Reliability and auditability usually get used as filler words. @JanOberhauser actually defined them. Reliability turned out to be four things. A fallback model, because everyone goes down and Claude is barely at four nines. Self-hosting, so it runs next to your data with no internet in the way. Integration code n8n writes and maintains, so when an API changes it gets fixed once for everyone instead of by every builder separately, each forgetting a different edge case. And retries with defined storage when something breaks. Auditability is the one he says code can't give you. With code you see what went in and what came out. Everything in between is invisible. Why it chose that path, which branch it took, what the values were halfway through. None of it. n8n replays every past run step by step, showing the data going into and out of each node. You can drop a deterministic check in the middle, then look back and see exactly why it went left instead of right. And you can rerun half a workflow from any point rather than starting over. That last bit is the real one. Debugging isn't reading the output. It's finding the step that broke and running it again. Code gives you a result. This gives you a record.