The classic Mythical Man Month makes a crucial distinction between "accidental" and "essential" complexity. Accidental complexity is stuff that it is in your solution, but is not necessary. For example, you added a layer of abstraction that ultimately isn't necessary and doesn't have benefits outweighing the costs. Essential complexity is intrinsic to the problem itself. For example, if you write software to help you file your taxes, you have a certain fundamental amount of complexity that no amount of clever code can get you around, because the problem itself is complicated.
One of the core errors of the most breathless low-/no-code advocacy is that they clearly see that code as it stands today is very complicated, but they think it's all accidental complexity. If we just did the right things... if we just made it easy enough... if we just had the right visual user interface... all this complexity could go away! And then anyone could code! And lo, Utopia would emerge.
There is a grain of truth in this. Code does have accidental and unnecessary complexity. Some traditions and codebases have more, some have less. The low-/no-code approaches can help with this... though I have to qualify it a bit because at times they add their own accidental complexity to problems that traditional approaches don't. But they can be easier sometimes, certainly.
The problem is that even a hypothetically perfect low-/no-code solution with absolutely zero accidental complexity still wouldn't do anything to eliminate the essential complexity of the problems people want solved. I don't care how amazing your no-code UI is. I don't care how visual it is, and how you can grab any 12-year-old off the street and show them your UI and they can grasp everything that's going on. I don't care how much work you put into it. If someone tries to use it to create a tax preparation service, they are going to ram face first into the brick wall of the essential complexity of the problem.
No matter what you do, there are going to be people in the future who have developed a skill set in dealing with that sort of thing, and it isn't going to be a skillset everyone develops to the same degree. Even if you stipulate a domain expert who knows literally everything about the tax code, it will still be a distinct skill to learn how to explain that correctly to a computer, even a zero-accidental-complexity computer.
It is further inevitable that the people dedicated to that will have their own toolset that tunes the expertise and power level to the fact that they are able to pour more time into developing skills that have a longer-term payoff than people who are "programming" for six hours a year.
It is literally impossible for low-/no-code to take over. Even if I pushed a magic button that replaced everything in the world with low-/no-code solutions right now, the world would still bifurcate into the people who further develop their skills with the system, learn how to use it efficiently and effectively, and people who do other things like build houses, provide clean water, etc. The only way to make it so there is no such thing as a "programmer" is to forcibly cap the capability of the universal low-/no-code system so low that there is no way to become better at it, which is just inconceivable.
Everything you said would happen, I saw happpen. I literally witnessed this.
I started my career at a company that sold a graphical programming product. It's exactly the typical "no code" thing described elsewhere. Nodes and edges to implement Ifs, Loops, actions, subroutine calls, etc.
We sold this to customers but also had an in house professional services type department that used it. Those folks were indeed at a whole nother level with that tool and knew all kinds of tricks and had developed special scripts to transform the XML formatted files that the "programs" were saved in, etc. They had developed a long slew of best practices to try to tame some of the problems of the tool.
Then someone added a "execute arbitrary javascript" action and it was open season on everything...
I think when I left someone was working on a linter!
I venture the opinion that the overwhelming majority of the complexity on most current software is accidental. It's the kind of share that you measure in 9s, not on raw percentage.
Some stack that avoids all that complexity would be technically "low-code". But the format of the low-code stacks people push around today is incompatible with general development, and doesn't actually make most of the complexity go away.
Perfect way to say it, yes. It's a mirage in the desert that we'll be chasing forever, because to the business stakeholder's eyes, the water is just right there over that hill.
One of the core errors of the most breathless low-/no-code advocacy is that they clearly see that code as it stands today is very complicated, but they think it's all accidental complexity. If we just did the right things... if we just made it easy enough... if we just had the right visual user interface... all this complexity could go away! And then anyone could code! And lo, Utopia would emerge.
There is a grain of truth in this. Code does have accidental and unnecessary complexity. Some traditions and codebases have more, some have less. The low-/no-code approaches can help with this... though I have to qualify it a bit because at times they add their own accidental complexity to problems that traditional approaches don't. But they can be easier sometimes, certainly.
The problem is that even a hypothetically perfect low-/no-code solution with absolutely zero accidental complexity still wouldn't do anything to eliminate the essential complexity of the problems people want solved. I don't care how amazing your no-code UI is. I don't care how visual it is, and how you can grab any 12-year-old off the street and show them your UI and they can grasp everything that's going on. I don't care how much work you put into it. If someone tries to use it to create a tax preparation service, they are going to ram face first into the brick wall of the essential complexity of the problem.
No matter what you do, there are going to be people in the future who have developed a skill set in dealing with that sort of thing, and it isn't going to be a skillset everyone develops to the same degree. Even if you stipulate a domain expert who knows literally everything about the tax code, it will still be a distinct skill to learn how to explain that correctly to a computer, even a zero-accidental-complexity computer.
It is further inevitable that the people dedicated to that will have their own toolset that tunes the expertise and power level to the fact that they are able to pour more time into developing skills that have a longer-term payoff than people who are "programming" for six hours a year.
It is literally impossible for low-/no-code to take over. Even if I pushed a magic button that replaced everything in the world with low-/no-code solutions right now, the world would still bifurcate into the people who further develop their skills with the system, learn how to use it efficiently and effectively, and people who do other things like build houses, provide clean water, etc. The only way to make it so there is no such thing as a "programmer" is to forcibly cap the capability of the universal low-/no-code system so low that there is no way to become better at it, which is just inconceivable.