In this episode of the No‑Code Wizardry Show, host Dennis H. Lewis welcomes co‑host Tony back after a year‑and‑a‑half hiatus, showcasing a new studio and explaining the reasons for the break. They review the current state of no‑code development, focusing on Bubble’s evolution, its AI add‑ons, and complementary tools like Buildprint. Tony critiques Bubble’s design capabilities and SEO limitations, while Dennis highlights recent UI improvements and the platform’s strength in unified web‑and‑mobile back‑ends. The conversation then shifts to a broader AI theme: the under‑discussed opportunity of feeding AI agents with real transactional business data. Using a pizza‑shop example, they argue that AI should augment human workers—providing insights, spotting trends, and boosting productivity—rather than replace them. They acknowledge the reality of layoffs at both SMBs and large firms, attributing resistance to change and skill gaps, but maintain that a hybrid model of great people plus AI‑enhanced tools is the optimal path forward. The episode wraps with light banter about Paddington and a teaser for future content.
Chapters
Welcome to a new episode of the No-Code Wizardry Show. It's been years, man.
It has been so long. Okay, Tony, I am so glad to have you here back on my show.
Back on your show. You know, you know what's funny is that, have you noticed how Dennis sometimes inserts Spanish words in between sentences? Like you just did. Hey, Tony, ¿qué?
Yeah. Yeah. It just kind of spices it up a bit. A little jalapeño in there makes it like a little better. Yeah.
I gotta think when I'm speaking English, I gotta think about what I'm about to say. Like, I'm obviously not as bilingual as you are, but I think I do a better job of not mixing in languages than you do.
It could be. It could be. Yeah.
But your Spanish is pretty awesome. To be fair, you have spent how many years in Spain?
We don't count anymore.
We don't count anymore. I haven't spent as much time in the States. But anyways, Point being, the No Code Wizardry show is back and it is back in this amazing new studio, man. The, I'll be honest with you, the main reason why we've been, I think a year and a half without doing the show is because, um, I was renov— well, I, I moved and I've been renovating my, my new house and this is my new office. Been building it from scratch so that we could actually do the show in a much more Slick manner, like, hey, that's Dennis's camera. Say hello.
Hey, hello everybody. Welcome to the No Code Wizardry Show with Dennis Lewis and his sidekick Tony.
That, okay. I'm, I, I gotta get better at switching cameras, but this is my camera. We also have a panoramic camera, camera that we can toggle. It doesn't look as good on mobile devices, but anyways, truth be told, this whole thing is being powered by Ecamm in case you're wondering. But anyways. Um, I figured, okay, since we're gonna go back to doing the, the No-Code Wizardry Show, let's just kick it off by doing an episode where we just talk about what we've been doing over the past year and a half. Where, you know, the, where the, what the current state of no-code development looks like, because man, AI has definitely made some progress over the past couple of years. Um, it was already a big thing when we were doing season 1. And you know, people are building things without even no coding. They're just talking to chatbots and building really slick things. I've, I'm still, I, I think there are, uh, definitely developers cutting down times on how long they need to be programming in order to actually get something built. But let's just go back in time a year and a half ago. I think you and I were arguing about the fact that If you are someone trying to build with AI and you just let the AI do the work by itself, there's gonna be, there's gonna be a point where it's gonna get something wrong. And if you don't understand what it's done, you're not gonna know how to fix it.
That's still true today.
It is still true to today, you would say?
Yeah, I think so. I think that things have changed. Anybody hear the word agent recently? Yeah, that's the new buzzword. Yeah, you know this industry loves buzzwords, right? So it does. And there's a lot of cool stuff happening and we're fortunately able to bring a lot of the benefits from all of this to our customers. And, but there's still no substitute for human ingenuity and actual understanding.
Uh, so let's put the focus on how we've been building. Uh, we're still rock and rolling Bubble.
Oh yes, definitely.
