We've had Visual Basic and UML, and no-code visual coding tools for decades. Especially GUI builders like Delphi and Visual Basic died with the advent of responsive screens.

They don't scale. No one wants to drag around logic elements visually.

Code is much more expressive, can be refactored and diffed easily.

No one wants to drag around *logic* elements visually. I agree.

What if you could just mock up everything and let the AI fill the blanks with an automatically generated backend? I'm not sure it's possible, but I would like that.

If this thing (useful generalist AIs) takes off, there will probably be no single silver bullet that represents its full potential.

But the hard work isn't writing backend CRUD code.

The hard part is actually deciding and describing what the backend should do. How should it work? What decisions should it make? What's the business logic it has to follow?

You'd want to describe that in an unambiguous way, so you'd have to invent a very strict syntax so that ChatGPT has no way of misunderstanding your intentions. You'd end up with a programming language eventually - just adding more complexity on your way, but you'd end up with code.

Now if you feel that writing boilerplate backend code is tedious, repetitive and verbose and could be automated, I totally agree. Any tool that makes that easier is welcome. But then a language model is the wrong tool for the job, we need more tools like PostgREST, ReTool, and Zapier to not end up writing too much unnecessary boilerplate code.