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Every Visual Workflow Tool is Just Excel for Developers Who Gave Up Mohamed Ali Ben Othmen 5 min read · 3 hours ago 3 hours ago -- Listen Share
There’s a saying that goes “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” But what happens when you trade your hammer for a Fisher-Price toy hammer and convince yourself it’s an upgrade? That’s exactly what’s happening with visual workflow tools, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not insane.
Every visual workflow tool like Zapier, Microsoft Power Automate, make.com, whatever flavor-of-the-month platform you’re using is just Excel for developers who’ve given up on being developers. And just like Excel, they’re creating a special kind of hell that someone else (probably you, six months from now) will have to deal with.
The Excel Comparison Isn’t an Insult, It’s a Warning
Think about it. Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy. Both create dependency webs that become absolute nightmares to debug. Both give dangerous amounts of power to people who have no idea what they’re unleashing.
You know what happens with Excel. Karen from accounting builds a “simple” spreadsheet to track expenses. Six months later, it’s a 47-sheet monster with circular references and VLOOKUP formulas that would make a mathematician weep. The company depends on it, nobody understands it, and when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it?
Visual workflows are the same story, just with more colorful boxes and higher monthly fees.
The Question That Should Keep You Up at Night
Here’s what I don’t understand: why are developers whose literal job is to write, understand, and debug code are willingly trading their superpower for drag-and-drop boxes?
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