Bubble is still the way we're developing all of our applications. Um, there is an AI component to Bubble these days.
There's a couple of them. There's the official, uh, Bubble AIs, which are getting better, and, uh, they're interesting. Uh, I don't think they're quite there yet, and you can't use them in existing Bubble applications that weren't started by, uh, AI, or you It's sort of halfway there. But there's some other tools out there as well that are pretty slick as well. We'll talk about those sometime in one of the future episodes probably.
Well, I actually want to touch a little bit on Buildprint, if you don't mind. Let's not go deep into it, but we have discovered Buildprint. It's pretty amazing.
I'm impressed. Here's a shout out for George, Collier. He's done a, a really cool job. Um, I don't— it doesn't substitute having somebody who understands Bubble in your—
just like being able to chat with Lovable and building something that you don't know how it actually runs substitutes having a real programmer doing some work for you.
And yeah, you, you need to, to get the, the most out of the tool, you still need to understand Bubble. Because Bubble is unique. But the really cool thing is that they're bringing a lot of the, uh, the, the stuff that could be done in other platforms into the Bubble ecosystem. So you're getting the best of both worlds.
Is the Bubble ecosystem still growing?
I think it is, and I think that the, the value propositions that we were talking about before still exist. The ability to, uh, merge mobile application development and web application development with a common backend with the same business logic, the same database, that is still an amazing value proposition. And then Bubble is just so awesome at integrating with just anything that you need to integrate with.
Uh, I will say that it's been a year and a half and I still think, well, there's a new Bubble interface that I'm still trying to get used to. I can't say that I love it, but I can see that there are some things that have been changed for better. I'm— I guess I just— I don't love change— changes. Like, I need to get used to them.
But I will say this, the last update improved things significantly on the, uh, on the panel inside the, the Bubble Builder. Um, if you were to look at my day-to-day workflow recently, you would be surprised that there's If I'm working on 5 or 6 different applications in a day, maybe 2 or 3 are with the old interface and 1 or 2 are with the new one, and, and I kind of just go back and forth. It doesn't, um, so I'm almost there. I, I think that they're on the right track. It is though hard to push people into something completely different.
And so I'm still just to, to point out weakness in Bubble. I still think that it's just not a place for designers. And I know that it's never been intended to be a place for designers where people can show off their work in a slick-looking manner. But I do want them to put a little bit more emphasis on the types of landing pages, the types of pages, websites that you can actually build and have them look good. Like It, it's a great platform to build apps. It's not so good to sell the apps. I kind of look at the websites that people are building with, uh, Webflow, Framer. We're building them with WordPress and Bricks and custom CSS and we're implementing GSAP animations. And man, I wish I could do at least a fifth of the things that we can do on all of those platforms in Bubble. So that we didn't need to do the marketing outside of Bubble, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, uh, and that comes to sort of the— there's some— there's a fuzzy area there, uh, you know, that brings in the SEO questions as well. Uh, you know, there's, there's things that just because Bubble is a client-side rendered JavaScript, uh, architecture always are going to make it a little bit, uh, questionable sometimes if it makes sense to put the— you know, if you're, if you're doing landing pages for ad campaigns and they need to load in under 100 milliseconds, you're probably not going to get it there with Bubble because there's just a certain amount of overhead that the architecture still requires because we can't do server-side rendering. But you'd be surprised. I think that there are capabilities and you can do more in Bubble than you probably thought you could do. But yeah, I agree, uh, exactly. It's sort of like also just being able to control the pixel, uh, widths and heights by—
instead of, you know, using the, uh, you could use the VR, the RAMs, ERMs. We lack all of those things. I mean, those things have been available for WordPress users for 10 years.
You're right. Yeah.
So there, I still think that we, I don't know, I wanna see some, some more upgrades done in, in, in the design front. Um, but anyways, that's just the, my pet peeve that I still have with Bubble. Um, but I think that the advantages are still, it's still the, probably the best no-code place and platform to build applications.
