Surviving the Low-Code Nightmare
Low code doesn’t eliminate complexity; it just buries it deep under layers of configuration hell, waiting for the poor engineer who has to debug it at 2AM.
An Engineer’s Worst Horror: Coding in a Black Box I have had the unfortunate pleasure of working with PowerApps. The glitz and glam of drag and drops make the work seem easy, until you get an error…
Nothing will have you question your life and all the decisions you’ve made leading to that moment like the breaking of a feature. Unlike running your code and seeing outputs on the terminal, Microsoft has deprived developers the luxury of seeing what actually went wrong. All you will know is that something isn’t right… and it’s up to you to figure out the what and the why.
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And while you can Ctrl+Z your way to the past, Microsoft Power Platforms will sure make you feel like there’s a limit. Once you’ve reverted n amount of work, you find your back against the wall and if you’re lucky enough, “going back to the future” won’t be that much of a hassle. This is when you’d think version control would come in as your savior, but you know how this story goes. It is something close to non-existent. PowerApps technically has version history, but it’s not version control as developers know it. You can’t diff changes or branch safely; it’s rollback roulette at best.
To be fair, Microsoft got some things right. The Power Platform is a great connector; it’s the glue holding countless systems together. But that glue can melt without warning. You wake up knowing how to configure your components on PowerApps, the next day you have to learn all over again. And since everything is connected in the great circle of life, if the updates no longer match how things were previously done, be prepared to go on a witch hunt to find out what went wrong because your flows will break, and you will have to figure out why… and how to fix it.
I have nine months of experience with Microsoft Developer tools, maybe all I need is time with it. I also have to let go of the engineering standards I knew, because low-code has no room for that. It’s violations on top of violations and I have to find out what Uncle Bob thinks of this. This is not SOLID.
Working with low-code platforms has taught me one thing: I don’t code anymore, I maintain. I chase bugs I didn’t write, patch errors I can’t see, and fix flows that break themselves overnight. Somewhere along the line, the craft of engineering got replaced by configuration therapy. And maybe that’s what burnout really is: realizing you’ve become a caretaker instead of a creator.
