As a high-end skill, programming has always been synonymous with high-income high-tech. Recently, with the explosion of ChatGPT in the world, the WYSIWYG low-code development mode of "drag and drop" through the window in the past has faced a deeper impact under the spoiler of smarter and lower-cost AI .
A low-code platform is a tool for developing software applications that enables users to create applications using a graphical user interface, drag-and-drop operations, and minimal programming knowledge. With a visual development approach, developers of all experience levels can efficiently create web and mobile applications using pre-built components and model-driven logic.
To some extent, ChatGPT and AI-driven coding-specific technologies can handle some of the same tasks as low-code tools, both of which can automatically generate customized codes based on user requests. AI tools such as ChatGPT may help non-technical users and professional software developers who need to generate code quickly, and low-code vendors cater to these groups.
While AI tools like ChatGPT excel at language processing and natural language understanding, they still cannot fully replace low-code platforms. The reason is that the key functions of many low-code platforms, AI services are still difficult to achieve well.
Low-code tools provide a visual interface to help users quickly design and develop applications, and how to better organize and integrate application components during the application design process. Although ChatGPT can also generate code to implement specific parts of the application, it still lacks the ability to build these functions into a unified application architecture or allow users to freely choose the functional elements required by the application.
Compared with the two, low-code tools allow users to look at the application as a whole, expand the multi-faceted possibilities of application design from a macro perspective, and improve the ease of use and accessibility of the application.
In terms of code integration, a general-purpose generative AI platform such as ChatGPT can only write a certain function point in an application, and users need to combine these function points by themselves to make it a complete application. In this mode, most non-technical users will not be able to complete the professional operation of integrating code, while professional developers can complete this integration, but this also means that the speed advantage of using AI to develop applications will be greatly weakened.
In contrast, the low-code development platform itself is a complete basic framework composed of a large number of application components. Users simply select the desired functionality on the platform and the tool automatically integrates it. At the same time, users can also use low-code scripts to achieve high-scalability and seamless integration across systems, allowing developers to focus on core business logic development.
The low-code platform also has standardized coding, professional architecture, stable and efficient underlying layer, and one-stop license management service to ensure that application compliance requirements are met and help companies easily deal with copyright and intellectual property issues. Based on the low-code platform for development, components have unified rules and specifications, which can greatly improve software quality and software stability.
In contrast, ChatGPT and other general-purpose AI systems cannot guarantee the same stability of the generated code. ChatGPT and similar technologies rely in part on open source code for training, but the developers who developed the code did not authorize the training process, so some people think that these AI tools violate the open source license.
While ChatGPT has many shortcomings in terms of functionality, it may not be able to completely replace low-code development tools in most organizations in the short term. However, it has significant advantages in fields such as natural language processing and dialogue generation. In fact, AI is more likely to serve as a powerful supplement to low-code platforms to jointly promote intelligent and efficient software development.