[yowlingcat]

Very cool. The pieces you put together make sense, but I have to ask -- why use Node-RED over Jupyter notebook for prototyping? It seems like your reason is that it gives you access to a suitably flexible low code environment that lets you visually program and experiment without needing to reach into code until you have a working prototype.

Is the improvement in productivity that drastic that you'd rather take that approach when possible? I haven't given something like Node-RED a try before because I've been under the assumption that about 60% through any kind of low code prototyping exercise, you begin to hit limits of inflexibility that makes it more painful than dropping into pure code in the first place, but I wonder if I've been overly hasty in this presumption.

[rcarmo]

Because:

- I can write JavaScript inside nodes

- When each event is a JSON blob, it’s trivial to handle data

- You can break down arrays/lists into series of discrete events, and switch them along different paths with simple filtering logic

- You can build sub-flows and re-use them trivially.

- You don’t have to worry with doing HTTP requests or handle database connections (you just receive the request results as a JSON object or create an object you send to a database node

So for me a basic flow is [template node with prompt]->[LLM API call]->[parse and branch out depending on outcome]->[store output], and I only write two snippets of JS inside a couple of nodes.

I do have Jupyter on my stack (another stack, too, with GPU access), but it tends to be linear, messy and impossible to leave running as a service. My Node-RED stuff is effectively “testing in production” and exposing HTTP endpoints as well, and I switch by prod/test by linking the right nodes…

But yeah, when I’m happy with the prompt or the flow I look at it and write some actual code. Just not in Jupyter.