Who assembles the workflow?
Two products answer one question opposite ways. The third position already won, which changes what the live question is.
The question underneath every product decision in this space: who assembles the workflow, and what is the durable artifact?
| Node graph | Generated code | |
|---|---|---|
| Durable artifact | Workflow JSON: typed nodes and connections. Human-authored, human-owned. | Generated Python plus a rendered graph. Readable, not editable. In practice the artifact is the conversation. |
| Who authors | Someone willing to learn a node vocabulary, an item model and an expression language. | Anyone who can describe an outcome. |
| Editability | Surgical. Change one parameter, re-run from that node. | Indirect only. Every change routes through regeneration. |
| Debuggability | Per-node data for every run, pinned data, partial re-run. | Logs and final output, plus an agentic isolate-and-repair loop. |
| Cost of change | Proportional to the change. | Proportional to the system, not the change. |
The generated-code position is coherent and worth stating fairly. Its FAQ answers the key question directly: "Can I modify the code? Not directly. Instead, you can describe the change in plain English." So the human can read the artifact but not edit it, and the real source of truth is the conversation.
The prompt is the source, the code is the build output, and you do not hand-edit build output. That is how every compiler works. The problem is that unlike a compiler, this transformation is not deterministic, not total, and not reversible.
Architecture recovered from that product's deleted developer docs: each workflow is a standalone FastAPI app in an ephemeral sandbox, stateless, 15-minute execution cap, no persistent storage between runs. Which means it cannot express a long-running or human-in-the-loop workflow at all. And there are no steps, so there is nothing to observe per-step — the thin observability is structural, not an oversight.
The third position is "generate the graph rather than the code." Where does it stand in 2026?
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