I’ve seen lots of demos (and bought lots) of reporting or automation tools intended for the “CEO” to make their own ad how reports only to have that mean that consultants are hired or someone else do it.

At the end of the day, the hard part for many people is the idea of variables and abstraction and interfaces and looping and operators. Making a button vs a keyword to do this is maybe easier, but it doesn’t really Bridge very well to non-programmers.

The closest I’ve seen is Excel with people who will not try R or Python but can write lots of stuff in Excel functions and pivots and maybe macros.

There have always been power user types in small and large organisations who are not developers but can create simple solutions, mostly using point and click with some expressions, macros or SQL added in. The ones I have personally met have used dBase, Excel or Access (one of them a non-tech CEO).

Of course they had to learn how to do it. But it didn't take them years to learn nor is keeping the skills fresh a full-time commitment.

I think this is largely a disagreement over definitions. Can something that doesn't involve writing loops and mutating variables be called "building business apps"? I would say yes, but I understand how reasonable people could disagree on that.

They usually have their own jargon/terminology and concepts to learn.

So they just move the goal posts...

But I think it depends on what sorts of problems and solutions we're talking about. I don't believe for a second that all types of software can be created with this sort of end-user oriented wysiwyg + expressions tool.