The “type a prompt, get a pretty landing page” phase is finished. In 2026 these tools build applications that actually work: authentication, databases, APIs, payments, deployment, usually in a single sitting. That part is genuinely impressive and I’ve stopped being cynical about it.

What I keep running into is the second half. The first version arrives fast. Then you want to change something, and the platforms start behaving very differently from each other. That’s the thing worth judging them on. Not who wins the demo. Who’s still useful on day forty.

Low-code and no-code platforms arrived with a promise that has been partially delivered and significantly oversold: that business users without programming backgrounds could build the software applications they needed without depending on IT development teams. The partially-delivered part is real. Workflow automation tools like Power Automate, Zapier, and Make have genuinely enabled business users to build integrations and automations that previously required developer time. The oversold part is the claim that this capability extends to applications of arbitrary complexity.