I've worked with Microsoft PowerApps and evaluated Mendix, Outsystems, and ServiceNow. Low code will certainly be a part of the fortune 500 landscape, similar

I've worked with Microsoft PowerApps and evaluated Mendix, Outsystems, and ServiceNow. Low code will certainly be a part of the fortune 500 landscape, similar to how BPM (Business Process Management) and other visual tools have been used for decades. They work best when processes are relatively simple, and just need a little bit of "glue" between pre-built systems. The users are often semi-technical, sometimes called "Technical Architect" or "Programmer/Analyst" and they often work directly with the final users to document and implement the requirements. The issues I've seen with low code are: 1. Most users are unable to decompose their requirements into discrete steps - a Business Analyst is still needed to do this work. Low code can be useful here, but the BA role is usually extended to do the work. Vendors claim low-code reduces the need for this position, but it does not. 2. The resulting work flows are often quite brittle and hard to maintain. For example, it is often easier to rebuild a MS Power Automate flow from scratch than to substantially modify an existing one. 3. Technical debt is also very real for visual diagrams. There are little to no refactoring tools on these platforms, and even simple business flows can rapidly become hard to read and update (much harder than code in fact) As the process becomes more complex, code becomes much easier to maintain than these visual tools. 4. Visual flows are really pure procedural code - there no meaningful way to do object oriented or functional programming on these. This can rapidly lead to "spaghetti flows", the visual equivalent to "spaghetti code". 5. Speed and scale are still issues - all of these are slow and choke on even medium sized datasets. Tuning can be difficult because they often hide the underlying data system. 6. The platforms are very proprietary and very expensive. For that money, you can recruit and train several engineers on modern open web standards and frameworks and the long term team productivity will be much larger. If these platform were sufficient for scalable rapid general development, FANNG companies would be using them instead of paying expensive custom developers. These tools can certainly be useful in some contexts, but I expect it to displace precisely zero software dev/engineering jobs in the long run. Visual tools have been tried and failed many times in the last 50 years. To me, research in next generation computer languages is much more compelling.