With HPOO, I could support stuff I wrote, because I knew where everything was, but good luck supporting anyone else’s code or working on something as a team. It was so hard to see what was actually going on. While it looks like a nice flow chart in presentations to management, the meat of what’s happening is tucked away in various panels with properties and JavaScript hidden away on a different tab. Some even ends up in the transitions. To try and figure it out requires clicking on literally everything in a flow and holding the whole thing in your head. It supported source control, but that was more of a glorified backup, because good luck making sense of a diff on the giant XML file it used to represent the flow. This was many years ago, so maybe things have improved, but with all the acquisitions, I’m doubtful.

PowerApps felt similar, but also worse. To be fair, I only used it one time to set up something to monitor my email and send an attachment to SharePoint for a weekly report, since SharePoint removed the email feature that did this out of the box. It could have been that a lot of my issues were simply the learning curve, but I just remember it being very annoying. This was before they added AI to it, so maybe now I could write and simple prompt and be done, hard to says.

Considering my experience with HPOO was that it was easier to re-write than try to understand an existing flow written by someone else, I don’t see AI being very good. It would be very difficult to review what it did to make sure it’s doing what was intended. I also tended to order my flows in a way that looked visually appealing and logical to me, and I’m not sure how AI would do with this. Not to mention the lack of training data, when I was using it there was 0 information out there on it. I only used it because that’s what management bought and pushed down.