I’m here for one main reason: my time is short these days.
Spiritual health, physical health, family, children, work, family entertainment, personal side projects, and a few other things related to adult life. Try to maintain all of these with an adequate level of dedication, and you’ll see that your time is the most important thing in your life, that it never comes back, and that it becomes scarce as you get older.
I’ve been at Bubble for about 5-6 years. I have a programming background. I build my own things with code when necessary. I enjoy challenges. I wish I could do more, but again, time is short and life flies by.
Maybe if I were younger, living with my parents, being supported by them, or single with not much to do, I might invest in testing every new AI tool that emerges (many jump from tool to tool, become mediocre at them all, and never focus on anything) or even delve deeper into traditional programming. But… that’s not my case. At the end of the day, for the vast majority, it’s not the tool that counts, it’s the solution.
Therefore, the lack of time prevents me from focusing on delving into all the areas required in traditional programming, such as security, software architecture, databases, scalability and performance, code quality and maintenance, version control and collaboration, monitoring and observability, infrastructure and deployment, APIs and integrations, and so many other areas and their subareas, just to be able to deliver a robust, scalable, and, above all, secure system. Of course, in traditional programming, this is a team effort, but that’s where other problems arise. It’s not just the cost of a team, but other issues that come with working in larger teams.
And don’t get me wrong, in Bubble, even though we don’t need to delve as deeply into these areas because Bubble already does a lot for us, we still require some knowledge and the ability to put these things into practice. So, it’s not as if we don’t know or don’t need it; we just don’t need to delve into the deeper layers of it all.
Furthermore, while many people these days believe that AIs are creating applications from scratch, completely secure, scalable, etc., they will realize over time that at some point things won’t be as simple as they seem. Technical debt will arise, and they will need more technical people to fix the mess, if there’s still time. We’ve been seeing numerous discussions about the problems of interacting with AI tools for a long time. They work well up to a point, but then, with each necessary iteration, while one problem is solved, three more are created. If you don’t understand the code it’s writing, or only understand it in parts, how can you identify what’s wrong? Even some expert programmers get lost in certain concepts created by AI and the way it “thinks.” Who knows, maybe things will change in the future; by then, I plan to be retired.
Bubble, like many other low/no-code tools, has helped many start from scratch; many have changed their lives because of these tools. They all have their applications and limitations. Just as the solutions created with these tools have their distinct types of customers. And like all tools, Bubble also has its problems, its flaws, and its strengths. Many things could be improved, and others that, for some, don’t even really need to be implemented (I highly doubt that Bubble’s experienced or long-time developers are using its AI, at least for now), but hey, you can’t please everyone.
I see a lot of people complaining about Bubble’s AI. The point is that everything has a simple and flawed beginning before becoming something big. But I think the main problem is that people want to compare AIs out there that have access to the entire internet, can use any library, any block of code found in the darkest part of the internet, in other words, a completely free environment.
With Bubble’s AI, which operates within a controlled environment, that is, Bubble’s own architecture. In other words, theoretically, it can’t create a component from scratch unless it exists within Bubble’s “framework”. Both approaches have their pros and cons. For non-technical people¹ (which is why Bubble was initially created), which approach do you think would be safer?
Is it safer to let a child play freely on a street, full of risks and dangers, or to let them play in a controlled environment, supervised by specialized people?
¹ Non-technical people doesn’t mean people without knowledge. These days, it takes a lot of knowledge to create a truly functional and secure Bubble app.
I also get pissed off sometimes, with unexpected bugs, features requested years ago that haven’t been implemented, this and that, and of course, the main thing that affects everyone: crashes (the ones that happen in production versions, because we can still deal with the editor crashes). They’re not always recurrent, but they’re the kind of problem that, when they happen, makes most people angry and forget about Bubble’s strengths.
It’s like a marriage, where your spouse has strengths and weaknesses, and you live with them, but sometimes something happens that makes you forget their strengths and become extremely irritated. Some are more patient, they relieve them, they know there are good and bad days, while others already think it’s a reason to break up.
Well, I think that’s it. That’s my opinion, given my reality and life story. Nowadays Bubble is my job; it allows me to work remotely from wherever I want, have flexible hours, be present in my daughter’s growth, spend more time with my family, travel whenever I want, among other things. And I intend to stay here for a few more years, trying to help improve the tool, criticizing when necessary.
I understand those who have clients who depend exclusively on the solutions you’ve created and who get incredibly upset when something goes wrong. Or those who want to maintain a certain relative dependency by not being on Bubble or other locked-in tools. Ultimately, we’re simply changing our dependency source, sometimes they’re just not very explicit.
And finally, I’d like to share a small example that everything outside the “Bubble” isn’t perfect either. Everything in the world is imperfect; the question is what bothers us.
), but here’s the quick(ish) answer: