No Code is Better than Code
This article is a follow-up to my previous article, where I publicly let go of Jams.
In that article, I mentioned that No Code is Better than Code.
There are two teams at play here: Team Code is King, and Team No-Code Tools all the way.
Software engineers are artists
For decades, I was part of the former. That’s right; I used to craft websites, apps, and anything else I needed from scratch by hand, just like a painter.
In fact, software engineers and developers are artists. They like their tools and always look for the fanciest and most shiny ones for their next projects. At least, that was my case and the case of most of the people I have worked and collaborated with in my 15-year career so far.
Marketers and Designers should own It
In 2017, after launching Hackages, I hired my first marketing person, Liesbeth. When she joined the company, our website was a well-crafted, delicate piece of software built by the internal team.
It took the team 2 to 3 months to put that website together. Everything was fancy: GraphQL, React with hooks, TypeScript, AWS, Styled Components, and others I can’t recall. This was in 2017 when most of these tools were starting up or not well known in Belgium, where I lived.
Mind you. It was just a Website!
Liesbeth wanted to launch a few marketing campaigns to create visibility for our services: Workshops, Consulting, and Events. Every single change she wanted to bring to the website was painfully integrated. We needed someone technically minded to change anything. She couldn’t do much. She even wanted to quit since nothing was fluid and dynamic.
Later, I brought on board a designer who had an amazing experience with Figma and Webflow, Achraf.
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It took 3 days
Achraf was part of the No Code tools team. After spending a few hours with him discussing the requirements for our new website, he came up a few days later with a Figma design. We iterate over the design for a week maximum. 3 days later, we had a new website with an integrated CMS so the marketing team could run campaigns at will.
The Marketing team could now run campaigns without the need for developers.
The website was in the hands of the marketer and the designer. The No-Code team got the best of everything.
This is not an isolated case. There are applications today that don’t require code at all.
Prototyping your idea with a tool like Figma will probably take longer than building the applications.
How about AI?
With the rise of AI tools, building applications with or without code is becoming even faster. In 2024, we’re not at the stage where you can completely let go of code. That might never happen, actually.
Code is expensive. Each line of code adds complexity to the whole application.
In 2024, you can build an MVP in just a week or two, validate it with your potential customers and iterate quickly to find PMF (Product Market Fit)
Like painters, software engineers love their craft. It’s their hammer, and we defer to it whenever we see a problem.
At Hackages, we combine both approaches to build products. An MVP in less than 2 weeks, and we iterate quickly to find PFM. We only defer to code if needed.