Practice · 2018–2025 · Platform Wars
Low-code will replace eng
Drag-and-drop apps for the enterprise backlog. Useful for internal tools; fantasy as a full replacement for engineering — a pitch later absorbed by AI demos.
How Low-code will replace eng mutated
Low-code mutated internal tooling by letting ops build what IT queued for quarters. It failed as engineer replacement because edge cases, integrations, and governance always need code. By 2025 the "replace eng" narrative migrated to copilots and vibe coding; the same limits remain.
Case studies
Patterns
Compare with
Related
Framework · 2023–now
LLM app frameworks
LangChain-class glue mutated into MCP clients and thin wrappers around vendor APIs. The durable pieces are still boring: evals, retrieval, and product UX.
Practice · 2021–now
AI pair programming
Coding agents that edit the repo — now table stakes. Generation outran review capacity; ownership is the bottleneck.
Practice · 2024–now
Vibe coding
Accept AI output on feel, skip the diff, hope tests exist. Fast demos; CVEs and nobody owns the middleware.
$ Ship-to-prod without reading the diff became a flex until incidents revealed nobody knew which prompt wrote the auth middleware. Review debt arrived in one weekend demo.
Practice · 2023–now
Shadow AI / paste-into-ChatGPT
Prod data into consumer chat because the approved tool is slow. GDPR with better autocomplete.
$ Employees routed tickets, logs, and customer PII through consumer chat before InfoSec finished procurement. Compliance scramble followed the demos.