Uniting Citizen Developers with ProDevs and AI

• By Howard M. Cohen
• April 22, 2025

Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAPs) have been around in some form since the early 2000s, though the term "low-code" itself wasn't popularized until around 2014. The industry analysts at Forrester Research coined the term "Low-Code Development Platform in that year to describe these visual, model-based platforms that allow users to build applications with minimal hand-coding.

In one of its famous market research reports ("The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise LCAP"), Gartner, Inc., ranks Boston-based OutSystems firmly among the leaders in this space—it's furthest to the right on this scale, which means it has the greatest "completeness of vision." It's also third from the top which indicates a "high ability to execute."

And it's no wonder; Outsystems started in 2001 with a vision for "a complete reversal of software delivery" and a platform designed for professional developers (ProDev) to solve a very specific problem. "A great deal of time is spent trying to plan for everything needed in an application to ensure that it is 'right the first time,'" the company's website reads. "The problem is that it is just not practical to know every requirement that might be needed in an application or plan for every eventuality."

I'm throwing a spotlight on the Outsystems Platform in this column because the introduction of its Mentor AI application generator late last year demonstrates the inevitable intersection of LCAP and Generative AI.

DevOps Meets GenAI

Speaking at the OutSystems ONE Conference, the company's CEO and Founder, Paulo Rosado, explained the problem Mentor was created to solve.

"The Generative Software Cycle is here," he said. "In fact, 93% of executives are planning to increase their investment in AI-powered solutions, driving developer productivity and value creation to unprecedented heights. But speed can lead to technical debt and security issues if not managed carefully. With OutSystems Mentor, developers can now build full-stack applications in minutes, without sacrificing quality, security, or governance. Mentor ensures apps are built right from the start, changing how software development gets done."

OutSystems isn't the only vendor with this type of offering. Not only are they competing with the many other LCAP providers, but with Mentor they have placed themselves in fierce competition with most of the many AI model providers. One of the primary capabilities they all point to is their platform's ability to build applications.

Think "And" Not "Or"

Rodrigo Sousa Coutinho, Co-Founder and AI Product Manager at OutSystems, sees the environment differently.

"Before all this craziness with AI, our main competitor was traditional code," he explained. "Traditional code with AI typically doesn't have a lot of context.... [One of our customers] work in OutSystems, and they work in traditional code, and they decided to give ChatGPT to all their developers. After a while, they realized that they had code nobody understood, and there were no people accountable for it, because ChatGPT is not accountable for code.... The fact that we are using low-code avoids these issues because we are at the higher level of abstraction, we have much more control over what's generated. We ensure it follows the best practices, we ensure it's a valid application."

Coutinho believes that the ultimate solution for ProDevs is low-code plus AI. "That's the winning combination," he said, "plus you must add humans. I'm a firm believer that the humans are a very important part of the equation. They will change their role, but they will not be 'thrown away.'"

As Coutinho describes it, Mentor is more of a communication tool that dispenses with development of the classic functional spec and goes straight to generating an application.

"The first thing you do is type a prompt, or send a requirement document, and it will create a full-fledged working application for you," he explained. "How well it matches exactly what you want depends on the level of detail you provide. But the good thing is, you don't need to give it a lot of detail, because at that point, you're just getting started."

This is where the OutSystems Platform with Mentor really demonstrates its value: users don't have to have provided every detail of everything they want the application to do. They are always welcome to add to the application, remove parts of it, or create other changes. And yes, the best way to describe this way of building applications is definitely "agile."

"Mentor will help ensure that that the developers can show, or the citizen developer can show, what's happening," Coutinho explained. "Then the business will either say, 'Yes, that's exactly it,' or perhaps it's not exactly right. But then they can iterate over and over. That's the role of Mentor."

When asked whether OutSystems is an LCAP with AI or an AI application generator with a low-code interface, Coutinho said, "OutSystems is the low code provider that uses AI. We are focused on that vision of allowing every company to innovate through software, and we're doing that through automation and low-code."