What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?

IN 2018 ADIYLCNC field technician working for Telstra, an Australian telecoms firm, built an app that unified 70 messaging systems for reporting phone-line problems. The technician did this despite having no coding experience. The interface may look cluttered: the landing page jams in 150 buttons and a local-news ticker—the app equivalent of an airplane cockpit, quips Charles Lamanna of Microsoft, who oversees the software titan’s Power Apps platform that made it possible. But it has been a hit. Some 1,300 other Telstra technicians employ it, saving the firm an annual $12m.Professional developers (pro devs) might poke fun at the technician’s app. But the trend it exemplifies is no joke. Since well before 2017, when Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of GitHub, a coding-collaboration site, declared that “the future of coding is no coding at all”, so-called low code/no code (/) tools have burgeoned. They allow anyone to write software using drag-and-drop visual interfaces alone (no code) or with a bit of code creeping in (low code). Under the hood, this is translated into pre-written or automatically generated code, which then whirs away.