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.
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
Context
Frameworks fought for the runtime
Front-end frameworks consolidated power; TypeScript became table stakes; Next and friends absorbed routing, data, and deploy gravity. Serverless and Jamstack rebranded old ideas with better CDNs, then cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. Blockchain-for-CRUD and big-bang rewrites collected dumb budgets. The winners were boring platforms with ecosystems — React gravity, Rust where systems care, Vite for greenfield bundling. The losers were narratives that skipped product-market fit or treated every App Router rewrite as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Framework · 2023–now
LLM app frameworks
LangChain-class glue gave way to vendor SDKs and thin wrappers. The durable pieces are boring: evals, retrieval, and product UX.
Practice · 2021–now
AI pair programming
Autocomplete that understands the file — 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.