Comment by jamamp

I'll also agree with you.

I want to start with the fact that building FlowRipples is a monumental feat of its own. Generic tools that are adaptable to lots of situations is a difficult task, and it's impressive what was built.

But the supporting functionality in any service like this is also so important. It's one thing to have a low friction setup and way to get started, with simple steps and a quick showcase video, so that someone can get to tinkering. It's another thing to fully adopt this as a tool within your team that would be integrated into a published product.

Suddenly, like you say, you have multiple environments (Dev, QA, Staging/Pre-prod, Prod) that you have to move changes into and out of. Replicating the same changes manually will inevitably lead to human error and what worked in QA will no longer work in Staging or Production. Even a simple export + import helps with this.

I think one thing that also needs attention is parallel changes. Two people are wokring on different changes in the dev environment. Promoting the current state of the Dev environment to QA requires that both tasks have to be dev-complete, or else unfinished changes could make its way to QA and cause confusion. This is difficult when the different tasks aren't synchronized in their testing (i.e. start testing one ticket but not necessarily the other). It's almost like you need branching and merging and diffing, a la git, to help resolve this. That's difficult to do in low-code visual programming apps.