Exclusive: OutSystems' Paul Arthur warns coding comes with hidden cost

Coding may power the digital world, but it often leaves businesses with an expensive legacy.

OutSystems Regional Vice President for Australia and New Zealand, Paul Arthur, has warned that every line of code comes with a hidden cost, one that enterprises can no longer afford to ignore.

"The first thing you have to do with technical debt is stop building it," Arthur told TechDay, during a recent interview. "When you're at the bottom of the hole, stop digging."

Arthur, who has led OutSystems in the region for more than five years after a career spanning startups and global software firms, argued that companies too often treat technical debt as a permanent fixture.

"Some organisations have got to a point where there's a level of what they consider acceptable technical debt because they put that in their budget every year," he explained. "I don't believe that's the right way to go."

Instead, he said businesses should adopt development platforms that prevent debt from piling up in the first place. OutSystems, founded in Portugal and now serving thousands of global customers, has built its model on that promise. Arthur said the company's AI-powered low code platform allows organisations to turn ideas into applications quickly - but crucially, without creating the hidden costs that weigh down innovation.

"What really struck me about OutSystems was the ability to turn ideas into reality," he said. "Nobody wants code. Everybody wants applications. Code is just a means to an end."

From speed to velocity

Arthur is adamant that success isn't just about building quickly.

"We prefer to talk about velocity than speed," he said. "Speed is a bit chaotic. You can go really fast, but if you're going in the wrong direction, that's not improvement. Velocity is about speed and direction."

He argued that OutSystems enables organisations to build solutions at pace but also "build right, build for the future, and not create technical debt."

Tackling technical debt

Arthur acknowledged that many organisations have come to accept technical debt as inevitable.

"Some organisations have got to a point where there's a level of what they consider acceptable technical debt because they put that in their budget every year," he said. "The first thing you have to do is stop building it. When you're at the bottom of the hole, stop digging."

OutSystems' platform includes what it calls "true change" capability, which Arthur likened to an AI assistant warning developers when their design choices might cause problems later. "Stop building technical debt by using a development platform like ours to start off with," he said. "Then you can go back and start to address the core debt you've had."

AI and the rise of agentic workflows

Arthur pointed to two fronts where OutSystems is embedding AI: within the development process and inside the applications themselves. The company's AI Mentor tool already allows businesses to generate first versions of applications from prompts or documents. More recently, it launched AI Workbench, a solution for creating and managing AI agents.

"The future is not individual agents, but a workflow of agents making more and more complex business decisions," Arthur explained. "It's not just about making simple agentic solutions within your application. It's about linking those together and creating a more complex workflow."

He added that adaptability is vital in a fast-changing AI landscape. "If you build a static workflow, just defined agents, you can't then change, you can't update, you can't manage. Use what's available now, but do it in a structure that allows you to swap in and out components as they improve."

Professional developers at the core

Despite the perception that low code is mostly for citizen developers, Arthur stressed that OutSystems today is focused on professional developers creating mission-critical systems. "We are much more focused on the professional developer building applications from the full life cycle," he said. "We're building using AI and graphical interfaces, but sitting on top of a proven platform that allows you to deploy what you build at scale, securely."

That heritage, he argued, is what differentiates the company. "You can all go out and get ChatGPT or Copilot to write you some code, but what do you do with it? How do you ensure that it's secure, scalable and will perform in the future? Our key is our 20-year heritage of having a platform of which people build and run mission-critical applications every day."

Evergreen innovation

Looking ahead, Arthur said customers could expect continuous innovation rather than disruptive version changes. "Because our platform is completely cloud native, it's always available. You don't have to take it down to upgrade it anymore," he explained. "It's an evergreen technology where we're constantly improving the platform and offerings in flight."

At the company's global conference in Lisbon later this month, more announcements are expected. Arthur would not share specifics but confirmed there would be new iterations of AI Mentor and AI Workbench, alongside fresh tools for building complex applications from prompts or requirement documents.

Australia and New Zealand adoption

Arthur believes local enterprises are embracing the technology enthusiastically. "Australia and New Zealand are definitely punching above their weight in terms of looking at how to do things differently," he said. "Some of them have ideas already, some are still looking at the technology and saying, well, what could it be useful for us?"

He added that AI literacy is improving. "I think it started off relatively low, then we got to the hype cycle where everyone thought ChatGPT was AI. Now we're getting into agentic, and that's where we're going to start to see multiple workflow solutions take shape."

What will 2030 look like?

Arthur does not foresee a world without developers.

"There are always going to be developers," he said. "But it's going to be AI-augmented development, not just in doing the doing, but suggesting options and helping developers build better."

He believes the focus will shift to full life cycles rather than isolated coding.

"No business stakeholder wants code. They want solutions. They want the outcome that the code is going to enable," he said.

As for competition, Arthur is confident. "Right now, OutSystems is in the best place to be. We have the generative AI capability, but we also have the deployment life cycle capability with the underlying platform proven to work for thousands of customers," he said. "Those two things together is where the future is."