The no-code movement arrived with a particular kind of evangelism — the democratization of software, the death of the developer gatekeeping model, the era where anyone with an idea and an internet connection could build a business without writing a line of code. Some of this was true. Most of it was a product pitch. The actual picture is more nuanced, less ideological, and more useful once you strip out the marketing layer.

There is a version of bootstrapping that mistakes frugality for virtue and turns every spending decision into a referendum on character. This version produces operators who are undercapitalized not because they don’t have money but because spending it feels like failure, who spend thirty hours solving a problem that a $200 tool would have resolved in thirty minutes, and who confuse the appearance of leanness with the reality of leverage. The inability to spend when spending is correct is not a bootstrapping virtue. It is a liability dressed up as one.