The first time you wire something together in n8n, it feels like cheating. You move fast, skip ceremony, and get something real working in minutes instead of days. There’s a small, intoxicating sense that you’ve outsmarted the system. No boilerplate, no deploys, no tests, just boxes and arrows doing useful work. Then someone asks why it failed, and suddenly the magic evaporates.
Low-code tools promise speed, but speed without clarity becomes a liability faster than most people expect. As workflows grow beyond a few nodes, reasoning about behavior becomes harder, not easier. State is implicit rather than declared, error paths are hidden behind UI affordances, and the “happy path” quietly dominates the design. The system works, but only because nobody has asked it a hard question yet.
The deeper problem isn’t that n8n is visual, it’s that visual systems obscure causality. You don’t see invariants the way you do in code. You don’t see contracts, only connections. Assumptions accumulate silently because the tool never forces you to name them, and unnamed assumptions are the ones that hurt you later.
This matters most once a system is relied on by people other than its creator. Teams don’t just need outcomes; they need explanations. Systems need narratives that can be communicated verbally, in writing, and under pressure. A screenshot of a workflow is not a narrative; it’s a map without a legend.
Code forces you to make decisions explicit, whether you want to or not. Inputs are shaped, states are named, and errors are modeled instead of implied. Even mediocre code leaves behind a trail of intent that another engineer can follow if they’re patient and curious. The system may be imperfect, but it is legible.
Writing services in code also creates pressure toward structure over time. You introduce modules because duplication becomes uncomfortable. You add logging because production incidents demand answers. You write tests not out of moral superiority, but because reality already punished you once.
None of that discipline emerges naturally in n8n. You can impose it, but the tool doesn’t push you there. Code does: constantly and without apology.
I once rebuilt an n8n workflow as a small service after a single question broke me: “Which step decided to retry—and based on what?” I realized I couldn’t answer confidently without clicking through nodes and reconstructing the logic in my head. That’s not knowledge; that’s improvisation.
In n8n, the answer was effectively “somewhere after the webhook, depending on conditions.” In code, the answer became a function with a name, parameters, and comments explaining the tradeoff being made. That didn’t just help debugging; it created shared understanding.
The service wasn’t shorter, and it definitely wasn’t faster to write. But it was explainable under stress, which made it trustworthy. And trust, in real systems, is everything.
Speed without explainability doesn’t scale
Code preserves intent; workflows preserve outcomes
If you can’t explain it, you don’t control it
If this hit close to home, subscribe.
And reply! I’m curious where your systems became hard to explain.