> That’s why we don’t believe in low/no-code tools: they get you to 50% of what you want quickly, but you generally aren’t able to customize the last 50%, and have to build from scratch to get to an ideal outcome.
Agree - low-code software has tons of problems that all stem from things not being expressible in code (hard to version control, hard to do code reviews, too much vendor lock-in, etc).
It's interesting to see Retool say this in a blog post, since their core offering (the UI builder) is built as a proprietary low-code platform with an underlying domain-specific language. I co-founded a company called Airplane.dev which takes a much more code-based approach to building UIs, workflows, and other internal tools due to these pain points with existing low-code platforms.
With this launch it seems like Retool is taking some design cues from Airplane (or maybe just independently coming to the same conclusions). We've had a code-based Workflow/Cron tool for about a year now. I'm excited to play with Retool's version and see how it compares.
> Sometimes it's faster to solve a problem with a few lines of code. All Workflows blocks are code at their core, so you can always use dot notation to pull up autocomplete menus, trigger queries with /, and expand blocks to larger IDEs.
Excited to see this! I am quite fed up with pure no-code software. I love the idea of being able to write code so I can fully control what's happening.
Agree - low-code software has tons of problems that all stem from things not being expressible in code (hard to version control, hard to do code reviews, too much vendor lock-in, etc).
It's interesting to see Retool say this in a blog post, since their core offering (the UI builder) is built as a proprietary low-code platform with an underlying domain-specific language. I co-founded a company called Airplane.dev which takes a much more code-based approach to building UIs, workflows, and other internal tools due to these pain points with existing low-code platforms.
With this launch it seems like Retool is taking some design cues from Airplane (or maybe just independently coming to the same conclusions). We've had a code-based Workflow/Cron tool for about a year now. I'm excited to play with Retool's version and see how it compares.