WaveMaker is built on its leaders’ strongly-held beliefs about how software development should be done. However, they aren’t contrarian, just driven by the force of conviction.
So, even among the pandemonium of voices around generative AI as god’s gift to the software subset of humanity, WaveMaker wanted to stand out for their real and meaningful contribution to product engineering.
They had an idea, which they built into a great product. They needed help positioning it in the way they mean it.
To do this, they chose Emdash.
WaveMaker is an AI-powered development platform that supports the entire app lifecycle. As one of the first use cases of integrating generative AI into the development workflow, they created WaveMaker AutoCode.
They needed a positioning paper reflecting not just their product but also their point of view.
Writing a positioning paper requires two-fold understanding: What everyone else is saying and what are we saying differently. Emdash began its work at this point. Industry research, competitor analysis, lots of Google searches and YouTube videos later, we learned that the industry has scarcely looked beyond ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ by automating the plucking of low-hanging fruits.
WaveMaker was addressing a more nuanced problem: Complexity. Drawing inspiration from WaveMaker’s pitch that it helps developers ‘convert intent to code,’ we began building the narrative.
As a position paper, WaveMaker’s philosophy of application development — and their mission — was central to this content asset. So, we put that front and centre. The rest of the paper was about showing how WaveMaker intends to complete that mission.
We broke down the how into three interconnected parts: Abstraction, connection and customisation. We explained both in theory and in practice what this would look like. Some examples below.
In theory:
WaveMaker’s focus on reducing grunt work and producing pixel-perfect apps using AI leads to the twilight zone between the two worlds of design and development, two semantically different worlds. Closing the design-code gap is the first step from intent to code.
In practice:
Instead of thinking about tables and buttons, developers are free to think about intent or purpose — for instance, a leave management app with approvals and access control.
On why:
Unlike most AI-driven low-code products today, WaveMaker doesn’t strongly lean into any domain or industry…Instead, it takes a horizontal approach that addresses the everyday needs of professional developers hand-crafting multivarious applications.
And, of course, how it all comes together:
In many ways, this position paper is a message from the heart. It needed to reflect what WaveMaker’s leaders feel about the future in a tone to match that. Emdash worked closely with the WaveMaker team to get this just right. We debated word-choice, they moved sentences around, we pulled some quotes out and together gave it its best shape.
Apps come in various flavours. So do app developers. Three mainly. First is the developer who builds apps quickly using cookie-cutter components with some mild customization. Second, is the developer who completely trusts and delegates most of the work to generative AI models. Both cover use cases that are typically short-lived or internal. Third is the developer who builds custom applications with bespoke features, rich user interactions, and enterprise-grade class. Such apps are largely still hand-coded, outside of using open-source libraries.
A clear and differentiated position paper for WaveMaker's approach to AI.
