Comment by yearolinuxdsktp

Who remembers Model-Driven Architecture and code generation from UML?

Nothing can replace code, because code is design[1]. Low-code came about as a solution to the insane clickfest of no-code. And what is low-code? It’s code over a boilerplate-free appropriately-high level of abstraction.

This reminds me of the 1st chapter of the Clean Architecture book[2], pages 5 and 6, which shows a chart of engineering staff growing from tens to 1200 and yet the product line count (as a simple estimate of features) asymptotically stops growing, barely growing in lines of code from 300 staff to 1200 staff.

As companies grow and throw more staff at the problem, software architecture is often neglected, dramatically slowing development (due to massive overhead required to implement features).

Some companies decided that the answer is to optimize for hiring lots of junior engineers to write dumbed down code full of boilerplate (e.g. Go).

The hard part is staying on top of the technical (architectural and design) debt to make sure that feature development is efficient. That is the hard job and the true value of a software architect, not writing design documents.

[1] https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_origina... A timeless article from 1992, pre-UML, but references precursors like Booch and object diagrams, as well as CASE tools [2] You can read it here in Amazon sample chapter: https://read.amazon.com/sample/0134494164?clientId=share