I’ve been playing around with AI web application builders a bit. More concretely, today I tested Hostinger’s Horizons, where you can prompt for your next web application directly in the browser. No technical know how needed.

It’s pretty powerful for tiny applications. One single prompt can already get you a fully functional small web app with login, a nice-looking UI, and even a database - all set up and ready to deploy. Highly customizable and easy to extend - using modern LLMs in the background.

It’s clearly tailored for non-technical people though, and every application looks quite similar in the beginning.

But for getting something with absolutely no technical input, this really doesn’t look too shabby - especially if you keep customizing it further and further.

Suddenly it hit me: AI can get non-technical people surprisingly far these days. I can totally see a huge number of tiny business applications being created by Product Owners or Requirements Engineers without any developer or architect ever involved - at least until they hit the limits of what’s realistically possible without a deeper technical background.

And then?

Are you old enough to still remember Access applications? The ones we had to all replace 15 years ago because they inevitably hit their limits?

Full circle - just with a more modern tech stack?

Simple example of Hostinger’s Horizons:

• The single prompt

  

• The application out of the box - still buggy but looking okisch

  

• The pocketbase database with user and tasks table