Comment by romanhn
I have never heard of this approach. It does sound interesting in theory, but I have a hard time seeing this work beyond the simplest of CRUD apps.
My initial concerns would be:
- Maintainability: the "duct-tape logic", as you put it, sounds like spaghetti code from hell. Making sense of a feature comprised of tons of chained third party calls will be a nightmare.
- Expressiveness: complex functionality may require complex code. I don't quite understand how you would write even medium complexity algorithms using this system.
- Reliability and performance: you are now entirely at the mercy of third party providers. This is often the case with SaaS products, but this seems like a particularly severe case. Each hop reduces performance as well, which may impact user experience (assuming we're talking about user-facing features).
- Quality: by moving business logic out of code, you're throwing out testability, so no more unit tests. I guess integration tests could still happen, but they're going to be slow, expensive, and involve someone writing the actual code - which, given the premise of product managers creating features, seems very unlikely.
N8n is pretty powerful in that you can pipe Kafka streams into there for webhook trigger functions, separate postgres DBs can be set up for non-eng and also all the production API endpoints can be called from there in a tracable way.