Automation & AI
All blog posts about automation (usually about n8n) and AI-related workflows and comments.
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I just discovered that Raindrop.io offers many integrations, including n8n! I might need to reconsider my bookmarking strategies, yet again. I’m currently using Anybox. 🤔 I’m exploring ways to move the data around. If you made a similar move, I’ll be more than happy to learn about your experience. For now, I’ll prompt ChatGPT for strategies.
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This diagram tries to illustrate the how modern AI, Claude AI in particular, compares to traditional computing paradigm. Models more or less are processors, Agents are more or less the operating system and Applications are more or less Skills. It’s interesting, but I’m wary about agents because they open up too many pandora boxes.
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I made two important changes this morning for my automation-related operating environment:
- Using DigitalOcean monitoring, I created two resources alerts (CPU > 50% for 5 min, Disk usage > 70% for 5 min). Alerts will make me look into n8n automation misbehaviours.
- I switched my AI nodes to use Claude AI Haiku 4.5 instead of Sonnet 4.5 to reduce costs for comparable results. I don’t think my summarization tasks needs more powerful LLM.
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When Things Go Wrong With AI-Generated Code
My first bad experience: the code generated by Claude Code made my dashboard unresponsive in my browser. Eventually, the data stopped updating. After a ten-minute debugging session, I asked Claude Code to revert the change, and it did so promptly. But then I started getting execution failure notices on Discord. A lot of notifications. Then I started investigating… It appears the browser was making frequent refresh requests to one of my workflows, which depleted my Claude pay-per-use credits. Continue reading →
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I’m making good progress on my personal dashboard idea. While people may criticize LLMs and enjoy coding for fun, for me, it opens up possibilities I couldn’t have imagined before.
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One of the frustrating aspects of LLMs is their lack of consistency unless you develop specific skills, which can take time to implement effectively. For example, I wanted to generate documentation for my most recent n8n automation workflow, but Claude was unable to do it, and I can’t remember the prompt that finally made it possible. I should have saved it somewhere for easy retrieval. I’m wasting precious credits. 🤦🏻♂️
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Simon Willison on AI-assisted programming:
The more time I spend on AI-assisted programming the less afraid I am for my job, because it turns out building software - especially at the rate it’s now possible to build - still requires enormous skill, experience and depth of understanding.
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In today’s world, with LLM, Claude Code, etc., is Apple’s Swift Playground still relevant, even for younger aspiring coders? A few years ago, it seems we were hearing much more about it than today.
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Apparently, people are barely using Stack Overflow to ask questions, thanks to LLMs and AI. I expect a similar trend among people in a community like this one on Micro.blog. Some questions would be super easy to answer by asking ChatGPT or the like. I do understand that many people still want this human touch, though.
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Updated my n8n instance from v2.0.3 to v2.2.4. Super easy to do (I’m using the Docker Compose installation provided by the DigitalOcean 1-click install droplet. Took a droplet snapshot before, just in case something goes wrong. So far, so good. Of course, Claude helped me out on this. I’m not a Linux or Docker expert. 😅
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Claude Code skills are probably the most intriguing aspect of Claude Code and Claude AI. I’m not so sure yet how to take advantage of them. My understanding from this excellent video is that you have to be an expert at something to create those skills.md file.
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An Important Lesson
When I started my studies in computer science over 40 years ago, we learned to read functional specifications and then translate them into machine instructions (COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, etc.). It was the training of a programmer. I knew that one day I could become the person who writes functional specifications. I didn’t become a programmer, nor did I work in the development world. Due to my recent experience with Claude AI, Claude Code, and Vercel to create custom applications, I realize that I have become the one who writes functional specifications, but for processing by artificial intelligence. Continue reading →
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Added a new and much-needed feature to my micro.blog front end. See my prompt below.
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On OpenRouter.ai
I just finished reading about the service openrouter.ai. I was curious to understand the purpose of this service as well as its business model. I saw several instances of this service being used in n8n workflows. The problem I see with this service is that it makes the consistency of the quality of responses from the requested LLMs even more unpredictable. Each request could be handled by LLMs with different characteristics and performance from one time to another. Continue reading →
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My latest n8n workflow automates summarizing my Micro.blog timeline (via its private RSS feed) and sends the results to my Discord server every hour. Pretty cool, right?
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Today, I created a new blog post category. Now, all blog posts related to automation (usually n8n-based) or AI will be assigned the “Automation & AI” category. I went back to my blog posts and updated a few of them to reflect this change. You can follow the blog posts with this dedicated RSS feed, which is automagically created and maintained by Micro.blog.
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I’m discovering this powerful n8n node this morning. This means I could trigger that workflow from an external source, such as a Telegram message, and receive a response with some RSS content.
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And the next n8n project is?
My next project with n8n automation is to build a replacement for Mailbrew. 🫣 I’m facing many architectural decisions: How do I fetch content (web or RSS feeds)? How do I extract articles for more efficient summarization? How do I combine the results? How do I control the size of the summary? Do I need some form of temporary data persistence within the workflow? How do I minimize LLM credits usage? Continue reading →
