biggest lesson i learned here: all-in-one tools that promise to handle your whole workflow are almost always worse than stitching purpose-built ones together.

i tried every no-code automation platform (make, airtable, n8n) for a content pipeline i was building. they all break the moment you need to run it more than twice a day at any real scale. weird rate limits, silent failures, state management nightmares.

ended up just writing python scripts that call APIs directly. less "elegant" but infinitely more debuggable. the fix-your-tools moment for me was realizing the tool itself was the problem -- sometimes fixing means replacing with something simpler and more transparent.