Increasingly when building business operations on Make or n8n. The same issue crops up.
The frontier models keep shipping new API features. Structured JSON output is the one I keep coming back to: tell the model exactly how to shape its response, and your downstream pipeline gets a lot easier to build. Genuinely useful. But the setup keeps evolving and rapidly.
But the nodes (or modules, or whatever each platform calls them) can't seem to keep pace.
Every time there's a new release, someone has to build a new capability into the visual builder before you can actually use it. When you get an API announcement, and want to use the new capability. You discover your automation platform has not got around to updating.
The workaround now seems to be the default. Use the plain HTTP module and call the API directly, bypassing the nicely designed node entirely. Which raises an obvious question. If I'm calling the API directly anyway, what's the actual value the automation platform is adding beyond letting me see the steps laid out visually?
It's worse for anyone coming to this fresh, rather than someone who's been fully immersed since 2022/23. New features are being shipped so quickly there is a tremendous lag in being able to activate them without using a HTTP call.
And it's not only when you want to use the frontier models. SaaS platforms are shipping MCP support now too, which means their APIs are shifting as well. It's API whack-a-mole.
My working hypothesis: If we end up going more native on orchestration over time. It's entirely possible n8n and Make disappear from the Digitising Events stack altogether. Or there is a market gap for a much simpler automation platform.