Every Visual Workflow Tool Is Just Excel for Developers Who Gave Up

Zoom image will be displayed A man looking at the window and thinking 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? Code is infinitely more powerful. You can version control it, test it, refactor it, and when something breaks, you get actual error messages instead of “Node 47 failed.” You can build exactly what you need, scale it however you want, and integrate it with literally anything that has an API. So why are we choosing tools that are objectively worse at being code? Why are we paying money to make ourselves less capable? The Uncomfortable Truths We Don’t Want to Admit Let’s be honest about what’s really happening here. Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared. We’ve developed imposter syndrome about our own job. Somewhere along the way, we started thinking “maybe I’m not smart enough for ‘real’ coding.” So we reach for tools that feel easier, that don’t require us to think through proper architecture or handle edge cases. We’re suffering from decision fatigue. Writing code means making a thousand tiny decisions. What framework? How do I structure this? What about error handling? Visual tools reduce those choices, which feels relief until you realize you’ve also reduced your power to actually solve problems. We’ve bought into the illusion of speed. “Look, I can build this workflow in 5 minutes!” we say, conveniently ignoring the 5 hours we’ll spend next month trying to figure out why it randomly stopped working. Management pressure is real. “Can’t you just use that no-code thing so Sarah from marketing can help maintain it?” Sure, let’s give Sarah the ability to accidentally bring down our entire customer onboarding process. What could go wrong? But the biggest truth? We’ve gotten cognitively lazy. Dragging boxes around feels easier than thinking through the actual problem. It’s the programming equivalent of ordering takeout every night instead of learning to cook. The Economics Make No Sense Here’s the part that really gets me: you’re paying premium prices for inferior tools when you literally have the skills to build better solutions for free. You can write Python, JavaScript, or whatever language you prefer for exactly $0 and have unlimited power. Or you can pay $50+ per month to drag boxes around with artificial constraints. How does this make sense? These platforms have you trapped in subscription models where you’re paying monthly to be locked into their limited vision of what your workflow should look like. Want to use a custom API? That’s the Enterprise plan for $500/month. Need more than 1000 operations? Upgrade time! Hit a rate limit because too many people are using their shared infrastructure? Sorry, that’s just how it works. You’re literally paying companies to make you less capable than you naturally are. It’s like a chef paying someone to only let them use a microwave. The Red Flags You’re Choosing to Ignore The signs are everywhere, but we keep pretending they’re not deal-breakers: Vendor lock-in should terrify you. Your entire workflow logic lives in their proprietary format. Good luck migrating that to anything else when they decide to change their pricing model or shut down. Rate limits and artificial constraints exist not because of technical limitations, but because they need to segment their pricing tiers. Your automation stops working not because it’s technically impossible, but because you hit your “Basic Plan” limit. Missing integrations are always “on the roadmap.” Meanwhile, you could write a proper API integration in an afternoon, but instead you’re waiting for someone else’s development team to maybe prioritize your use case. Error handling is a joke. When your visual workflow breaks, you get messages like “Something went wrong in step 3.” Compare that to a proper stack trace that tells you exactly what failed and why. Performance is whatever they give you. Your workflow can only be as fast as their slowest shared infrastructure. No optimization, no caching strategies, no control over anything. The Wake-Up Moment Here we are: developers who can architect distributed systems but can’t figure out why a 3-node workflow is timing out. We debug race conditions in multithreaded applications but accept “Something went wrong” as a valid error message. We optimize algorithms for performance but shrug when our automation takes 30 seconds to do what a script could do in milliseconds. This isn’t just about tools, it’s about what we’ve become. We’ve traded our developer identity for the comfort of clicking instead of thinking. We’ve convinced ourselves that paying for limitations is somehow more professional than writing actual code. The question isn’t whether visual workflows have their place. The question is: when did we stop believing we were capable of better? The Choice Is Yours The uncomfortable truth is that visual workflows aren’t making us more productive, they’re making us more comfortable with being less capable. Every month you pay for these limitations is a month you could have spent building something actually powerful. The choice is yours: keep paying to be constrained, or remember that you have superpowers and start using them again.