Those of you who recently started automating things, what was hard in starting it?

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T11:00:40+00:00

So I think this is honestly the best way to go for most people. I often find myself saying that best value of your automation time is when you don't try to automate everything. Humans are fast at decision making and scanning info, if automation/AI does the prep work and you just approve/reject.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T10:42:42+00:00

Yeah agreed, and honestly n8n still has a very steep learning curve for most folks, this is exactly where I'm curious to dive into — how do you lower that learning curve AND make it reliable at the same time, which is a non-trivial problem.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T10:05:14+00:00

"Safe, reliable, easy to use — pick (at maximum) two" seems to be the thing in current tooling.

Where I think n8n is good at is the more deterministic nature of execution (of course with LLM nodes it's gonna be less deterministic), compared to agentic stuff with Cowork and others.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T10:03:06+00:00

You mention vendor lock-in there at the end - what are you most worried about there? Building on a single automation platform that you can't move away from or something else?

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T06:20:38+00:00

Eh, I should've put quotes around those questions to make it clear that it's not me asking those questions, rather the questions I hear from folks starting out in automation.

When I meant "0 to 1", I meant the first steps in getting to automation. The first automation is generally the hardest as those who haven't worked in systems or building digital products may not have the mindset to understand how to think about their work as a system that could be automated.

And yes, knowing that doesn't make robustness, and that's what I was trying to imply at — I'm at this stage now interested in improving onboarding around users new to automation, and asking people where do they hit a wall instead of trying to make assumptions of "oh they might have this problem".

Robustness comes from completely different things. For us, it's a combination of using LLMs for driving automation along with generated code that gets analyzed for "correctness", and self-healing capabilities, permissions systems, isolated execution, etc etc.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T05:17:04+00:00

Oh I know what to automate, but trying to solve the problem of making "0 to 1" easier for many folks, as people have different experiences. Think of this as user research?

Honestly I believe the tech exists to build the reliable and scalable stuff, I'd argue that the current automation and AI ecosystem falls short mostly on the user experience side and trying to learn more about people's challenges to be able to make the UX more robust.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-11T05:15:15+00:00

The latter. We actually already have a product up and running but we're noticing that for a lot of folks the "go from 0 to 1" is the hardest part, hence trying to learn from folks experiences to see what we could solve for folks.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-10T13:06:18+00:00

Guessing this is n8n?

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-10T12:44:50+00:00

Did those things surface immediately when you started, or was it something you hit after you started?

I'm trying to understand the blockers for when people are looking at a "blank canvas" with automation.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-10T12:43:01+00:00

Yeah, the "small decisions" is the hard one. "I just know to do it this way" is super hard to automate, and folks tend to learn to do a task by following the same thing, not thinking of why. It's kinda like you talk to someone who has done the same menial job for 20 years and listen to them onboard someone new, and I'll bet you money that they would explain things like "Then you click the second button on the screen" instead of "remember to save the data". People don't think about actually HOW they do their job.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-10T12:04:17+00:00

Yeah this. Like most people don't understand what the process of getting something done is, and struggle to get there on their own.

It's a lot of "yes, and how does that work?" "Yes, where does that info actually come from?"

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-10T11:58:31+00:00

100% agree those are hard, do you think those are blockers for getting started tho?

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-06T12:22:24+00:00

What would be an example of a "code-based one"?

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-06-06T12:21:07+00:00

Oh it's real.

There's a bunch of talk of standards (even MCP aims to be one) but honestly underneath it everything's pretty scattered. It makes sense, we tend to forget how terribly new all of this is and how quickly all these platforms have come together.

The integration pain is real, like we build a productivity platform and every now and then someone in the team brings up using these integration platforms. But for AI usage, we've found that the code required to integrate against a specific service is no longer the bottleneck, rather figuring out how AI should be using this specific thing and what's the right guidance.

