Show HN: Flowcode – Turing-complete visual programming platform

Hey HN! I’m Gabriel, and I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on for the last few years. Flowcode is a visual programming platform that tries to combine the best of both worlds (code and visual). Over the years I found myself repeatedly drawing architectures and logic. It was always my dream to just press “run” instead of having to write them in code afterwards. But none of the visual tools I found were flexible and transparent enough for building real products.

I think that visual programming fits perfectly with modern backend dev tasks that revolve around connecting different services with basic logic. Flowcode is meant to speed up and simplify those tasks, leaving more time to think about design and solve design problems. Visual programming also works really well for developing workflows involving LLM calls that are non-deterministic and require a lot of debugging and prompt tweaking.

There are many other visual/low code tools, but they all offer limited control and flexibility (no concurrency, loops, transparency) and most suffer from the same problems (vendor lock-in, hard to integrate with existing code etc.).

Flowcode is built on an open source visual programming language (Flyde https://github.com/flydelabs/flyde, which I launched last year here on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39628285). This means Flowcode has true concurrency, no vendor lock-in (you can export flows as .flyde files), is Turing-complete (loops, recursion, control flows, multiple IOs etc.), lets you fork any node, integrates with code via an SDK and more.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Show HN: Flowcode – Turing-complete visual programming platform
app.getflowcode.io

I remembered Flyde : looks interesting, will definitely try.

Haha, thanks!

As for the DOM nodes - as a React frontend developer by trade, the DOM was my first choice for simplicity when I started working on Flyde a few years ago.

I was sure I’d eventually need to switch to Canvas or WebGL, but surprisingly, the DOM has held up pretty well. It’s been performant enough to render complex flows smoothly, and being able to leverage the existing React ecosystem has been a huge advantage.

I do think there's an option for a canvas/WebGL based version in the longer-term future, especially to be able to build interactions like this one - https://xai-primer.com/tool/

Looks very good, I believe this type of product is the future (instead of vibe-coding that produces heaps of junk new code). A few thoughts:

* Flowcode is a clever name but since you are positioning yourself as an alternative to code ("Code is messy and complex") the name is contradictory, just call it "Flow" (or "flows" or "Flower" something)

* You are replacing the legacy of code with something new, embrace new ideas that get out of the "one running process" paradigm, e.g: durable functions. There are a bunch of companies in the space (inngest, DBOS, trigger.dev) who are doing very interesting things, copy/steal/leverage all the great things they're doing -- your product's value is the visual programming

* Most developers today are already writing code so getting out of their code flow to do something visual might not fit well, whereas there are lots of non-developers who would love a product like this (see: the success of Make.com, Zapier etc.) because you're offering the AI integration for creating workflows which gives them confidence to go beyond what Make, Zapier etc. offer

If I were marketing this product, my pitch would be reframing programming as something anyone can do when it doesn't involve code, i.e:: your users can become a developer without writing code, AI-assisted visual programming builds production-ready systems without a single line of code. Code is archaic, (visual) programming is the future. Vibe coding is faster horses, AI-assisted visual programming is flying cars.

Congratulation on the launch! I definitely see a future in visual scripting, the best candidate I have for my next project is https://luna-park.app/ but I'll be experimenting with FlowCode/Flyde.

What use cases do you target with Flwocode? As I see here it seems general purpose.