Say No to Black Box Integrations! A Modern Problem That AI Can Make Worse

Black box code can be a real problem in integrations. They solve a problem quickly; what can be easier than installing a Shopify or BigCommerce app or going to a systems integration firm with their own integration platform. Both approaches have future downsides, however. For the app approach you have no control over them and are beholden to their developer. For the integration platform where customer integrations are built by their own team, you're locked into that vendor for life. Then, adding artificial intelligence into the mix can make this problem even worse. You have a quickly built integration but the subsequent maintainability of the code/integration gets expensive and time consuming.

I've Heard AI is Amazing?

AI is an amazing accelerator and there’s loads of AI hype around at the moment. I’ve been playing with “vibe coding” (prompting AI to write some code for me and then refining it) as per these videos and it became obvious that an AI agent writes code very differently from a human/software engineer.

Quite often AI nails the first bit of a requirement. For instance, you can upload a Postman collection for an API (I’ve been using our Patchworks Postman collection) and prompt it to build a react app that prompts for the Patchworks API key and then gets the run logs for that account (second video above). However, prompt it for the second and third phase requirements and a real issue then emerges. Often, when prompted to fix a bug, without very strict "prompt engineering," the AI rewrites the code base from scratch — reintroducing previously fixed errors or other new and unusual behavior. This is using a generalist large language model (LLM). The LOVEABLEs of this world do a much better job of avoiding this. However, the fact remains that you're building code that no human has touched; you’re building a black box.

No-Code/Low-Code: User Focused, Maintainable Integrations

When I started at Patchworks in January 2023, no-code/low-code technology was at the top of the hype cycle. I would argue that this technology and trend is actually more important than AI as a code building tool. Why? A constant trend in my 30 years in digital technology has been putting control into the hands of the nontechnical user. For example, the rise of CMS systems, first for enterprises and ultimately leading to the popularity of WordPress, Drupal, etc. Another example is the rise of e-commerce platforms, from the first platforms like ATG that needed code and content to be engineered by developers and shipped to production through to SaaS platforms like Shopify that enable companies large and small to merchandise products and sell globally via a web-based interface.

No-code/low-code integration tools do this for the integration platform. Our vision at Patchworks is to make it as easy as possible to launch fully integrated retail systems, and to then maintain them. Putting the ability for less technical users to add a custom field in NetSuite and Shopify, and to map that data without downtime — this is the reason we work so hard on our dashboard. In addition, avoid the vendor lock-in through a platform that is supported by hundreds of partners globally and has self-serve certification training.

Conclusion: Put the Customer at the Center of the Stack

So, am I down on AI? Not at all. I’m down on black box integrations, and then using AI to create even more black box integrations. The secret sauce I believe is marrying AI to no-code/low-code technology, accelerating development and deploying it on an infrastructure already built for security and scalability, which a human can then edit and maintain in production. This is how Patchworks is embracing AI, providing AI tools to act as accelerators to launch integrations as quickly as possible, that can then be maintained by customers, agencies and SIs with the right training.

Ultimately, it's about usability and flexibility — commercial and technical — and putting the customer's requirements first.

Jim Herbert is CEO of Patchworks, an e-commerce integration platform as a service (iPaaS).