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- Hacker News
- There's this magnetic appeal to use a visual graph editor as the UI paradigm for your app.. it seems to fit so many problems well.
Yet if you complicate the problem just a notch, the graph becomes big fast and that renders like complex spaghetti you're afraid to touch in the UI.
The other problem is that the UI paradigm becomes the driver - you try to think of the problem in terms of fitting it into the UI graph editor, which is often not a natural way of thinking about said problem.
All of this to say is that I've always thought that graph/flow editors looked cool, except I've never found good use for them in practice except for very simple and predictable graphs.
Just writing the flow as a data structure in text is often a lot simpler and practical..
by delegate - I remember Flowise app being well-intended but bad. I evaluated the self-hosted version to be used as a component in an internal tool so non-technical people can tweak their prompt chains without writing code. As far as I remember:
1. it became increasingly slow as I added flows (felt like a O(n^2) ish bottleneck)
2. There were many bugs and bad UX
3. the flow variable system was underbaked and underdocumented
4. feature gaps
I decided I was probably not the target audience for their app and moved on.
by nirava - "Over the last few months, we've noticed a significant shift in how people build. As AI models become more capable at reasoning, we've noticed that developers are increasingly relying on new coding agents such as Claude Code/OpenClaw to handle complex tasks." is true when your primary users are developers. But no-code workflow is still valuable at scenarios where determinism is required.
I'm building an agentic compliance platform where every procedure needs to follow company policies and operated on the rigid plan, but the procedure itself is different for every customer. Coding agents could in principle generate the necessary workflow for each company, but they need to integrate with millions of other applications in the company, easy to review and modify.
We built our own workflow builder because every other existing solution is too complicated and doesn't meet compliance requirements. The workflow builder itself was coded by Claude, and it's working wonderfully.
So flowise's shutdown is because their business is targeting a specific sector which doesn't need it anymore, not because workflow builder itself is not useful.
by taoh - Full disclosure I'm a founder of cbk.ai and chatbotkit.com, where we've built reusable agent components. I have never really saw flowise, n8n the now defunct OpenAI agent builder and other similar products as competitors and I wanted to describe why.
I think workflow builders are mostly the wrong mental model for AI. A graph of predefined nodes and edges is useful when you already know the exact sequence of work.... but the point of an AI agent is that it can decide what to do next from the current context.
IMHO reusable building blocks still matter enormously. You should not have to recreate an integration, a capability, or a piece of reliable deterministic logic every time. It is wasteful and you cannot oneshot it. Even with coding agents which we use all the time system to system connectivity is more complex than writing the code. But those should be available to the agent as tools, mechanics, and features that are not wired together as a visual workflow of sorts.
A product can look graph-like at a glance though, while avoiding making a workflow builder. I think this still matters in order to put a mental model around it. But the mechanism should not be graph / workflow like in practice.
by _pdp_ - >Over the last few months, we've noticed a significant shift in how people build. As AI models become more capable at reasoning, we've noticed that developers are increasingly relying on new coding agents such as Claude Code/OpenClaw to handle complex tasks. The typical rigid workflow low code approach quickly hits the limit when it comes to complexity.
Their front page says ‘design agents visually’ so their target market was less skilled devs/non devs.
So not sure why they are giving the reason if closer as cli related when low code and cli are different markets.
by fsuts - Flowise was cool. I used to to help build an enterprise employee search tool with it a few years back. https://medium.com/better-programming/employee-search-with-o...
The fact is, there's not as much need for drag-n-drop low code tools anymore. At least I don't have much need.
by jbdamask - Flowise was acquired by Workday in August 2025 [1].
At the time, they posted "Flowise isn’t going anywhere, we’re doubling down. In fact, we’re only just getting started!" [2]
I wonder if "keep the platform running for >= 1 year post-acquisition" was part of the terms! Ah well, another one for Our Incredible Journey [3]...
[1] https://newsroom.workday.com/2025-08-14-Workday-Acquires-Flo...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/flowiseai_were-thrilled-to-sh...
by mkeeter - There is something about agent workflow builders not gaining as much traction as they could have. Open AI also launched something in house and they are also shutting it down
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agent-builder
OpenAI is deprecating Agent Builder. Existing users can continue using it during the transition window, and the product is scheduled to shut down on November 30, 2026. ChatKit remains available. See the deprecations page for the current timeline.
by ashu1461