In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote that software is eating the world. His article has proven prescient and this trend shows no signs of slowing. Unfortunately, the power to take part in the digital economy was limited to the tiny percentage of people who could create software by hand with code. The No Code movement is about building bridges to creators and empowering them to create software without code. Already we see rich visual development tools for creating websites & user interfaces, connecting systems & managing data. There is going to be an explosion of specialized tools to distribute tasks that are currently confined to the work of engineers. The component mental model will be distributed across product organizations as the source of truth for Design Systems are moved from front-end developers to designers using tools like Modulz & Plasmic. We’re going to see the data world shaken up with tools for data processing & AI model training. The cost of creating in-house tools is going to drop with the expanding breadth of functionality landing in cloud providers & new visual tools. It’s only a matter of time before accessible general purpose visual development unleashes the masses. Yes, Marc Andreessen was right, software is eating the world! Today more people can create software than ever and this trend will only continue as No Code eats software.

Originally authored & published for a UI.dev newsletter.