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Comment by mattfrommars | Hacker News Reader

I have come to realize these drag and drop no code solution are good for low complexity solution. If project scales, it is better to write code.

I kid you not, we use another no code solution at work and it was originally meant for PM to create workflows. It came to us the devs to make it and we resent daily working on it.

Our life would have been much similar if our workflows had been written in code.

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PM (at the next sprint meeting): "So, Matt, for your next story here's this 48000 line code base that I vibe coded for the new vendor interop feature you said would be difficult to implement correctly.

Of course this is a standalone page written in some language that I forget. I think Cursor mentioned some animal name... anyway. Can you please put this into our product please?"

"I haven't run or tested it yet, but I am sure it will work. At worst it will just need a few tweaks, an hour or two max."

I wish I had gone into medicine like my parents wanted

I think about going to law school more with every passing day.

Just imagine all the vibe coded nonsense your clients would bring to the table. Billable hours sure, but still.

Similar experience. Now for these little automation needs I'm have some LLM write most of the code. Then fix it a bit, then pack into a container - one container image per automation task. Some are in JS, some python, some PHP, one is a nasty shell script with an obscure dependency.

They get a readme, compose.yaml and git repo.

This has worked for set-it-and-forget-it experience.

I tried n8n but for some automation needs, it just wasn't flexible and/or I'd have to build a custom module. My choice was custom code in n8n or custom code in whatever.

Well that really comes down to how much control the solution actually gives you, right? I'm a DevRel at FlowFuse, so yes - biased - but something like Node-RED can give you wild complexity or pretty simple flows. I think where other solutions miss the mark is in trying to abstract control away too readily for the sake of simplicity and polish.

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