In 2023, at the No Code Summit in Paris, I gave a talk that our blog later turned into a deep dive. Its central claim sounds wrong: the hardest part of building a feature is not writing its code. Fifteen years of building an app platform taught me that. It's also the reason the total freedom everyone sells right now, raw code, vibe-coding, build anything, arrives with a bill nobody itemizes. Let me itemize it.
The hard part was never writing the code
Take any feature you consider simple. A list of items, say. Now formalize it: name the states, the loading, the empty, the error, the stale. Decide what happens when the network dies halfway through a fetch. Decide what two options do when someone combines them in a way nobody asked about. That work, naming states and finding edges, is where the effort lives. The code that comes after is the transcription.
I didn't learn this from a book. I learned it feature after feature, for fifteen years, building the platform where that formalization is my team's actual job. And once you've seen it, you can't unsee what the current tooling debate is really about. It isn't about who types the code, you or an AI. It's about who does the formalizing.
What "total freedom" actually invoices
