Do Software and Programmers Still Have a Future? - NocoBase -->

--> Do Software and Programmers Still Have a Future?<br>AI is reshaping the software industry. After months of anxiety, debate, and adaptation, we share what NocoBase has learned about the future of software and programmers.<br>Zhou Yanliang<br>Jun 15, 2026<br>Insights<br>NocoBase stories

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Background

Six months ago, when we released NocoBase 2.0, we published our second recap: No AI, No VC, Just 17K Stars and Real Revenue. At that point, NocoBase had already reached around $1.4 million in annual revenue.

The plan had been simple: one recap a year, sharing NocoBase’s growth as it happened. This third piece was supposed to wait until the end of this year, when NocoBase 3.0 comes out. But the world is changing too fast. AI is hitting this industry with a new shock wave almost every day. In a jolt like this, NocoBase was never going to remain untouched. We have been pulled, over and over, into all kinds of uncertainty.

So we had to move faster. We had to stay nimble enough to answer the shock as it came.

That is why this recap is arriving half a year early, together with NocoBase 2.1. Better to write it now than wait another six months and wonder whether this industry will still look the same by then. Or whether anyone will still care about an open-source product like this. Or whether anyone will still care about software, or programmers, at all.

Where We Are

It has now been five years since we committed the first line of code on GitHub.

Compared with six months ago, our team size has not changed. We are still 14 people. We still do not have a dedicated sales team. For the most part, users still find us, not the other way around. But beyond SEO, we have also started paying serious attention to generative engine optimization, and we already have quite a few paying users who discovered NocoBase through ChatGPT and Claude.

Here are a few other numbers:

GitHub stars: 22.7k

Contributors: 115

Git clones: 3K/day

Revenue

Now that the revenue figure is becoming more substantial, we will stop disclosing exact numbers in future recap articles. But we will keep sharing the trend lines, and the shape of what is happening underneath them.

In the first five months of 2026, our revenue was exactly double what it was in the same period of 2025. In our best month so far, monthly revenue alone had already reached our entire revenue for all of 2024.

But if I am being honest about how it felt from the inside, this was not the result of some smooth, graceful curve upward. It came after a major turn.

Were We About to Be Killed?

Before 2025, NocoBase was positioned as a no-code platform. It was a direction plenty of companies had already proven to be valuable and commercially viable, even if it was not the kind of business that usually leads to spectacular fortunes. The familiar products in this category can become solid businesses, even if they rarely produce outsized outcomes. With differentiated positioning, a standardized product, and a global market, we believed we had a chance to build a durable business around a focused product and a lean team.

Starting in 2025, we began introducing AI features into the product. That opened up a new imaginative horizon for the traditional no-code platform. AI could play a supporting role in business workflows and help people get certain kinds of work done more efficiently. At the same time, our revenue was climbing quickly, which seemed to validate the decision.

Then, at the end of 2025, things changed.

When Opus 4.5 was released, it felt as though the weather turned overnight. Social media was suddenly full of awe at the revolutionary changes it seemed to be bringing to programming. Then came the wave of layoff news, followed by all the loud voices declaring that traditional software was about to be killed. And just like that, the whole industry seemed to be living inside the same split reality, one half panic, one half exhilaration.

That mood spread through our team almost immediately.

More than one colleague started to feel that what we were building no longer had any meaning. And once that feeling takes hold, it does real damage. We had spent years building something we were proud of. Now AI appeared able to produce something similar in a few hours. And AI was still evolving at a frightening pace. So what were we still here for? Only a month earlier, I had believed that the stronger AI became, the better it would be for us, unless it planned to take over the entire world. Was that day really about to arrive this quickly?

At the same time, NocoBase’s revenue also entered a weaker stretch. I could not tell whether that was just because of the Christmas and New Year holiday season, or because a flood of AI news had genuinely affected how enterprises were making purchasing decisions.

For two full months, I read obsessively. I tried product after product. Every day I discussed, argued, and compared notes with the...