It's not Front-End dev as a whole, just the "pushing-pixels" stuff.
There's a ton of difficult FE work (esp. state). It's just that when it comes to a lot of the "basic" styling and responsiveness there's a lot of tedious work that should be automate-able (just like any framework or library, the goal is to reduce unnecessary work, not to suggest that the work is trivial).
The difference is that Shopify and Wordpress are for well-defined solutions (shopping, blogs, landing pages), but are NOT viable for custom software applications.
100%. Key thing is finding the right abstractions where the tool does enough to provide real value, but slots neatly into your existing workflow without requiring a bunch more work to actually integrated.
I don't think low-code as a "generalized" solution will ever gain traction with developers, but has a future as small, focused tools to solve specific dev problems.
Yeah, I think Zapier is one of if not the only example I've come across in my software dev career of a low-code-type tool that devs will reach for before doing stuff by hand.
Great example of where low-code is a better alternative for a very narrow use case of development.
Low/no-code tools as replacements for devs is never going to happen.
But as an "aid" to empower developers... absolutely.
The lowest hanging fruit for a low-code solution would be in the Front-End space since you're dealing with a visual medium anyway, and because Front-End work isn't "hard" as much as it's super tedious which is generally a good target for disruptive automation.
Of course one of the big challenges will be that devs are most comfortable coding in text-heavy non-GUI environments like the IDE or terminal, and any low-code tooling that leans on a visual interface is going to struggle.
This was actually a huge problem for me at https://rapidream.com (apologies for the shameless plug). I wanted a Figma-to-React dev-tool that I could actually use on my real "day-job" projects, but designing an interface and user flow for users who don't like low-codey tooling was almost a bigger challenge then the actual tech.
Orthodox Jew here who went through the Yeshiva system (~10 years of full-time study).
If you haven't read the Bible in the original Hebrew here's an analogy: imagine the tactile, raw feel of Robert Frost, how the language he employs and the deliberate choice of words makes his poems feel as if they rhyme. Now compact all that into the extreme terseness of Emily Dickinson.
My weekly highlight is the public reading of the Prophets in the synagogue every Sabbath. The language, the rhythm, it's beautiful.
I found grpc-gateway to be overkill for what I wanted, so I wrote https://github.com/zang-cloud/grpc-json to serve Golang GRPC methods as a JSON API, no configuration required.
It's not Front-End dev as a whole, just the "pushing-pixels" stuff.
There's a ton of difficult FE work (esp. state). It's just that when it comes to a lot of the "basic" styling and responsiveness there's a lot of tedious work that should be automate-able (just like any framework or library, the goal is to reduce unnecessary work, not to suggest that the work is trivial).