Not long ago we were working with a healthcare startup that was using Retool, a “low code” application, as part of their stack. I had seen a demo of Retool before, but I never had the chance to work with it closely.

Our client initially hoped that the engineering team could build components in Retool that might then be used by non-technical staff to assemble various intake forms. When we arrived on the scene, they were valiantly trying to make it work, but the speed at which they were required to iterate made it extremely difficult to create the right set of shared components. As a result, the engineering team was spending significant amounts of time coding and very little was able to be done by non-technical staff. The savings promised by “low code” never materialized.

After this experience, I believed that low code tooling could be useful in a very limited capacity, but I wasn’t terribly impressed by its potential.

Fast forward a year or so. As part of an engagement with a client in the market research space, we were working with their engineering team to iterate on a customer-facing web application.

In the midst of all this, the founder asked a former colleague with analytics experience if they could put together a prototype of a data dashboard, parallel to the engineering team’s efforts. Within a day or two they had created a fully functioning prototype using Bubble.io, a no-code application.

I was surprised with the speed with which they had managed to build the prototype. I wasn’t familiar with Bubble, however, and assumed, based on my experience with Retool, that they wouldn’t be able to do much more with it than crank out a few clunky prototypes.

I was wrong. They went on to quickly build out functionality in the new application that matched, and then surpassed, the existing site. With no coding experience at all they managed to release in a couple of months what had taken an experienced engineering team over a year. I quickly dug into Bubble and began to understand just how powerful no-code/low-code tools had become, and how badly my bias for writing code had blinded me to the possibilities.

For over a decade our teams have used prototyping tools like InVision and Figma to rapidly test high-fidelity prototypes and conserve engineering resources. However, since we’ve realized that no-and-low-code tools like Bubble can be used to build full-featured, durable applications, we have incorporated them into our toolbox for use on projects for proofs of concept and MVPs to save time and money.

Coding is still incredibly useful, but for many problems it’s no longer the only, or even the best, solution. Low-code/no-code tools are likely to rapidly improve and solidify their position as powerful options for application development.