Hello!
Our company just deep dived into Hubspot and we found that, like many UI Tools, visual programming workflows were not powerful enough for our customer journeys : not possible to perform complex join on entities, no property comparison function, no dynamic date, etc.
Therefore, we (Tech Team) started to build many Custom Code Python-blocks to be used by the marketing team within workflows.
It works pretty well so far but I faced huge caveats that could be easily fixed to leverage developper experience.
- The UI ‘coding’ interface is not serious. It is impossible to code a block more than 20 lines long with this interface, it lacks all the basic features of a 2022 IDE. Even Full Screen, you cannot see anything.
- Quick win - easy to implement : could we name custom code blocks so workflow users would figure out immediately what is the purpose of a block. Right now our workflows ended up being a block ‘custom code’ connected to another ‘custom code’ splitting in branches connected to many other ‘custom code blocks’. Not really friendly 
- Quick win - on the same topic : could we get a visible description field on the block itself ? Comments do not work well for that purpose
- Medium Difficulty : could we get a centralized custom code management? One custom code block can be re-used over and over (copy/pasted), so when the code is updated, it shall be replaced everywhere in every workflow. It is a nightmare to maintain. At least centralized per workflow would be good enough.
- Tough one : could we get a proper connection to an external IDE ? With one click code publishing updating all components within workflows? Righ now we have to copy-paste the code into each components.
Hubspot is a great tool and API are working well, I think that a better bridge between workflows and code would leverage a lot what can be done with the tool.
Thanks!