Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API
ballet.dev
ballet.dev
You drastically underestimate how bad most systems are. All of the vendors in your examples have good APIs. Those vendors already did the hard part.
All of the systems we need solutions for are moving targets that are breaking constantly. You can’t model those in 30 minutes because the ways in which they break don’t show up until months later.
Perhaps I'm the wrong market for this project (despite much of my bread and butter being types of workflows) because I have no idea what Brainfish is.
The runtime being the biggest value add from tools like this.
Like Airflow or Temporal or Unmeshed.
The value for me is the runtime not the ability to create stuff. Drag n drop is definitely dead. But so is coding by hand. Pick the right runtime for getting the value from tools like these.
The examples they show are someone typing something into a prompt and then some agent starts coding.
But the hard part in automation these days is not writing software. It is "how does the software get the credentials to access data and services? What APIs does it use?". So before being able to type a prompt and then use the software created, there must be the hard part: Setting up all those interconnectivity pieces. Making sure the software can access and change data, trigger actions, but only within a certain scope.
I think something like this could have worked several years ago but now it's overkill.
Can it do DAGs? Can it do directed graphs with loops?
This is, to me, what sinks most of those services like Zapier and n8n in power-user market, and dooms them to become marketing platform for third-party integrations, concealed by some drag&drop complexity. Because the moment you want to do anything that isn't a direct ETL job with SaaS for databases, you discover the thing is trying very hard to not be Turing complete and there's basically no easy way to express any logic without shelling out to code, if that option is even available...
A product I wish existed is basically something like Zapier but with code. That is, webshit SaaS with quick IDE and (that's the important part) full auto-complete of all active integrations as function calls. Plus some basic correctness checking.
Rationale:
It's easy to write the equivalent of a low-code flow in code; almost trivial if you can tab-complete a dropdown with icons and descriptions for each symbol:
$data = FromWebhook(...);
if(IsCromulent($data)) {
$message = Format("XYZ {1} happened on {2}", $data.payload.title, $data.payload.timestamp);
Telegram.send({to: $me, message: message});
}
TL;DR: the main value of low/no code tools isn't in the drag&drop UX - it's that they regularize the APIs of the integrations, solve the discovery problem of those APIs, and hide all the incidental bullshit behind the scenes. In principle, there's no reason you couldn't just do the valuable parts, wrap it in an API, and let users run code against it on the platform.
- n8n
- tonnes of these keep popping up
Check out the docs: https://docs.ballet.dev