I would also like to add that many of these tools give you the ability to develop an idea quickly without cornering you into bad decisions. In the worst case you just redo a bad design decision. The average case I have seen is you say crap and then realize that you only need to change 3 lines of code and a filename. This has been my experience with rightcart.com and we've been out for about 30 days and had 3 releases with new features in each. That doesn't indicate perfect code level planning, but the ability to rapidly adjust (the ruby people like to call this being agile). This has given our developers (myself included) a lot of confidence in exploring new ideas and features without the fear of breaking the current system. A common line is that it makes programming fun again. Well, my experience is that a happy programmer is a better programmer.