I was watching a live stream recently about using AI tools to generate applications, and obviously “vibe coding” is getting a lot of attention nowadays. My interest here was just trying to stay up to date with my skills on the various development platforms that are getting lots of traction. But during the live stream, there was a throwaway line made by one of the presenters, which (paraphrasing) was
“Vibe coding means that Low Code is dead”.
Naturally, being a part of the APEX organisation within Oracle, this comment piqued my interest, so here’s some of my thoughts.
Firstly, I think there is a more granular definition of “Low Code” required, because grouping all Low Code solutions into a single bucket clouds the debate. Low Code platforms need to be separated into two classes:
- Low code solutions that offer low code to the developer, but still generate a “high code” or “full code” application.
- Low code solutions that never generate code, the low code metadata is the end product, and a runtime engine is responsible for delivering the application logic based based on that metadata.
Some Low Code solutions out in the marketplace fall into the first category, and for them, I can understand the sentiment of vibe coding obsoleting or replacing low code. If you are coming from the perspective of low code solutions that simply generate traditional low level code, vibe coding is no different, ie, you are taking a path of reduced coding effort to arrive at a large codebase for your application. Fundamentally you are still arriving at the same place – a large complex code base. You are simply relying an AI based tool now to manage that complexity.
Oracle APEX however is not the same. It sits in the second category of low code platforms. There is no large code generation, the metadata that defines the application is the application. The APEX runtime maps this metadata into application functionality.
Developers may see this is as just “same dog, different lead“, but the distinction is far more important for business users, analysts, and citizen developers who do not have a coding mindset at all. Visual interfaces along with in-built guardrails are still of huge value when it comes to “democratizing” application development.
In this sense, vibe coding is a complementary technology to low code platforms like APEX. Vibe coding to produce a template for an APEX application, for example, generating an application definition via APEXlang will let developers and non-developers alike build sophisticated applications without ever needing to subsequently manage or deploy a large suite generated low level code. In the Enterprise space, that makes for a solutions that are far easier to check that they satisfy security and maintainability requirements. Freeform AI-generated code may or may not meet those existing requirements, and typically will require extensive testing to check if it does. Free form by it very nature is .. well… free form 🙂
Don’t get me wrong – I feel vibe coding is here to stay, but claims that this is the end of low code I think are missing the mark. I believe it will the combination of low-code and AI, that will continue to bring business needs and IT application delivery closer, and APEX is perfectly suited to meet that goal.
Learning is not a spectator sport 
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