and promises we\u2019ve heard about the no-code\/low-code space, which was interesting to me.<\/p>\n

I can’t count how many developers and engineers over the years I’ve chatted with who actively distrust the outputs of no-code platforms, despite claims that it will speed and ‘democratize’ development. It’s notable that the idea of \u201cbuilding a website without ever needing to write source code\u201d has taken the world by storm when it’s being done with AI\/ML but is something we collectively tend to discount when it’s done with low-code.<\/p>\n

So what’s the difference, and what does the introduction of LLMs mean for low-code platforms?<\/p>\n

The primary justification for low-code platforms is allowing teams to move quickly from idea-to-deployment with no code input required.<\/p>\n

Given what we’ve witnessed in the last few months, it’s inarguable that AI-code generation is going to have some impact on this space. The purported and demonstrated abilities of AI to generate code (in some cases from very abstract descriptions<\/a>), create scaffolding<\/a>, help brainstorm, test and prototype<\/a>, and otherwise speed up the development process is well documented. See my colleague James Governor’s post on AI’s impact on the “revolution of idea-to-code.”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

LLM vs. low-code is not an apples-to-apples comparison. The primary difference between LLMs and low-code platforms is the output. Generally, when you tell an LLM to generate a website, it spits out actual code in an actual language that will run anywhere. When you tell a low-code platform that, it either won\u2019t (black box) or it spits out incomprehensible and\/or proprietary code that, often enough, can only be run on a single proprietary platform.<\/p>\n

There are still plenty of use cases where low-code will still be the right choice. If you’re an organization that doesn\u2019t want anything to do with infrastructure and don\u2019t care about the underlying platform, then low-code might still be the best bet.<\/p>\n

If you care about portability at all LLMs will probably be an appealing alternative.<\/p>\n

LLMs won’t take the whole market, but it seems likely they’ll take some of the growth out of the market. Existing low-code customers and their apps are unlikely to migrate, but low-code platform growth is going to become more difficult to come by. Low-code providers have reason to be concerned about their future growth prospects.<\/p>\n

\"Silhouettes<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We recently had a couple different clients bring up the concept of “prompt engineers,” speculating on a future where engineering would be less about the creation of the code itself and more about the process of creating and curating AI-generated prompts. The framing about what these prompt engineers might theoretically do felt remarkably similar to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Pending Collision of LLMs and No-Code\/Low-Code Platforms","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[40,126,127,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-llms","category-low-code","category-platforms"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}