from Hacker News

Amazon Honeycode Shutting Down

by navels on 8/24/23, 8:34 PM with 61 comments

  • by honeycode_eng on 8/24/23, 11:15 PM

    Haha. I was an engineer on Honeycode in 2017. I initially joined the project because the best talent was flocking to finally make a frontend builder for developers. When I was there, the vision was there (allow people to build apps with spreadsheet skills), but the execution was all over the map: we had engineers mostly interested in getting promoted, so it was super political. I remember that every team had their own redux store (including one for the navbar, one for the login screen, one for the home screen, etc.). It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer!

    Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing).

    Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics.

    Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.

  • by nell on 8/24/23, 10:19 PM

    I will be happy to use a no-code platforms that lets me eject out into a standard application. Otherwise, I'm just learning and depending on a proprietary system.

    Once you need something slightly complex, no-code becomes non-trivial. It requires serious commitment to learn all the techniques the designers came up with.

    So most people who use these tools use them for for simple or short-lived apps and side projects, which they could now use web frameworks, but just want to try something new, because they know it's trivial.

  • by ArchOversight on 8/24/23, 9:46 PM

    What is Amazon Honeycode:

    > Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows you to quickly build mobile and web apps for teams—without programming. Build Amazon Honeycode apps for managing almost anything, like projects, customers, operations, approvals, resources, and even your team.

  • by scarface_74 on 8/24/23, 10:31 PM

    Until 2 weeks ago. I worked at AWS Professional Services.

    Most of the time, when a new service is introduced, we were given all sorts of go to market videos to watch and were asked to find use cases for it for our customers.

    I never heard anything about Honeycomb coming from anyone on the service team. I worked on a popular company sponsored open source project. We looked into integrating with it and I said hell no.

  • by bdcravens on 8/24/23, 9:50 PM

    I should really keep a running list of apps I hear about for the first time (or don't remember hearing about) when the shutdown announcement shows up on HN.

  • by delocalized on 8/24/23, 10:27 PM

    I wonder how long no-code is going to stay relevant in the age of AI. It feels like the segment of "what a novice with no-code can do that a novice with an appropriate AI tool can't" is ever-shrinking and the tail of "what specialized use cases AI can cover that no-code can't" continues to grow.

  • by charles_f on 8/24/23, 9:41 PM

    Another downside to all these no-/low-code tools. You're dependent on the provider to maintain their service, and if they inevitably stop after a few years, you're on your own.

  • by navels on 8/24/23, 8:34 PM

    Banner from the linked forum:

    To our valued customers: After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end the Amazon Honeycode beta service, effective February 29, 2024. New customer sign-ups and account plan upgrades are no longer available. Existing customers will be able to use Honeycode and your Honeycode apps as normal (and add team members to your existing account) until February 29, 2024, when the service will be discontinued. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Honeycode or any of the apps you created in Honeycode. To learn more about this change, and how to download your data, visit the Community Discussions.

  • by seper8 on 8/24/23, 10:17 PM

    More and more I (ex MAGMA Cloud engineer) become disillusioned with their garbage propietary services.

    The services I've recommended to clients are too often low quality, overcomplicated, expensive, shit alternatives to the better open source solutions...

    And to add insult to injury, imagine having built something with a service like this and it being deprecated in such a short timeline...

  • by ignoramous on 8/24/23, 10:46 PM

  • by chickenpotpie on 8/24/23, 9:49 PM

    They need to make this warning more prominent throughout their website. The main site, honeycode.aws, doesn't mention this at all until the user tries to create an account. Someone can easily waste a few hours reading their documentation and marketing materials before learning the product is deprecated

  • by pylua on 8/24/23, 10:03 PM

    Looks just as complicated as programming.

  • by pabs3 on 8/25/23, 5:51 AM

    The announcement for this is actually here:

    https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-ending-soon-commu...

  • by shrubble on 8/24/23, 10:44 PM

    Certainly gives another meaning to the word 'no-code'!

  • by endisneigh on 8/24/23, 11:06 PM

    It’s really impressive how ubiquitous discourse seems to be as forum software.

    It’s interesting that this was posted there instead of as a blog post, but I guess it was in beta.

  • by whoknowswhat11 on 8/25/23, 10:00 AM

    I was a user of this. But didn’t find it that useful! So if others had my experience traction would have been super low.

    Like a lot of AWS stuff but not this.

  • by appleflaxen on 8/24/23, 9:40 PM

    Damn. Never heard of it but it looks cool!

  • by spullara on 8/24/23, 9:40 PM

    I got this email too and I don't even remember signing up for it or what it was.

  • by NomDePlum on 8/24/23, 10:02 PM

    Anyone else detecting a touch of irony in a nocode product becoming a nocode deployment?