Tweet about how a No Code developer completely detroys a Coder resonated massively
Right now i'm leading a project for a venture builder to build a fintech app using Bubble and Upwork folks... and seeing the exact same thing.
So i’m not a frequent user of Twitter but i’m kind of forcing myself each day to spend at least 10 minutes on it. As i’ve given up a number of times the past few years because it just wasn’t hooking me.
This time I said to myself I need to just force myself to see if after a month or so I hit a critical mass and start enjoying it. And I’m starting to see that inflection point.
This post above is a good example of where Twitter is growing on me
So this guy posts this tweet (link) and it immediately intrigued me. Particularly because I use lots of developers from Pakistan the last few years from platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.
And for the past month i’ve been building a fintech app for a venturebuilder using Bubble. And this post immediately resonated because after almost a decade of using actual coders…. I’m seeing exactly what this dude is.
The setup to the competition
So as the post states…. there were two programmers who were hired to create an MVP.
1st dev: Alex from Germany. 100% code. 19 years experience.
2nd dev: Hamid from Pakistan. Code + Copilot + GPT-4 + no-code. 4 years experience.
Both programmers received Figma screens and detailed specs. A designer was available to assist them with the assets they needed, and there was also existing code that needed to be integrated.
How did the Bubble Developer (Hamid) do?
Hamid finished the first version in one week with 100% test coverage of code and end-to-end testing of no-code parts. 95% of the work seemed to be finished and appeared to work at first glance
Hamid built the UI and front-end workflows in Bubble, generated Cloudflare Workers using GPT-4, integrated existing code using Copilot, and generated tests using GPT-4 (playwright/ava).
Hamid's costs: GPT-4: $211 Copilot: $20 Cloudflare: $5 Bubble: $134 Compensation: $2460 (41 hours worked)
Costs to host/run: $139/month
How did the actual coder (Alex) do?
Alex finished around 7% of the tasks in the same amount of time (compared to 95% for Hamid).
Costs: Vercel: $20 Compensation: $3500
Estimated to developing everything: $45k. And expects $11k for adding tests.
Costs to host/run: $20/mo
What?? So coding it will have cost ~$60k vs. $3k for the No coder…. 20x cheaper!!!!! And the No coder finished 95% vs. 7% for the coder… so 13x faster!
What did the guy that ran the project conclude?
He states in the tweet… “The development agency of my friend has 100+ developers like Alex. Now he is going to retrain or replace them with developers like Hamid...”
How many more folks are concluding the exact same thing?
Well just recently I interviewed 20+ Bubble devs on calls and would ask them what else they have worked on… and was blown away by what i heard.
Some of them were really well funded projects by companies that were from the Valley.
This is the future of software… that train is speeding by and either you jump on board or you get left behind.
Now relating this back to my current Fintech project
We are about 3 weeks in and I expect to have gone from having nothing (ie. no wireframes or specs) to having a fully working, well designed, prototype within 6 weeks.
Having used about:
50 hrs of Bubble development time per week (avg cost is $25/hr) using a couple of devs
20 hrs of designer time per week (avg cost is $20/hr)
15 hrs of my time per week (i’m a bit more expensive.. haha). And actually some of this time is also used on other stuff like SEO, customer dev, etc.
Plus we’re creating the homepage and other landing pages in Webflow using a guy who does Webflow (avg. cost is $20/hr)
Now also note that I hadn’t worked with any of the devs before (ie. no spending months hiring good engineers).
And I’d estimate that by the 6 week mark what we will have completed would have taken a normal engineering team (ie. coders) at least 6 months to build. And would have cost at least 5x more.
So yeah.. we’re doing this this about 5x faster and 5x cheaper. And that’s conservative.
I plan to be on the cutting edge of this no code / AI coding wave. Because its gonna wipe out the old way of doing shit. And i’m gonna enjoy seeing it happen.