Webhooks were designed to notify, not orchestrate. But in no-code platforms, they’ve quietly become the default — often triggering fragile, chaotic systems in the name of “real-time.” This post breaks down how we got here, why it breaks, and what to build instead.
Published April 25, 2025
Webhooks. The knee-jerk trigger of no-code.
Shiny, reactive, featured in every platform tutorial.
The gold standard for integrations.
Who isn’t swayed by the promise of real-time connectivity?
Sure, there are other flavors of triggers — a scheduler, maybe even a button. But why pick those when you’ve got the when you’ve got the cleanest, most powerful trigger at your fingertips?
I’ve had clients ask for webhooks.
Not for responsiveness. Not for clarity. Not to reflect their business process.
Just — “Can we use webhooks?”
That’s a signal. A clear one.
We have a problem.
The problem isn’t that webhooks are bad. It’s that we’ve forgotten what they’re for.
What they’re good at. What they’re meant to be.
They’ve become just another no-code default — and that’s the real issue.
The Promise of Webhooks
I remember first hearing about webhooks as an application developer, sometime around 2012.
Back then, they were called HTTP callbacks. As someone used to a rigid “Ask First, Get Answer” model, the concept was jarring. But intriguing.
Webhooks had a lethal mixture:
- They made the alternatives look stale — non-realtime, non-reactive.
- They were introduced by the right people — GitHub, Slack, Shopify.
Then came Zapier. Then came Salesforce — with a webhook implementation that used a SOAP body. Truly bridging eras.
But soon, webhooks weren’t just novel. They were everywhere.
Architects. Developers. Integrators. Everyone latched on.
They were seen as efficient. Real-time.
No more polling. No more stale data. Just clean propagation — state updated when state changed.
And like any promising tool, things veered.
Quietly at first. But deeply.
Webhooks stopped being notifications. They became brains — the first line of orchestration, the trigger for everything.
And no one questioned it.
That’s how we ended up in a cargo cult.
Not loud and bloated like microservices. Not over-ritualized like agile.
This one is quiet. Hidden. Assumed.
And just as dangerous.
Why This Is Dangerous
It’s not obvious at first.
But in no-code platforms, this so-called gold standard of triggering can easily be misused — shifting from a lightweight, reactive technique to an open floodgate.
Webhooks begin responding to every possible event, kicking off massive, irreversible, multi-route cascades.
Think of those elaborate domino setups — the ones that take minutes to execute, but now they’re running and re-running every few seconds.
Now envision that level of orchestration mapped onto your platform.
Is that the process automation you were promised?
Is it truly representative of your business?
Does anything in real life behave like this?
Why This Happens
It’s not the technology’s fault.
The technology is incredible — a game changer.
And that’s exactly why it’s so easy to misuse.
No-code platforms feature webhooks by default.
They lead with them in tutorials, showcase them in marketing, and sell them as the modern way to build.
And let’s be honest — it’s hard to argue against “real-time.”
Why would you choose anything else?
Far be it from a developer to intentionally build something less modern.
Try implementing a batch process, and someone will ask:
“Why didn’t you use webhooks?”
This isn’t just a tooling problem. It’s a cultural one.
We went from:
- Not knowing what webhooks were
- To not understanding how they worked
- To blind adoption and default usage — without questioning fit or consequences
That’s the shift:
From “What is this?”
To “Can we use it?”
To “Why wouldn’t we?”
And at no point did anyone stop to ask:
Should we?
What’s the Problem — You Don’t Like Realtime?
This is where the promise breaks.
If you’ve ever had to debug one of these systems, you know the drill:
- “Why isn’t our realtime processing engine giving us the right numbers?”
- “We’re seeing performance issues in automation — can you take a look?”
You dig in.
And under the hood?
Thousands of executions per hour.
Parallel processes running for tens of seconds each, barely keeping up.
Loops. Retries. Update → update → update → update.
Something went wrong?
Good luck catching it before 50 new executions bury the logs.
Your context scrolls off the screen before you even know what broke.
Observability? Gone.
Troubleshooting becomes a lottery: reproduce the issue and hope you catch it in-flight.
This is the hidden cost of misused realtime orchestration.
Not just performance. Not just fragility.
This is reactivity at its worst.
And more than that — it’s a misrepresentation of how your business actually works.
You wanted data synchronization.
You got data suffering.
The Better Way
Webhooks are excellent — when used correctly.
They offer a reactive, real-time integration pattern that’s powerful in the right context.
But when they’re misapplied, the failure isn’t subtle — it’s catastrophic.
And today, they’ve become the default method for process initiation — even when the process they’re triggering is anything but real-time.
That’s where the trouble starts.
Far too often, webhooks are used to initiate what is fundamentally a batch process.
Something that should run periodically, deliberately, and observably — not instantly, endlessly, and invisibly.
But in the race for modernity, real-time gets chosen by default.
And the result is systems that are fragile, hard to debug, and completely misaligned with how the business actually operates.
Here’s the truth:
Most businesses don’t need real-time everything.
They need accurate, predictable, and supportable automation.
The illusion of real-time is often enough — and that distinction matters.
When minutes is good enough, why push for seconds?
That line — between real need and default assumption — is the difference between:
- Controlled, elegant orchestration
- And an environment where execution becomes layered, unstable, and hard to trace.
Let the process define the implementation.
Let the business define the system.
That’s your job.
Build systems that can be:
- Understood
- Observed
- Supported
Webhooks can be part of that.
But they’re not always the answer.
Ask why first.
If you’ve lived through webhook misery, you already know the pain is real.
Webhooks aren’t dangerous because they’re powerful.
They’re dangerous because they’re easy — and unchallenged.
You don’t have to reject them.
Just stop treating them as the default.
Real systems aren’t reactive.
They’re designed.
They’re intentional.
They’re representative of the actual business process.
You don’t need to build for real-time.
You need to build for what’s real.
Feeling the pain?
If your systems are showing signs of webhook overload — or just don’t reflect how your business
actually works — it might be time for a reset.
Start with an automation audit — or keep reading Field Notes for more.
Prefer to talk it through? Just email me: david@nocodeengineering.io