Citizen developers in Power Platform, five years later: Better or worse with AI?

In 2021, I wrote about common pitfalls of low-code solutions and today I'd like to revisit the topic to judge whether or not "AI"^[1] has improved the citizen developer experience.

To quickly summarize the old post: Nancy from accounting is great at accounting, and she can't be faulted for not knowing anything about software development. Her app ran on her own AD credentials, so it broke the day she left. She built one giant Flow that did everything. And when she got stuck, she came to IT anyway, halfway in and without a project request. My conclusion was that citizen development should stay at the workgroup level, and that people went around IT because IT was too slow, which was our problem to fix.

Fast forward five years and now we have AI. Has AI changed the calculation?

The promise of AI is that it can do development so therefore, your Business Analysts and Project Managers can use it to do the development and you no longer need those pesky and expensive developers. Productivity goes up. Profits go up. Wall Street is happy. The CEO gets a new boat. Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and company leadership all want us to think these products are the answer to everything. Everyone who profits from this is happy.

Writing code to get something to show on the screen isn't the hardest part of development; anyone can do that. Before AI, people searched web forums or watched YouTube videos. Now we ask a chat bot. The hard part is everything else. What's your ALM plan? Do you have dev, test and prod environments? Did you setup the new solution to use service accounts or service principals? Do you even know what a service principal is? Is there a documented style guide and naming conventions? Is anything documented? Requirements? Design? Deployment runbook? Anything?

Here's the part I keep coming back to though. AI doesn't actually make less work. It moves the work somewhere else. A developer used to have to know how to write a Power Fx formula. Now the robot writes it and I have to review it instead, and I think reviewing might be the harder job. When I write a formula, I already know what I was trying to do. When I review one, I'm reconstructing what someone else was trying to do and checking it against requirements I'm holding in my head.

And that's where it falls apart for the citizen developer. I can usually tell when a chat bot is guessing (I've been doing this long enough that something just reads wrong and I go look). Nancy can't do that. She gets a confident, complete, plausible-looking answer to every single question she asks, and no way to sort the good ones from the bad. In 2021 she'd hit a wall and she'd know she hit it. That was annoying but it was also a signal to go get help. Now the wall never shows up, so she keeps going, and the thing doesn't surface as a problem until it's in production.

I think one could argue that AI has made the citizen developer projects worse. At least a citizen developer was writing their solution, and even if it was poorly written, they could explain the thought process. The stuff that AI makes is often a black box so the citizen developer can't really explain what was written, other than to provide the prompts used to make it. Who knew that troubleshooting could include reviewing a chat bot transcript?

There's one more thing from the old post I keep chewing on. I said back then that the reason people went around IT was that IT was too slow, and that fixing that was on us. I don't think we fixed it. Meanwhile the business now has something that answers instantly, at 11pm, and never asks for a project request form. Whatever friction IT used to have, AI removed all of it, so the pressure I was worried about in 2021 is worse now, not better.

Companies and organizations still need pro developers on staff to support Power Platform, even though it's sold as low code/no code. I'm a pro developer so weigh that how you like, but I don't think it's a preference at this point. Somebody on staff has to know development principles, because otherwise nobody in the building can tell whether what got built is actually correct.

As far as I can tell, the outcome and experience of citizen developers has not changed but now, there's just another bill for AI subscriptions.