Researchers, educators, and developers face a common challenge when building robust, ethical, and sustainable AI software: the lack of accessible full-stack development resources and expertise. Low-code platforms promise to address this gap by automating parts of the coding process and reducing development time. But an important question remains: are these platforms truly open, or do they lock users into proprietary ecosystems?

Often, proprietary low-code tools create vendor lock-in and limit user freedom. We argue for more open-source alternatives that empower users to use, extend, and even adapt the tools to fit their specific needs.

In this workshop, we present BESSER, an open-source low-code platform for smart software development. Participants will get hands-on experience creating applications, databases, AI agents, and chatbots directly from our web modeling editor. Beyond these exercises, we will also explore the advantages of BESSER’s open-source ecosystem, which gives users the freedom to extend the platform, adapt it to their own domains, and contribute new features to the project, building and sharing their own model-driven solutions.