Every low-code platform looks great in the demo. Drag, drop, ship — 50 records fly. Then it hits a real tenant with a few million rows and real concurrency, and the list view takes 12 seconds, the detail page times out, and someone in the chat says "low-code just doesn't scale."
It does scale. It just dies in five very predictable places. I've debugged most of them. Here's the field guide — and a checklist you can run against any platform before you commit.
Killer 1: runtime interpretation overhead
A lot of low-code magic is "interpret metadata/config at request time." Flexible, but every request pays the tax.
Avoid: look for metadata compilation / caching — does the platform cache interpreted results on hot paths, or re-parse the whole config on every call? Mature engines do the former. This is the single biggest demo-vs-prod gap.
