When low code becomes high friction

Low-code tools like n8n are awesome for getting a workflow running fast. Drag some boxes, wire them up, ship. But here's the thing: the benefits don't scale linearly with complexity. Your "simple automation" turns into a real system, and suddenly the low-code surface is fighting you instead of helping.

The visual graph becomes impossible to reason about

Five nodes? Great. Fifty nodes with branches, retries, and edge cases? Good luck. You're clicking around trying to remember where that one conditional lives or why this webhook sometimes fails. The "source of truth" is scattered across a UI you can't grep. You can't diff it meaningfully. You can't even think about it without opening the app.

Testing is basically "click run and pray"

There's no real way to mock external services, assert on intermediate states, or build a regression suite. So every change gets scary. You're never sure if you just broke something three layers deep. Bugs slip through because proving correctness costs too much.

Git integration is a mess

Yeah, you can export JSON blobs, but the diffs are unreadable noise. Merge conflicts? Have fun. Code reviews turn into "I clicked around and it seemed fine." You lose the normal flow: focused PR, readable diff, CI passes, merge with confidence. Instead it's just hoping someone actually tested their changes.

Code-first fixes this

Switching to code-first fixes this. Workflows become software:

You can actually test things. Unit tests for each step, integration tests for the whole flow, mocks for external systems. CI gives you real confidence.

Version control works like it should. Readable diffs, manageable conflicts, meaningful history. You can bisect bugs, revert cleanly, tag releases.

Your teammates can review properly—comment on specific lines, catch edge cases before prod, suggest better patterns.

You get modularity for free. Shared libraries, typed interfaces, reusable components. Complexity doesn't spiral out of control.

Observability becomes first-class instead of an afterthought. Real logs, metrics, tracing, structured errors.

Low-code is perfect for prototypes and simple automations. But once a workflow becomes business-critical, treating it like actual software—testable, reviewable, evolvable—stops being optional.