The End of No Code - exe.dev blog

You may have heard the news: Bending Spoons acquired Airtable for $1.28 billion. Rome didn’t fall in a day, but this is as good a point as any to mark the moment No Code platforms jumped the shark. Full disclosure, I worked at Airtable for many years, love the product, and love the people I worked with there even more. It’s the technology, namely the unreasonable effectiveness of LLM loops with tool use, that’s changed.

Software at work is not valuable in and of itself. It’s built to serve some purpose. Mostly it’s used to keep track of something (schedules, parts, orders, people, you name it). Spreadsheets are the universal software here–and I love me a spreadsheet. But spreadsheets have a ceiling when it comes to sharing, programming, permissions, automations, and so on. Once you leave a spreadsheet, you upgrade to a database and some software on top of it: that’s what low or no code platforms like Airtable are. At their best, the person who brings Airtable to their team isn’t bringing Airtable: they’re bringing much-needed organization and process, and Airtable is merely the means.

One of the things that Airtable got right was their experience of creating the tables themselves. You just added a column (like in Excel), and chose a data type (string, number, date, and so on), and, voila, you’ve created a table. I used to joke that Airtable should show up to SIGMOD (the big database conference) and present a paper on the efficacy of not having ALTER TABLE widgets ADD COLUMN (color string) as the way people use your database. Fred Brooks wrote: “Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.” Airtable understood this at its core: if the user can specify the business model, building the automations and features on top of it becomes possible. (This is nothing new! FileMaker launched in 1985; it was my introduction to databases when I helped run a conference for ~1,600 high school students. It turns out that a little bit of extra credit, some freshmen, and 3 AppleTalk-connected computers could handle the mailed-in registration forms!)

Once upon a time (the 90s!), IT teams at companies existed to build software for said companies. Much software was bespoke. We can use Salesforce’s 2000 “Software as Dead” campaign as the mile marker for when SaaS started taking over. IT departments became all about procurement. And procurement means saying NO. Low code and No Code platforms (and Microsoft SharePoint and Excel and Google Sheets) picked up the slack. When you can’t buy the software, you make do with what you can get access to, and you smuggle in some Airtable, increase revenues/efficiency/trust/whatever, and nobody can get rid of it for bureaucratic reasons because it’s now load-bearing.

AWS launched EC2 in 2006. You could rent a VM. Getting it on the internet (so that you could share a thing with your co-workers) required learning about EC2 VPCs, IAM permissions, EBS, RDS, static IPs, DNS, and a handful of other Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs). Even within software companies, IT gatekept EC2. When I was at Google in 2007, the tool to search the company’s code base ran on a spare desktop under Jeff Dean’s desk. Getting a machine in Google’s datacenter to serve this (to me, critical) piece of infrastructure was too much of a hassle. (There were, at the time, funny “Is it web scale?” videos; e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs, amongst others.)

Fast forward to 2026. LLMs are king. The SaaSpocalypse is under way, and happening like bankruptcy–gradually first, then all at once. What is the right way to build and deploy business tools? What is the right platform? Can non-software-engineers be trusted to do it?

The right answer (it’s my turn to be wrong on the internet today, baby) is Linux. Yes, choose boring technology, and just use Linux. You can choose one of many stacks on top of Linux. Honestly, if you chose LAMP (Linux, Apache HTTPd, MySQL, PHP) you would be fine. My current preference is (sqlite, Go, Typescript, maybe Vue). If memory weren’t getting expensive, there’d be nothing wrong with (PostgreSQL, Node, TypeScript) but the memory crunch is real, and the advantages of using a single language for frontend and backend have disappeared since you’re not writing the code anyway.

Yes, that entire stack is Open Source. Yes, if you build on that stack, and you need to migrate to AWS or GCP or Render or Azure or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or Railway or Hetzner or a miniPC, you will be able to rsync the data and code over, and you’ll be all set. The platform-level lock-in is weak compared to low code platforms. (That said, an agent will port your low code setup to Linux with a few prompts.)

Exe.dev sells this very stack. Your subscription lets you create Linux VMs. They’re on the internet in the way that matters: you can send links to your...