Around the middle of last year, much was made of GPT-3 AI coding bots that can take a short description and
generate the code for you. These are just starting to turn into
useful products, mostly to help developers code faster through autocomplete. This hasnāt made it to non-technical users yet⦠but it might just be a matter of time.
Mostly, there are two main bottlenecks to no-codeās continued growth. On the one hand, non-technical folks donāt really know how they want their product to behave. On the other hand, no-code tools like Bubble still require a considerable amount of technical knowledge to use.Ā
As new products focus into smaller and smaller niches, there will be opportunities for āall in oneā tools to arise. You can hook up 5 different SaaS tools with Zapier, for example, or you can do the same job with
Outseta right out of the box. So vertical SaaS isnāt going away, but itās led to new opportunities for ābusiness-in-a-boxā software ā which you can now increasingly build with no-code tools, too.
The cutting edge of software will always outpace the cutting edge of what you can do with no-code tools. This makes sense: You need to be able to create a website in the first place before you can make it point-and-click. No-code tools are still built with code.
But there are more and more opportunities to build new platforms using platforms like Bubble. Bubble is one of the first platforms that gives you the same infinite possibilities as code, without code. The problem is, youāve still got to learn the concepts.
For this reason, I think weāll see a lot more purpose-built, all-in-one platforms like Outseta that abstract away the complex stuff. Weāll also see a lot more ābuilding blocksā products, which make it easier to create these āall-in-oneā products. And so on, in a self-reinforcing loop, until thereās an all-in-one software for everything and a pre-made building block for every aspect of it. Maybe thatās when GPT-3 will really become useful.
Another issue is that all these ābuilding blocksā are proprietary, with their own APIs you have to learn plus the ever-present risk of being cut off or charged for access. Zapier helps, but itās not all-powerful. Thereās opportunity here too (cough cough, Web 3??).