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    Low-Code Platforms: Where Do They Belong?

    Visual tools drive adoption, then users build sprawling diagrams that need specialist skills and lack diffing, review and rollbacks. With AI writing good code, maybe platforms should describe and pilot software rather than be it.

    Seedtended planted 1 min read

    🌱 A rough idea, planted recently. Expect rough edges — it will grow.

    On this page

    I led the UI of a low-code workflow platform (Building a Low-Code BPMN Workflow Platform), so this is a question I keep coming back to.

    What happens

    Visual tools are a huge driver of adoption. People who’d never write a service can draw a workflow and run it. Then adoption grows, and so do the diagrams: screens full of boxes, lines and custom branches. The thing the tool was meant to replace (complex, specialist work) comes back in a new form, now needing specialised and highly unusual skills to read.

    What visual tools usually lack

    Everything we take for granted in code:

    • version control and meaningful diffs
    • peer review
    • blue/green deployments and easy rollbacks
    • reusable structure that doesn’t depend on copy-and-paste

    Where they belong now

    I don’t think the answer is “the hype is over”, but the use cases are narrowing:

    • Simple, bounded cases where the diagram stays small and the audience genuinely isn’t technical.
    • With a gear shift to code when a use case outgrows the canvas (Growing a Platform: Breadth, Depth and Gear Shifting).
    • And a new question: AI can now write well-structured, patterned code, connect reusable pieces and even discover new reusable blocks. Maybe the next goalpost isn’t visual tools that are the software, but platforms with visual dashboards that describe and pilot software, while the software itself stays as reviewable code.

    Related: Golden Paths · Internal Developer Platform · What Makes an AI Agent

    • #low-code
    • #platform-engineering
    • #workflow
    • #ai
    • #visual-tools
    • Blue-Green DeploymentSeed
      It's one of the release safety nets that visual low-code tools usually lack (Low-Code Platforms: Where Do They Belong?), and one of several ways to release in slices alongside feature flags (Growing a Platform: Breadth,…
    • Don't Read the Code? Verifying AI-Written CodeSeed
      …and good tests, which is very close to TDD as a Feedback Loop. It connects to a question I keep asking about low-code platforms: if people stop reading code, maybe the platform becomes the place where we describe and pi…
    • Growing a Platform: Breadth, Depth and Gear ShiftingGrowing
      …s a learning curve at the shift, but it's far better than halting the people who've outgrown the simple path (Low-Code Platforms: Where Do They Belong?).

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