No-code tools can make raw API calls but lack built-in SDKs from providers like Google, forcing users to handle authentication and pagination manually. The speaker argues low-code platforms should embed SDK code snippets to combine ease with the reliability of proper libraries.
So a challenge I often see in no-code environments is that, you know, they have the primitives to be able to work with a lot of third-party services, basically being able to construct like an HTTPS request, but they don't have support for using the SDKs. You see, a lot of these third-party services have invested in what they call developer experience, where in addition to having their central service, they also have these libraries, these libraries that run usually in one of the major languages, almost always something in Node, something in Python, that can just make interacting with their service just a matter of a few lines. And of course they also have a baseline HTTPS API. Now sometimes that HTTPS API is really easy to use, but often it's actually kind of complicated, like in the case of Google services. And if you had access to the SDK, you wouldn't have so many challenges. So the opportunity for low-code is being able to bring just those few lines of code in that can use the SDK to give you that kind of flexibility to be able to interact with the service and then go back to do what's the no-code goodness.
