Recently I was in an Office Hours session with an old client that had previously hired me to oversee an overseas team of software developers to build software that they use internally to run their business.

New development of features had ramped down over the years but I was still kept around to ensure the app ran fine on AWS.

As fate would have it they brought one of their team members into the meeting that was trying to figure out how to leverage “AI” to benefit their business and we got to jamming.

I showed them N8N and a few other technologies I wanted on their radar. As I got to thinking about how this could benefit them the most I came to a realization that I shared on the call:

“Never hire anyone to write code for you again. Just use tools like N8N to build out your own internal flows”.

I realize that sounds crazy coming from a guy that spent their entire career getting paid to write code but times are changing.

If these tools were around way back when we started the project and I knew it was only going to be used internally then I would have advised them to do that.

Sure, I would have been out of a paycheck but it would have saved them lots(trust me, a lot) of money.

Why would I say that?

• Their internal tools don’t need to scale up to handle millions of requests per minute.
• They don’t require 99.999% uptime internally.
• They are constantly innovating so internal processes change fairly regularly.
• They already use a lot of pretty standard tools like Microsoft Teams which have N8N integrations.
• They don’t need multi-region support with servers on 5 continents.

Now there are some caveats obviously which I will cover in subsequent posts but for now let me end with this:

If you run a small - medium sized business and want your internal processes automated but don’t want to blow a bunch of money on hiring people to code you a custom solution you should check out N8N.

If that doesn’t describe you then by all means stick with coding, at scale in production I 100% would stick with code over an automation tool.

Wrapping it up:

Don’t worry, I am not pivoting my focus to N8N explicitly, there are plenty of people already doing that like Nate Herk, Nick Saraev and even the official N8N channel.

As always I will continue to focus on how to scale your tech stack, N8N or otherwise, to handle billions of requests without breaking the bank when you are ready for it.

Until then thanks for reading!