[collingreen]

I love your premise here. I think visual programming has such untapped potential even though it has been tried and tried and tried so I hope you crack the code a bit (lol).

I think you're exactly right on the idea of "I just diagrammed all the control flow why can't I just push run". It's kind of crazy to introduce a point of failure (and a menial translation step) by writing code to match the diagram.

Another huge benefit that I learned when reading about drakon (obvious in retrospect) is that good visual programming makes the software development process more accessible to other smart people involved instead of locking it away behind computer jargon and tools (the drakon example was rocket scientists able to now work on, review, and validate the logic and control flow instead of having to just hope it ended up right).

I hate that I'm saying this but this would actually make me feel a lot better about the vibe coding going on right now. If the control flow was right, hand crafted, and easy to review I'd feel a lot better about throwing the implementation details of many individual nodes over the wall to the ai without worrying about the house falling down.

[gabigrin]

Author here. Thanks!

Lowering the barrier of collaboration is indeed a major goal for us. In the DRAKON analogy, Flowcode might help technical product managers collaborate with developers on LLM-heavy logic.

Re: vibe-coding - that matches our vision 100%. Let AI build the nodes while a human (even if heavily AI-assisted) oversees

[WillAdams]

I tried creating a workflow:

>Given a folder of scanned files, create a .bat file with move commands which renames each file using the information from the scan of the form and superimposed check using the naming convention: $<amount of check>_<date of check in YYYY-MM-DD format>_<Invoice ID>_<PWS ID>_<name of company from population line>.pdf

https://app.getflowcode.io/api/run/7344545b-116c-44f1-83e0-2...

and when I run it, I get:

>{"message":"No matching HTTP trigger found"}

but I was expecting to be prompted for a folder.

[gabigrin]

Thanks for trying Flowcode! sorry it didn't work for you.

The AI should have explained that local scripting isn't supported by Flowcode. Our copilot is under active development and has a lot of room for improvement.

Flowcode is built for cloud-based use cases - you can think of it as a "visual serverless" platform

Perhaps working directly with Flyde https://github.com/flydelabs/flyde + some AI assistant to build the custom nodes you'll need might work for that use case.

[WillAdams]

My pleasure!

My problem has been to find a front-end which will actually work with local files....

[Towaway69]

Great stuff, wish you every success with Flowcode.

It reminds me of Node-RED which seems very similar but is aimed at IIoT applications.

I’m working on a version that is based on Erlang and not NodeJS which isn’t a true concurrent language.

For me, flow based programming makes the most sense with languages which are truly concurrent and message passing is baked in, ie Erlang.

One thing I’ve come to realise is that visual programming is a hard sell, hence my effort to create a visual environment for Erlang - to introduce visual programming to a different set of developers.

[snthpy]

Interesting discussion. How do you see BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) fitting into this picture?

I feel that something like BPMN should be the starting point becomes at it from the business person or business analyst's point of view and then us more developer types can fill in the missing pieces, rather than starting from the developer POV and trying to foist that on the less technical stakeholders.

[worldsayshi]

I feel like visual programming opens up for paradigms that would otherwise be hard grasp. And it opens up for many alternative ways to interact with "source code" - which feels under explored.