| "as opposed to building proper systems integrations or rebuilding the underlying legacy app entirely." Spinning the blame around a bit, I've often thought that part of the problem is we keep building GUI toolkits that hate this usecase. If they supported this better, the RPA stuff would be less awful. Appletalk almost did it, but my impression is that it is dead now. Websites have decent support for it, but trying to use it in practice still involves a lot of little compromises everywhere. It still breaks pretty easily, and the workflow is bad even when you learn all the tricks. But there's a lot of useful code buried in GUIs. If there was a way to write scripts against the UI, in a discoverable, testable manner, this would be a much more sensible strategy. And you wouldn't necessarily have to hire developers just to maintain a "real" solution. But we persist in treating this as a fifth-class citizen in our widget sets, so... here we are. I mean, yeah, it would always be a bit of a tech debt pit, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near as bad as it is now. |