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..
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
The inherent problem of constant attentiveness being extremely challenging means that most relevant authorities say a life guard should not be on duty for more than an hour at a time, and they should have at least 15 minutes break between those hour shifts.
Even with those minds are going to wander (or there will be distractions - people asking for directions, etc) but there are multiple failsafes: there's generally more than one life guard, being distracted for a few seconds is not a failure (a life guard is having to scan a significant area so they don't have 100% awareness of 100% of their zone at once, so there's always potentially significant delay between something going wrong for someone, and a life guard seeing it), and the time to catastrophic failure is measured in (contextually) significant amounts of time.
The issue with self driving cars, as they are currently set up, is that they say "the car will do everything" and it does, but they then say "however the driver is still in control of the vehicle so if a crash happens it was the drivers fault for not paying sufficient attention".
In the pilot case: there are periods of flight where the pilot is doing very little for extended periods, but those are all at altitude, and the time from "something went wrong" to "it is irrecoverable" (in non-aircraft failure modes) is remarkably large (at least to me - my mental model was always 'something went wrong, it's seconds to crashing' until I binged air crash documentaries and even if they're trying it takes a long time to go from cruising altitude to 0). There are also modes where the pilots must always react immediately, whether or not they were distracted, or if they were focused but on a completely different task, but those modes are all close to "this alert occurs->reflexively do a specific action before you even know why".
Attentiveness is a real problem for long haul train traffic and multiple accidents have occurred because of it (or the loss of it), and there are many things they've tried to do to prevent the exact same problem that self driving cars introduce, and they simply do not work. At least for trains you can in principle (those the US seemingly does not) use safety cut offs such that a train that is not responding correctly to signals is halted automatically regardless of the engineers and operators. What companies frequently try to do is add variations of dead controller switches (similar to the eye tracking in "self driving" cars), but for the same reason that attentiveness is an issue in multiple hours of no operation those switches get circumvented (brains don't like to focus on a single thing while not actually doing anything for hours, muscles don't like being constantly in a single stress point for hours).
> Filesystem bugs that silently corrupt your data will also get synced and backed up
This is a very easy problem to solve: don't do incremental backups. Or have N backups and rotate, which isn't as good but still gives you more time to notice. Hard drives are cheap.
My guess -- Microsoft wasn’t excited about the company structure - the for-profit portion subject to the non-profit mission. Microsoft/Altman structured the deal with OpenAI in a way that cements their access regardless of the non-profit’s wishes. Altman may not have shared those details with the board and they freaked out and fired him. They didn’t disclose to Microsoft ahead of time because they were part of the problem.
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..