Low-Code Is Eating the Backlog
Why Power Apps, Airtable, Retool, and Bubble are showing up in every software team's toolkit this year.
Every internal-tools Slack channel I lurk in has the same energy right now: somebody shipped an approval workflow or an inventory tracker in an afternoon using Retool or Power Apps, and the rest of the team is half impressed, half unsettled. Low-code and no-code platforms have gone from “thing marketing ops uses” to a genuine talking point among engineers, and it’s worth asking why now.
The obvious answer is the hiring crunch. Every company I talk to is trying to hire developers and losing candidates to counteroffers, competing startups, or just the sheer number of open reqs chasing too few people. When you can’t hire your way out of a backlog, you look for leverage. Tools like Airtable, Bubble, and Retool let a product manager or ops lead build something functional without waiting three sprints for an engineer to get to it.
The other piece is money. Pandemic-era digital transformation budgets didn’t dry up — a lot of companies that scrambled to digitize processes in 2020 are still funding that work, and low-code platforms are an easy line item because the time-to-value is so fast. You can demo a working prototype in a meeting instead of a roadmap slide.
What’s actually happening under the hood
These tools aren’t magic. Retool is essentially a drag-and-drop UI builder wired directly to your databases and APIs — you’re still writing SQL and JS in the panels, just skipping the frontend scaffolding. Power Apps leans into the Microsoft ecosystem, so if your org already lives in SharePoint and Dataverse, it’s a natural fit. Bubble is closer to a full app builder for people who don’t code at all, which is either exciting or terrifying depending on how much you care about maintainability. Airtable sits somewhere in between — spreadsheet-simple on the surface, with automations and API access that let it quietly become a lightweight database for whole teams.
The skepticism from engineers is fair and worth taking seriously. Vendor lock-in is real — once your ops team’s entire workflow lives inside Bubble’s visual editor, migrating off it later is its own project. Governance gets messy too: when non-engineers can spin up tools that touch production data, you need someone thinking about permissions and audit trails, and that someone is usually not the person who built the app.
Still, I don’t think this is a fad. The honest framing is that low-code tools are best at internal, low-stakes surfaces — admin panels, dashboards, one-off request forms — and worst at anything customer-facing or performance-sensitive. Used that way, they’re a genuine force multiplier: engineers stay focused on the product, and the fifty small internal tools that used to rot in the backlog actually get built. The interesting question for next year is whether these platforms start creeping into more serious territory, or whether teams settle into a stable division of labor between “real” engineering and low-code plumbing. I’d bet on the latter, at least for a while.