Walk into any plant floor in 2026 and you’ll see something that should be shocking - but somehow isn’t. The PLC running the line was likely designed in the early 2000s. The protocol it’s speaking was probably standardised in 1979. The HMI looks like Windows 95 had a baby with a calculator. And somewhere in the back office, a tired controls engineer is gluing it all together with VBA and ladder logic - and, probably, hopes and prayers.

And this isn’t a story about technical debt. Technical debt implies a deliberate trade-off - you took a shortcut, you know about it, and you’re planning to fix it. What we have in industrial automation is something stranger and harder to talk about: a kind of institutional fear. We are not stuck on legacy protocols because they are the best tool for the job. We’re stuck on legacy protocols because nobody wants to be the person who broke the line.

And the worst part about all of this is that the caution I’m talking about has fundamentally metastasised into something much worse - it’s become an excuse. And the people paying the price are not the vendors, not the integrators, and not even the engineers - it’s the end users. Operators, technicians, plant managers, and ultimately the customers downstream who deal with the consequences of systems that should have been retired a decade ago.

The industrial space needs to be braver. Not reckless, not credulous, not chasing every new acronym that comes out of a vendor pitch deck - but braver than the version of itself that has been hiding behind earned caution as a justification for not doing the harder work. I think FlowFuse represents a much braver way forward, honestly - and I think I have a pretty strong argument for that case in this article.

The frontier technologies are here. The new protocols are here. The new providers are here. The end users have been waiting.

It’s time we stopped making them wait.

Read more: https://kristopherleads.substack.com/p/heres-a-hot-take-for-...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922813

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Here’s the thing though - the problem was never the vibe coding. The problem is the approvals process that allows vibe coded content to proliferate unchecked. This may seem a bit of victim blaming, so let me set an expectation here - if you’re looking for a tech bro to tell you that vibe coding is the future and anyone against it is a luddite, that’s not what this article is about. I don’t think vibe coding is the best thing since sliced bread - but I also don’t think it’s the worst thing to happen in development.

What I do think it has done, however, is expose some critical flaws in the way that software - especially open-source software - gets built and released.

So let’s talk about that.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47887078

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

FlowFuse has built out an agentic solution for AI-powered flow inspection and development called FlowFuse Assistant - and we just released it to the Node-RED community via an open source node!

FlowFuse Assistant brings a ton of features for Node-RED users, including:

- A function builder - Function node Code Lens - JSON generation in all typed inputs and JSON editors (like the inject node, change node, template node, etc) - Flows Explainer - HTML, VUE, and CSS generation in FlowFuse Dashboard ui-template nodes - Context-aware inline and multi-line code completions for functions, templates, and tables

I recently did a video highlighting the release - you can see that here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osgli5cdWPY.

Try it out, and let us know what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46500374

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I suppose the tl;dr is if you're generating bugs in your flow and they make it to prod, it's not a tool problem - it's a cultural one.

If we can get high texture + throughput content like dual 4k streams but with 1080p bandwidth, we can get VR that isn't as janky. If we can get lower power consumption, we can get smaller (and cooler) form functions which means we might see a future where the Playstation Portal is the console itself. I'm about to get on a flight to Sweden, and I'd kill to have something like my Steam Deck but running way cooler, way more powerful, and less prone to render errors.

I get the feeling Sony will definitely focus on graphics as that's been their play since the 90s, but my word if we get a monumental form factor shift and native VR support that feels closer to the promise on paper, that could be a game changer.

I think that's a critical argument that n8n and others will have to overcome - why should users decide to over-specialise one aspect of their stack when they can do so much more and have so much more control elsewhere?

Like you could make a car like a truck, but why not just buy a truck in the first place?

No-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "I wish I had access to literally any code system to make this work."

Low-code: "I don't need code, this is so easy!" 2 weeks later "Oh awesome I can actually use code here!"