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Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

ballet.dev

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Re: Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

#2
Yet another automation? How do you plan to win the market when you add just 1% of extra value? In a few weeks it's commodity. The fact that it's easy to build nowadays don't mean you need to build every cool idea that pops up your mind... However, I might be completely wrong - and in that case, I wish you luck and success on your journey!

Re: Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

#3
> We’ll model it in Ballet on your real systems in a 30-minute working session

You drastically underestimate how bad most systems are. All of the vendors in your examples have good APIs. Those vendors already did the hard part.

All of the systems we need solutions for are moving targets that are breaking constantly. You can’t model those in 30 minutes because the ways in which they break don’t show up until months later.

Re: Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

#4
post #3

> We’ll model it in Ballet on your real systems in a 30-minute working session You drastically underestimate how bad most systems are. All of the vendors in your examples have good APIs. Those vendors already did the hard part. All of the systems we need solutions for are moving targets that are breaking constantly. You can’t model those in 30 minutes because the ways in which they break don’t show up until months la…

Absolutely. And scale does not matter. I had issues with top tier systems like docusign, tableau etc in beforeGPT era. Many undocumented issues and when you write support usually they only were pushing to buy top tier support package, but never fix anything.

Re: Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

#7
As a non-coder I was obsessed with automation tools like Zapier when they first came out. After that, I tried very hard with n8n but just found it impossible to work with until I read some post by some developer that said "just do it in Python". Took me a while to really take that in given I can't code but then I got Claude to write some Python scripts automate some work spreadsheet and API work and I haven't looked back since.

I think something like this could have worked several years ago but now it's overkill.

Re: Show HN: Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

#8
I don't get what this is about.

The examples they show are someone typing something into a prompt and then some agent starts coding.

But the hard part in automation these days is not writing software. It is "how does the software get the credentials to access data and services? What APIs does it use?". So before being able to type a prompt and then use the software created, there must be the hard part: Setting up all those interconnectivity pieces. Making sure the software can access and change data, trigger actions, but only within a certain scope.

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