I agree.
I think that's what you're probably going to say, right?
Yeah, especially, especially now if you want to be able to integrate with mobile and, and combine. And I think that that is a really key thing. And then, you know, I put out a video not long ago because although we haven't had this great studio, yours truly has been out there doing his best to keep content going out for you guys.
The Ratio YouTube channel has actually stepped up so much over the past year.
Well, thank you.
Good job.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I put out a video about the AI question that nobody's talking about that is so important. And I think that that is the merging of AI with transactional data. So to give an example, and you know that we are working on our top secret Conjuro project that we can't talk about, so I won't say anything. But it's coming soon, people. The ability to, for example, have transactional information about what's going on in your business. So let's imagine you're a pizza shop and you have a point of sale system and it calculates how many pepperoni pizzas, how many veggie pizzas, how many anchovies you use, whatever it is, you know, how many are delivered, how many are in store, how many are, you know, all of that transactional information. Have that be a part of your AI ecosystem. Because right now, most people use AI for social media posting and for creating content and fluffy sorts of things that— sure, I mean, it's great. It's not like I'm saying it's not awesome, but it doesn't move the needle for a business that much. But when you're empowering the AI model so that it can actually look into the, the actual transactional information about your business, and can go and tell you, you know, if you were to make a 3-month purchase of pepperoni, that would probably impact your bottom line by 2%. Well, you probably would never notice that on your own, but an AI agent that just scours all of your transactional information and looks for trends and looks for weaknesses and aspects where you can improve your business That is awesome because it can do all that work that you probably can't. Uh, and I think that is one of the real key places that we should be thinking about using AI in our businesses, is building that hybrid approach where the AI also has visibility into your transactional information and then where it can work and collaborate with the humans in your business, so that the, uh, people have tools that are augmented with AI to make their jobs more efficient instead of trying to replace people, which is what's happening. Better, let's make— give them superpowers.
People, programmers, people in marketing, they're being fired left and right.
But you know, that might be a short-sighted point of view from a lot of business owners, and, and I can understand. I mean, uh, people are expensive. People are expensive. So I would say keep your people and try to do— use AI so that you cannot hire the next 4 that you need to hire and can make the entire sum of your AI people and your real human people 10x their productivity. Instead of trying to shrink your, your, your human aspect, give it more power. Make— empower those humans so that your business can do more.
And why are businesses then— I mean, you look at, it's not just small to medium-sized businesses, which, which by the way are firing people left and right as well. But you take a look at Coinbase announced layoffs not too long ago. Upwork announced layoffs not too long ago. I mean, you got, you got big organizations firing people instead of doing what you're suggesting, which is, okay, let's empower these people. Or it could be, I think it could also be a question of, uh, you know, your labor not wanting to change or adapt to new technologies. That is also really part of the puzzle. Uncomfortable.
Yeah.
It's, it's uncomfortable to tell somebody that's been doing the job for 10, 15 years to stop doing what he's been doing and to try something new and to try to leverage the power of a new tech.
It, it's complicated.
It's not a—
there's not a one-size-fits-all answer. But I do believe that in the end, businesses with great people are always going to be more successful than businesses without great people and just AI robots. Um, I'm— and I think that the mix is where you really want to be. You want great people that are supported by awesome robots.
Interesting. Okay.
I don't know.
That sounds to me like a good place for us to wrap it up for this first episode.
All right. Well, I am super hyped. This is fun. This is a cool place to do it. We've got our buddy Paddington here with me so that, you know, keep an eye on me?
Oh, I don't know if you can actually see him.
Oh, you can't see? Oh, look, he's hiding behind— he's hiding. Look, here we are. Hello everybody from Ratio Land.
All right, so the story here is I'm a big Paddington fan, even though most human beings on this planet haven't actually taken the time to watch any of the Paddington movies. Um, they're great, great movies.
