A legitimate question to last week's missive on why no-code has motivated me to attempt to learn to code again, is what can you actually do with code in a no-code tool?

Building apps on app

The first thing that code allows is to extend the functionality of a no-code tool, building an app on top of an app. Once a userbase for a tool is large enough there exist missing features that are deeply valued to some set of that userbase. That subset may not be large enough for the tool itself to be considered valuable. But large enough that budding entrepreneurs can find users who are willing to pay additional costs to augment their no-code tool. A good example is miniextensions which builds extensions on top of Airtable. Some of their apps are small enhancements specific to a certain usertype, others are simply features that are lower priority on the roadmap. You can also think of Jetboost which improves search on Webflow. I often wish I had persevered to learn to code so I can be part of Airtable's or Webflow's (or Monday.com or Smarsheet's) flourishing app developer ecosystem. God knows I wouldn't lack ideas, but unfortunately I lack the knowledge.

The more you know, the more you realize you don't know

When you start learning a no-code tool, you start off like everyone else. You learn the build blocks of that specific tool. With Airtable, you think about how to add your data, organize it and build out your workflow. From there, you increase the complexity of your base to better reflect the nooks and crannies of how your team works. But you eventually get to a point where your workflow is so dialed in that you exhaust what can be possible with existing building blocks. At that point you use workarounds.

Maybe your blocker is that you want to link two records automatically based on the value of a field in both (other than the primary field) like Jason. His usecase is balancing an invoicing and accounting system.

This is so specific to Jason's workflow as an accountant that it doesn't make sense to build within the product itself (or for an app developer to create an extension). But it's so little code! A few lines of Javascript unlock Jason to create this wonderfully useful workflow.

In Webflow, custom codes allows you to extend the functionality in specific places of the tool. For instance, a little bit of custom code (that I copy pasted!) allowed me to pull a referral parameter on Webflow form submit which was crucial to a referral marketing workflow. Webflow is not built for referral marketing per se (there are dedicated tools for that like referral Saasquatch) but a little bit of custom code was all it needed to become a referral marketing tool!

I'm excited to explore the space between code and no‐code on Airtable's stream tomorrow and in the future on my stream with tools like Autocode, Zapier's code step and Parabola.

Learning the fundamentals of Javascript won't make me a coder—I have no desire to spend my days programming—but it'll make me a better no‐coder.

Best

Aron