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Flowise is shutting down

flowiseai.com

31–40 of 49 posts

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#31
post #15

as a person who spent years building flow.ai before flowise.ai, i'd say drag n drop ui was dead on arrival it works for a set of very hand picked cusomers , the rest were in a weird spot between people who can code( and think accordingly ) and don't.

You hit the nail on the head. A couple years ago I started prototyping a similar node based AI workflow builder which worked well but everyone I showed it to was either; confused at how to use it (even for super basic stuff), or liked it but poked holes by asking "can it do x, can it do y" which it couldn't. There is such a small niche of people technical enough to use something like this that wouldn't just opt in for coding it themselves (especially with AI assisted coding nowadays)

I do still use a part of it on one of my projects for building multi-step image processing pipelines for AI property photo editing (ffocal.io for the curious) that are configurable in the admin panel and it works super well and is useful for modifying and testing pipelines. So there are use cases, they're just very narrow

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#32
post #27

Flowise was acquired by workday, so I'd take this with a grain of salt. However, I agree with the reasoning. I don't see a future for visual workflow builders. They are used to define plumbings that can be defined by a 50 line python script. A non-technical user does not need to draw this workflow. They can just ask an agent to write that code for them, to debug it, to visualize it. All workflow builders now have an…

I would counter and say it’s understanding that makes the difference.

Having an AI generate 50 lines of code that you assume will do the job is a little different to creating a flow that you understand and maintain.

AI is really good at making everything seem so simple and easy, until it breaks. But then again, just use another AI to fix it.

So then there is an agent orchestration layer for coordinating multiple agents with multiple personalities, role playing multiple parts in a comedy called software development.

We still don’t know what they are really doing but does that matter? Does knowledge, experience, learning and failing even matter if AI is doing it for us?

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#33
post #6

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 av…

There does seem to be a need for a semi-deterministic workflow where nodes in the workflow are agentic, i.e., powered by LLMs, but the workflow itself remains deterministic. Lets say my daily workflow is to download a PDF from some website, extract some information from it, and email that information. I cannot just ask an agent to script this workflow, because the website will keep changing, the PDF layout will keep changing, etc. I need a "download agent", an "extract info" agent, and so on which will examine the website, PDF, etc. and generate any one-off scripts everytime the workflow is run.

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#34
post #33
post #6

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 av…

There does seem to be a need for a semi-deterministic workflow where nodes in the workflow are agentic, i.e., powered by LLMs, but the workflow itself remains deterministic. Lets say my daily workflow is to download a PDF from some website, extract some information from it, and email that information. I cannot just ask an agent to script this workflow, because the website will keep changing, the PDF layout will keep…

And without an LLM you wouldn't even try?

I don't mind semi-deterministic for plenty of things. But these agents like hermes, can codify a skill to be deterministic.

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#35
post #33
post #6

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 av…

There does seem to be a need for a semi-deterministic workflow where nodes in the workflow are agentic, i.e., powered by LLMs, but the workflow itself remains deterministic. Lets say my daily workflow is to download a PDF from some website, extract some information from it, and email that information. I cannot just ask an agent to script this workflow, because the website will keep changing, the PDF layout will keep…

My solution for that is to use skills and add a omnibus shell script in each particular skill folder that does all the deterministic steps and then write the skill markdown to only use the script, usually passing a command line step parameter to the script. I also usually add a note in the skill markdown that it should monitor how it calls the script and suggest any improvements when the skill is used.

As an example I have a `today` skill that has a today.sh script that can check my email, bug tracker, calendars, custom timesheet system and other systems via the script and then the skill assembles a nice summary of what is happening today along with a suggested schedule.

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#36
post #11

I’ve never heard of this product before today, but their website made it look like a nice visual tool. It’s too bad they didn’t make it.

With the speed everything is going now, nobody has time to learn nice visual tools. They set their AI agents an objective and leave them to iterate until the objective is reached.

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#37
post #33
post #6

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 av…

There does seem to be a need for a semi-deterministic workflow where nodes in the workflow are agentic, i.e., powered by LLMs, but the workflow itself remains deterministic. Lets say my daily workflow is to download a PDF from some website, extract some information from it, and email that information. I cannot just ask an agent to script this workflow, because the website will keep changing, the PDF layout will keep…

This is exactly what I’ve been building with ctx.traits :)

https://ctx.company/traits/docs/

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#38
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the cost (both tokens and initial setup and debugging the workflow). It's really easy to spend a gazillion tokens by mistake and the resulting workflows are still probabilistic and open for abuse or failure. Maybe it's too soon, we need more time to figure out what works and what doesn't. We're still looking for the right balance for when a probabilistic solution (i.e AI) works and when we need a determi…

Correct and I think for non technical folks just creating pure ai agents is much easier than creating these workflows which can be harder to test as well.

This will come with higher risks, no transparency, and higher costs, of course. That seems like a recipe for even higher frustration than normal software incurs.

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#39
post #24

>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 m…

Claude Code isn't necessarily command-line, the desktop app supports it.

For all intents and purposes they're the exact same interface

Re: Flowise is shutting down

#40
post #2

Disclosure up front: I build LLMGraph (llmgraph.ai), a hosted product in the same category, so I have a horse in this race. The interesting part of the announcement is the stated reason: "developers are increasingly relying on new coding agents" and "rigid workflow low code approach quickly hits the limit when it comes to complexity." I think that's half right. Coding agents are clearly eating the developer end of th…

I had built https://codeflow.co long ago - a workflow style integration platform (pre-AI). I could see less interest while showing the product to users in recent years as AI was catching up.

The sales demo that excited users - hey you can drag and drop and build stuff - which was pretty exciting few years ago - was seen as a burden by user (especially if they had to pay/license it) - they started asking why can't AI do it for me?

However n8n and other platforms embraced AI and AI automation was a thing for a while until the coding agents caught up. Now I believe drag and drop builders are not a buzz anymore where Claude has become a verb.

Being a visual person I do see value of debugging code "flowing" visually but not many are/were in the same boat. Since then I have pivoted to https://nexaflow.com - which is more like just tune the prompt and get your AI going instead of wrestling with the flow yourself - but I do feel a gap somewhere between the two spectrums - enterprises who would need high level of customization but wont believe in vibe code may be - but that could be a very tiny niche..

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