This is an ad I just saw for a Metaflow competitor called Union.ai . Thought it could spur discussion. It took me 4 times, but I think I've spotted a trend 🤣. Could there be an advantage to Metaflow adopting a similar interface? I've noticed a lot of new pipeline tools are using this abstraction and I kind of like it. Rather than wrapping everything in a class, you decorate functions and chain them together in a controller function decorated with

@pipeline

(ClearML and ZenML)

@workflow

(Union ai),

@graph

(Dagster) etc. Possible advantages: • fewer classes (mostly joking), • I guess you could technically share steps between DAGs since they are simply importable functions. Hard to import a single step out of your flow if it's embedded into a class. • kind of feels more intuitive. I tend to reason about a DAG as a series of steps. In a sense, it's weird to have that sequence of steps contained in a class.