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Comment by bikingbismuth | Hacker News Reader

I once had to implement SOAR in a “no code” automation solution (it was not Tines), and it was terrible. There were a lot of connectors and transformers, but almost all of them had some weird quirks that made them hard to use effectively. Coming from an “all code” background I was pulling my hair out trying to troubleshoot everything. The project was sufficiently onerous that I actually left my job over it.

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I used to consult in the document capture space (OCR, classification, data extraction) and one company I worked for wanted to sell UiPath. I showed them how I could do all of that in code (even built a wrapper around AutoHotkey for Windows UI interaction) with way less time, effort, and hair pulling. They said it wouldn't sell because businesses think they can have someone implement a low code solution and they'll take it over eventually, and a significant portion of their revenue is from licenses.

I luckily no longer consult and now am an automation engineer for a company and I get to build things the way I want. So far a lot of Go and a little bit of Node and things are great. I'll take that any day over "We sell X, so you use X for everything."

That said, for home automation I do use Node Red and absolutely love it. The integration with Home Assistant is top notch and prototypes and tweaks take no time at all. It's much more like functional programming than a lot of low code tools and the function node allows for whatever JS you want. So if I need to do something complicated that would take a ton of individual nodes and spaghetti to work natively, I can just drop in some code and move on.

I had to do this too. I eventually learned I could write python plug-ins and started writing the workflows that way instead. But then it exposed to me how actually unwieldy the api was and I was extremely unhappy with the work. I would automated everything myself, without the framework, but the platform was in part there to help those who lacked the technical skills to do everything from a terminal etc. I hear they’re still fighting with it even months after I left the job.

Co-founder of Tines here. This is exactly why we built Tines - I spent years working in security, and tried nearly a dozen different SOAR/SOAR-like solutions and felt the all were too complicated and the "connector" model was way too hard - the integrations were all quirky and limited.

Tines is completely different - we don't rely on any prebuilt integrations - similar to postman, if you have a curl command then you can paste it into Tines, and the response is simply the json from the API you're hitting - makes it a million times easier to do exactly what you want. You can then use that response in the next action. If the API is terrible (it frequently is) we've a ton of templates to help get the relevant data, and a community with experience connecting to most tools.

Would love to talk about the challenges and see if anything we're doing (or could do) which would have made it easier? I hope you're in a better job now anyway!

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