In 2023, at the No Code Summit in Paris, I gave a talk that our blog later , Dan McKinley argued that every team gets about three "innovation tokens" to spend on non-standard choices, because every exotic decision is a long-term maintenance commitment. The industry keeps rediscovering his invoice, most recently in the wave of posts on ), and full app platforms like the one I work on. Different technologies, zero shared code, same economics. On our platform, the patterns that repeat across thousands of apps have been formalized once, by us. The parameters combine into more than a billion possibilities. And for the genuinely custom remainder, we apply what I call the 10% rule: about 90% of a real project is patterns the framework has already formalized. The last 10% is yours, and the framework's job is to hand you escape hatches for it, rather than pretending the 10% doesn't exist.
That's the design position the usual binary hides. The dominant story says code and AI equal freedom, no-code equals limits. The real spectrum is: who formalizes what. Opinionated defaults for everything that is not your product, reversible trapdoors for everything that is. You enter complexity when your project requires it, by choice, with a map. Fast where you're ordinary, open where you're special.
AI has made this position stronger, not weaker. Whatever you're building, most of it already exists somewhere in formalized form: lists, accounts, search, push, payments. Features that have been studied, optimized and debugged against years of production. Rebuilding them is the worst possible use of a freedom budget. The rational split is to inherit that 90% as-is and spend your tokens on the one part that is genuinely yours, the part no platform could have anticipated, and that part you can now vibe-code in a dedicated section, inside the frame. That's what escape hatches become in the AI era. And the frame keeps the bill bounded: if your custom part turns out to be a bad idea, the blast radius is one section, not the app.
Seen that way, adopting a framework isn't renouncing freedom. It's acquiring a decade of formalization you won't have to do yourself.
A line held for fifteen years
One last thing, because "the middle" can sound like the position you hold when you don't have one.
The platform I build has defended this line since 2011: opinionated where projects are alike, open where they aren't. Fifteen years, through every wave that was supposed to invalidate it. The most persistent one is hybrid frameworks: they've been announced as our replacement for as long as the company has existed, under a new name every few years, and each time we made the same call, native. And now AI generation, the strongest freedom narrative so far. Each wave moved the how. The economics never moved: someone pays for every formalization. The only real choice is whether you pay for the ones that make your product yours, or for all of them.
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