Everyone is going on about vibe-coding at the moment but the dark horse that is gaining traction, which I think is more likely to have a much bigger impact … are flowgramming tools like N8N, Make and Zapier.
Whilst the automation tools are technically not AI, and Zapier has been around for ages anyway, there is a surge in creative usage of the tools – especially since you can easily automate with AI APIs.
Key value proposition:
- The cost reduction of creating useful outcomes is massive with automation tools.
- They are easy to use and only require programming knowledge in somewhat advanced situations.
- They are very visual, meaning you can retain a birds eye view of what you are trying to do, without getting lost in code
- Most software is just a collection of functions in a workflow and automation tools provide the framework that lets you easily work on these functions
Of course not all software will be replaced, but I have a friend who managed to create a automated voice assistant who takes phone calls, all with N8N. It took him several weeks of long hard days, but he managed it all himself without any programming experience.
Developers who have software experience will always be at advantage in some situations, and of course as the number of juniors going into the industry die, old school programmers will be in demand to fix older software … so hang in there developers, there will be an upsurge in demand eventually.
For myself, as I explore the automation tools, I now have to face reality and ask whether every business case I get asked to make for people, could actually be done within the flowgramming paradigm … and a large proportion can be!
I honestly think businesses who don’t create automation networks within the next few years will start falling behind. It’ll take effort to work out what can be automated within a company but there are always manual tasks that take up time.
Once you’ve skilled-up someone within the company on a tool like Make, N8N or Zapier … and they know how the company works … you can start picking off small tasks that consume time. If you can completely eliminate pesky tasks that take a few minutes every day for everyone in the workforce, or even attack larger problems … you start saving hours every week.
For instance, emails are getting unwieldy for most people around me. I’ve never liked emails much anyway, although we are very fortunate to have an open protocol that allows us to communicate with one another.
How many minutes a day do I waste opening up my email, scanning through them to identify urgency, or longer term relevance, deleting the spam … and maybe even making a quick response to a simple question… this is stuff that can now be automated by an pervasive AI that has context on your situation and goals.
An example with N8N that takes an RSS feed and outputs an image for each item
Results
For the moment I just selected the first RSS item as an example, and then pumped it through to the OpenAI image generator.
If you aren’t impressed, then you aren’t paying attention.
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