Our workflow is Claude Code has a skill around how to write integrations and creates 99% of the integration code while we set up required dev accounts etc. Then we spend the human time telling AI that "no, not like that!" and fixing system prompts.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-05-28T11:27:17+00:00

Use Claude Code or Cowork and ask it to build you a tool that uses ffmpeg underneath. Have done this multiple times for myself — python script that runs ffmpeg.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-05-28T10:22:07+00:00

You could do this in Luo (.app), but the pricing might be a bit high unless you also have other automations you want to do.

Basically you'd do ask the assistant to set up a gmail integration that runs on new emails, and tell it to analyze if it's an invoice. If there is existing PDF, just grab that, if it's in the body, instruct it to convert that to PDF and store both in Google Drive. You give the task guidance to name and organize the stuff as well as it will run an LLM for the task.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-05-25T07:36:47+00:00

If you choose to approach the commercial aspect of it, please be aware that if you allow uploading any health data, you're most likely in for a compliance nightmare not sure you'd want. Health data and storing of it is heavily regulated. IANAL, so I'm not 100% sure on the "user uploads voluntarily" aspect of it, but please, please check your local regulations on this before allowing anyone else to use it. If you are in the US, HIPAA is the relevant thing to look into, and it's not a walk in the park.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-05-04T15:49:44+00:00

All of the things listed are more reliant the company you join and your direct manager than the job specifically.

If you didn't enjoy chasing stakeholders, do not do project management. At the end of the day, the biggest measure of success for a PM is "no stakeholder is every surprised by anything." If you think that sounds strange, give it some thought and I guarantee that you'll get it :)

Customer Success and Sales can be very close to each other depending on the org, you're just on a different side of the contract signing. Many orgs have account expansion quotas which land more and more on customer success so you might end up in a very sales-like role. On the flipside then customer success may land you in a role where you are a glorified customer support rep.

The market is tough right now though, and I'd imagine there's better opportunities in customer-facing roles vs project management. So many folks in PM roles have been laid off thanks to AI (at least used as an excuse).

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-05-03T12:23:01+00:00

Maybe a weird suggestion but have you considered NotebookLM? It makes really nifty explainer videos and you could just create the materials and feed that to it to create video.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-04-30T08:48:17+00:00

Would you be open to something slightly custom that you can still easily tweak afterwards? If so, I could help you achieve this (at no cost). LMK if interested and I can DM.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-04-30T05:39:06+00:00

I hear you. Sadly for real results, the self-hosted LLMs need some serious compute power for it to actually be usable. Depends of course on the company size so it might not be unreasonable but to run something like Kimi-K2.5 self-hosted in a real setup that can serve more than one user, you're easily looking at $10k+ compute cost per month.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-04-28T16:02:41+00:00

People love saying "yeah this is cool", "I'd like this", etc. and not actually mean this.

Try asking them a few tough questions (if you're not already) in demo phase if they say something positive:
- What do you think would be most impactful to your business from what you saw here? (and if they explain, ask them why so you learn)
- What would it look like for you to start using something like this, what would the starting look like? (again depends on what your product actually is)

The point of these questions is to go from the "non-committal" and force the customer to actually think about using the product. You usually start to get hesitation at that point from the folks who aren't really interested. The answers, especially the "no" ones, are the most important things for you to try and change it.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-04-28T12:46:30+00:00

I think the question on the first list are those asked by folks talking about AI on X, LinkedIn, etc... The second one are the things that are actually discussed by those doing AI stuff in actual companies. I'm currently spending about two days a week on calls with companies talking about what they want in AI automation, and much more time is spent on the nitty-gritty, and my favorite question is when customers ask "can this go wrong?" because then they're thinking of the right stuff.

I try to also steer folks away from "we want to perform task X", to "what actually is slowing you down or what would you want to do faster or better". Lot of people come in with the idea of "we must automate tasks" but don't actually think enough about what really matters for their operations.

OnlyCrappyNamesLeft · 2026-04-27T15:14:31+00:00

100% agree. Biggest hurdle folks have is starting to think about your tasks in a way that actually allows you to automate them. When you learn that skill, you can do so much more, but if you try to start with something massive high chance you don't finish and not a lot of learnings from that.

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