[danpalmer]

That's great if you're building an internal tool, and in fact we use the Django Admin site for this, there exist low-code/no-code tools like Retool for things like this, it's a great type of solution.

Where this breaks down is anything customer facing, like Hey (the product Hotwire was built for), Basecamp, or things like Thread the product I work on. These products aren't forms, or CMSs, and trying to fit them into those sorts of solutions results in a bad or counter-intuitive user experience, even if somewhere deep down these are essentially "CRUD" applications.

[mistersys]

I understand your point here, but I think we're a couple of innovations away from dramatically reducing the cost of UI development.

The state of the art for web and mobile app development is a delicate stack of tools that require a lot of expertise to wield. However, if you pay attention, most the complexity of modern UI development is accidental, not fundamental.

Figma already has "auto-layout", which is essentially flexbox. Imagine a world where your designer just builds your whole app with in Figma with flexbox-like constraints, then they hand off to your developer who just writes a couple of snippets code to wire it up to a database and makes sure the elements are configured to be SEO friendly.

IMO developers dramatically underestimate the power of GUI tools to usurp their role because we think in terms of such low level tools.

[danpalmer]

Oh yeah that is absolutely a direction I can see this going. But that's enabling completely custom UI/UX and behaviours per screen. It's the form-builder style generic tools that I think have limited uses in consumer software.