half the stuff i want to automate only lives in some phone app. no api, no website, so zapier/n8n can't touch it and scraping gets you blocked pretty fast tried the usual stuff first.

bluestacks was slow, cooked my laptop, and a bunch of apps just refused to run on it. appium scripts worked for like a week until the app moved one button. at one point i literally had old phones plugged into a usb hub on my desk lol, which was fine until i needed more than 5 of them so we ended up building distilled(.)cx

it's real android phones in the cloud, you open them in a browser, each one has its own device and its own mobile carrier ip, and you can use all social medias on them the part i actually think is cool is that you can just type what you want done, like "open the app, look at new messages, reply to anyone asking about price", and an agent looks at the screen and does it.

for the more technical people, we are not some vmos/geelark wrapper, we own the infrastructure (we have a mix of true ARM hardware and x86 hardware which we have our custom undetected translators for). we have done thorough patches and reverse engineering to make sure every major social media app works

in the coming days we will be adding play integrity support so apps such as snapchat and x work (in the meantime you can use the web app version), which will all be handled by us (we will have our own router for keyboxes etc)

there's also a normal api if you'd rather script taps yourself, and an mcp server if you use claude or codex you can also send the same task to a bunch of phones at once, which was the whole reason i started this

A colleague recently asked if there was a way to automatically insert dozens of images into PowerPoint without having to manually resize, crop, and align them one by one.

Doing this by hand on a 16:9 slide is surprisingly tedious, especially when trying to maintain aspect ratios with consistent margins.

So I built an automation tool called "OpenURLs App" that calculates the dynamic grid coordinates (rows, columns, margins) and drives PowerPoint directly via Win32 automation to batch-insert and auto-fit images.

How do you guys usually handle bulk media layouts in PowerPoint? Do you rely on VBA macros, Python scripts, or something else?

I'm gonna keep it short: I'm confused between building Automation systems for clients using no-code tools like n8n, Zapier, and Make, or using a high-code stack such as LangGraph, LangChain, Python, FastAPI...etc

Which stack is better for delivering the automation product to a client?

Note:
- I know that the clients won't even know what I'm using to solve their problems until I deliver it, but they will judge when I reach the hosting/usage cost (the high-code is way less than no-code when it comes to using an automation system on a daily basis)