Thoughts on Workflow Builders
OpenAI recently announced their workflow builder, where you can drag and drop on a visual interface and build your own agents and agentic workflows. This led to some excitement from the folks who like visual workflow builders, but a bit of a “meh” from those who don’t.
So-called no-code and low-code tools have been around for ages, and their promise is always the same: Build sophisticated applications without writing a single line of code. I’m not convinced.
I don’t doubt that they work great for fast prototyping or straightforward workflows that plumb together content from different apps. For example, “If an email comes in to our support email address, add a bug ticket to JIRA and send a message to our Slack channel.”
For serious development, though, I see multiple issues:
Complexity. You can’t run away from inherent complexity. If the workflow you’re modelling is complex, your visual workflow will soon resemble a bowl of spaghetti.
Testability. How do you even create and maintain a test suite that protects you from messing things up when you add functionality?
Vendor lock-in. Okay, so your project has outgrown n8n, Bubble, or Draftbit. Now what? You’re essentially starting over from scratch with a “real” tech stack.
There are situations where these trade-offs favour no-code visual workflow builders, especially when market risk significantly outweighs product risk. Sacrificing quality for speed might be the correct strategy when uncertainty is high.
On the other hand, if speed is of the essence, can you afford to waste time with something that won’t scale and will start slowing you down sooner rather than later?
Here’s an idea. A compromise of sorts. If you insist on crappy-but-fast, don’t bother with no-code tools and don’t bother with anything that locks you to a particular platform. Just vibe-code your idea on a proper “independent” tech stack. Maybe Python on the backend and React (not the biggest fan, but LLMs are really good at it) on the frontend and you’re off to a much better start. You might even find that coding isn’t nearly as scary as the no-code advocates have you believe.
