> There's a lot of value in having direct manipulation and visual introspection of UIs, data, and logic

Yes. In the GIS industry for example, nothing has fundamentally changed with the introduction of LLMs. They may make the same processes more efficient e.g. though automated building of workflows. AI has significantly improved classification work of course but it's still using the same principles (we've been doing ML longer than most industries). Geocoding will get cheaper and easier but it's still geocoding.

GIS software allowing standard visualisation, export and map production will bet a lot better because of LLMs. It's an area where the sheer complexity and number of formats was overwhelming, but now a GeoTiff parser can be built in a day or two.

The article was making a bit of a sweeping statement based on a single datapoint: they didn't need Retool anymore.