Everyone who's shipped an enterprise system on a low-code platform knows the arc. The first two months are euphoric — drag, drop, forms and workflows and dashboards go live, the boss is thrilled. Then the business gets real: multi-org, multi-tenant, gnarly approval chains, cross-system integration, deep customization. And the platform turns on you. Change one field, ten places break. Performance tanks. Extension hits a wall. You end up rewriting it by hand.
The problem isn't "low-code." It's the paradigm you picked. There are three, and they fail at very different points.
The three low-code paradigms
1. Form-driven (Airtable-style, most "no-code" tools)
The world is a pile of forms + workflows + reports. Business users build it themselves, ramp-up is instant. But the worldview is "a stack of forms" — there's no unified data model. The moment your relationships need real domain modeling, form-driven runs out of road.
