[acoard]

Let me add to this. My viewpoint is similar to yours, and I have some anecdotal info to support this devil's advocate.

My wife was able to setup a WordPress site that sold fundraiser raffle tickets for her Rotary Club. The event was on local TV and handled a spike in traffic – thousands of ticket sales in a few hours – with no problem. This whole thing cost her less than $300, which would only get a few hours if she had to hire a dev.

I kept on telling her I was on standby and could help out, but she didn't need it once. She built the entire thing with WYSIWYG and WordPress plugins.

No-one is saying you build your tech startup with no-code WYSIWYG. But imagine if my wife's no-code skills (in her place, WordPress) became as common place as knowing Microsoft Office.

[ywei3410]

I’m skeptical of no-code solutions because every once in a while, a user does something really problematic without knowing that they do — this isn’t a criticism of the user; how can they be expected to understand, let’s say, security, if they don’t have a rudimentary understand of cryptography or client/server models?

A more physical analogy is that I do DIY — including internal wiring of the house. I’m comfortable doing that because I’ve read through the whole of the regulations and have a degree-level education in Physics and understand the risks. If a stranger asked me whether they could wire their house through Youtube videos I still wouldn’t happily say yes — even though theoretically there’s enough good information out there to wire a house.

[davnicwil]

The security example is a really interesting one because what you describe as a weakness of no-code viewed another way is a huge strength.

That is, an approach of the user not understanding these things and so deliberately going for a black box, just-works-in-exactly-this-way solution that's centrally tested, audited and maintained across the no-code platform is actually pretty great for security.

Having an understanding of how these things work, even a really good one, does not preclude mistakes if you want to do things customly - on the contrary this only ever increases the surface area for mistakes.

You might argue, and it often is argued in engineering (use the auth provided by your framework, well-trusted ecosystem libraries, etc), that it's better to just rely on known good solutions even when you do have a great understanding of the principles for this reason.

[ywei3410]

I think your counterpoint is a good one — but I would argue that it has the implicit assumption that such users will and can delegate to authority.

In my own experience this hasn’t been the case — the alternative of the user not understanding a problem is not going with an authoritative approach, but simply not to think or care about the problem.

Even when relying on ‘good’ solutions you need the requisite knowledge to judge what is good — otherwise people, engineer’s included tend to view such solutions as unnecessary. In your example, an authorization framework will have a selection of different protocols from OAuth, Basic, LDAP and so on — all of which are ‘good’. Without understand authorization and authentication could you really select between them?