Robotic coding or building agents without code still does not solve for the most important problem
Lately there has been an explosion of nocode platforms – which have taken the concept of assisted robotic coding to a different level of user friendliness. If you want to start a restaurant, the best place to start is, paradoxically, next to other popular restaurants. If you have the most expensive mobile phone in the world, it’s actual value is in the fact that billions of other people can be reached from your phone; not in the price you paid for it.
If you are building a product, your first concern should be finding customers for it and reduce distribution costs. Patrons of your fledgling restaurant will likely discover you when they visit the popular eateries next door and some day, might decide to try you out.
If you are building an app, on these new platforms for building apps which are now called agents : like Replit or agent.ai, you will fast realise the problem.
I sat for an hour and built an app which finds a public utility anywhere in the world, within say 500 meters of where you are. I did this on Replit. I am not a coder, by the way. Have never been.
The app was running, taking inputs and giving excellent results. It was calling public Google apis, had set up the backend. All this in less than an hour.
Assisted coding solves only half of the issue
But, I wait for the day when agent.ai or Replit have a marketplace which is anywhere as popular as Google Playstore or Apple Appstore. If I built an app and had to tell the general public to get the app from a marketplace that they have not heard of, it will have zero downloads. Yes, it might gain traction among fellow hobbyists, but unless they are my target customers, I do not see how that helps.
But, surely it’s okay if you are building for internal use?
I am not sure of that either. But, yes, if you want to quickly test out an idea, build an app to test out a concept, robotic coding is not a bad idea. But, don’t expect this to become serious.
If these robotic coding platforms built a path from their platform which leads to deployment on the Apple or Andorid stores, it will work for me. But, that may not align with the business plan or revenue plan of them!
By the way the image on the header of this post was generated using an agent called Flux Image Generator on the Agent.Ai website.
We built a very functional live application in one day. Read more about our concept to live in one day challenge.
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