They really don’t. People say this all the time, but you give any project a little time and it evolves into a special unique snowflake every single time.
That’s why every low code solution and boilerplate generator for the last 30 years failed to deliver on the promises they made.
I agree some will evolve into more, but lots of them won't. That's why shopify, WordPress and others exist - most commercial websites are just online business cards or small shops. Designers and devs are hired to work on them all the time.
If you’re hiring a dev to work on your Shopify site, it’s most likely because you want to do something non-standard. By the time the dev gets done with it, it will be a special unique snowflake.
If your site has users, it will evolve. I’ve seen users take what was a simple trucking job posting form and repurpose an unused “trailer type” field to track the status of the job req.
Every single app that starts out as a low code/no code solution given enough time and users will evolve beyond that low code solution. They may keep using it, but they’ll move beyond being able to maintain it exclusively through a low code interface.
And most software engineering principles is for dealing how to deal with this evolution.
- Architecture (making it easy to adjust part of the codebase and understanding it)
- Testing (making sure the current version works and future version won't break it)
- Requirements (describing the current version and the planned changes)
- ...
If a project was just a clone, I'd sure people would just buy the existing version and be done with it. And sometimes they do, then a unique requirement comes and the whole process comes back into play.
If your job can be hallowed out into >90% entering prompts into AI text editors, you won't have to worry about continuing to be paid to do it every day for very long.
As a yet that's exactly what people get paid to do every day. And if it saves them time, they won't exactly get bored of that feature.