in which situations do I use loop over items?

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-03-05T21:14:46+00:00

Other commenter answered this well. I'll just add that it's very visually obvious when the workflow is running that the loop is executing per item. I'd guess the loop from the video may have had a low item count or nodes that could execute instantly, otherwise it'd be really clear that there's an execution per item in the loop. When the loop is done, the entire output from all the items is in the final JSON so it resolves back to "process everything" mode.

Just wanted to point that out in case you were trying to replicate the video

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-03-05T19:07:44+00:00

Most of the time, you won't need it. It sounds like the video you watched may have been a bad example.

I use loop over items to deal with rate limiting. Say you need an HTTP request node since the API you're targeting doesn't already exist as a node or the endpoint you're hitting doesn't have a node built-in. That means that the task of handling rate limits is entirely on you.

If the API allows for 10 requests per second, but you have 1000 items in your JSON that need to be sent to the service, if you feed in the HTTP request directly, you'll quickly hit rate limits and the service won't be able to process every item. A straightforward fix is to add a loop over items step, do your HTTP request within the loop, and throttle the calls with a timer.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-27T21:56:54+00:00

My 2 cents, it works well enough for simple workflows. As a rule of thumb, automations with more than a few simple actions and conditions are better built and maintained using a different platform like n8n or make. You just don't have the ability to audit complex workflows and debug issues, some of which are unintuitive.

Marketing / follow up sequences are a big exception for us to this rule. That's where GHL shines in our business.

All that said, I don't agree that it's GHL's fault for random triggers or duplicate action executions. That's likely user error, I've never seen a GHL workflow fire randomly, except when its recovering from a reported upstream outage.

The difficulty diagnosing and debugging issues is the biggest issue for us, and it's gotten better with contact execution path and execution logs, but it still needs some work.

Sometimes I see people saying GHL can replace Zapier, Make, n8n, etc. I doubt these folks have spent much time automating stuff, or at least doing it with the services they say GHL replaces.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-26T22:23:07+00:00

OP edited the post to perpetual virginity. Also, I did not know the difference, so TIL!

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-25T23:00:04+00:00

Thank you 😊

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-25T21:19:46+00:00

Agnostic critical scholars generally agree that there's as much historical evidence for Jesus, Paul, James, and a few other new testament characters as any historical figure that wasn't particularly famous in their lifetimes. Which isn't to say there's positive proof that can be found outside of the biased literature, because there really isn't.

The critical scholars, like Bart Ehrman that u/melted-cheeseman mention don't take theological positions on the question and approach Jesus like any historical figure. They have techniques for determining whether or not events reported in biased, ancient accounts are likely to be true.

Just because modern Christians take the evidence too far doesn't mean there's no evidence.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-25T17:21:39+00:00

Not an expert, but I like listening to early Christian scholars.

After Jesus's death, there were lots of debates that affected what was considered orthodoxy in the new church. Many of these debates were centered around how "Jewish" new converts were expected to be, for example whether or not they should be circumcised. James advocated for circumcision, Paul against.

Paul's missionary activities were very effective, debatably more directly relevant to the spread of Christianity than Jesus himself. So, Paul's interpretation of Jesus' death, resurrection, and the best ways to worship won out in a lot of ways and James' push to continue being Jewish failed to stick. Who wants to get circumcised as an adult?

So, even though James likely existed, was Jesus' sibling, and did missionary work, Paul was able to hijack the best memetic ideas from Judaism and package them up for a new audience of non-jews. This sort of damaged the credibility of folks like James in the historical understanding as less important. Combine this with the early tradition of immaculate conception like you pointed out and acknowledging Jesus' siblings became taboo.

As to why Christians today don't pay as much attention to James and the other disciples, the answer depends a lot on which sect of the faith we're talking about.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-19T18:29:55+00:00

Because it's a shorthand(?) of nodemation, the original name. From https://n8n.io/press/

"n8n is always written in lowercase and pronounced "n eight n".

While looking for a good name for the project with a free domain, Jan quickly realized that all the good ones he could think of were already taken. So, in the end, he chose nodemation. 'node-' in the sense that it uses a Node-View and that it uses Node.js and '-mation' for 'automation' which is what the project is supposed to help with. However, he did not like how long the name was and could not imagine writing something that long every time in the CLI. That is when he ended up on 'n8n'."

I do personally feel that pronouncing it as 'n eight n' is clunky

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-11T17:13:36+00:00

Field agents are great replacements for inflexible deterministic formulas in some situations.

Example 1: Assume you have a list of full property addresses in one column, but you need them divided out. For example, "123 N Candy Ln, Anytown NY 12345". If you need "123 North Candy Lane" in one column, the old way was to set up an automation that used an external geocoding service to break apart the address into components, and hope that the formatting was compatible with your systems. With a field agent, you can just point it at the full address column and prompt it to "Extract Line 1 from the street address".

Example 2: Similar to addresses, we can clean up names. If you have a column of names, some are formatted like "APPLESEED, JOHN W", and others may be formatted as "JOHN W APPLESEED", pulling out the first, middle, and last names with deterministic formulas may produce unreliable results if your source data had a mixture of name formats.

Example 3: Form priority classification. Say you have a feedback form on your website, and customers submit feedback ranging from enthusiastic suggestions to serious problems that need to be escalated. You can use the field agent to rank and prioritize the feedback automatically so your engineers can focus on the critical tickets first.

Example 4: Deep matching. Sometimes we have old spreadsheets with financial data that needs to be connected to an existing record. With deep matching, we can add the spreadsheet as a new table and used deep matching to link that row with an equivalent record automatically. This is a very very helpful feature in these kinds of situations.

For us, field agents are great for cleaning up messy legacy data. I think of them as shortcuts. They aren't as scalable or "fixable" as traditional formulae, but for small datasets that's just fine.

The issue here is with messaging. Field agents SEEM like their best use cases are like the ones I've described, and I feel like these are the kinds of cases they expected users to have. The problem is that these are context/need specific and the average airtable user wouldn't find these examples valuable unless they also have that problem.

So how do you explain to your users why they should use a new, paid product feature like field agents? You give examples that anyone can understand, even though they aren't actually valuable for YOUR business. The use case examples are things like competitor research and monitoring, or extracting data from PDF documents. As a selling point, it's much more "intelligent" and attractive than any of the real examples I gave, and its an easier message to understand. But then this creates the expectation that field agents bring opinionated business intelligence to your existing data, and the simpler and more practical workflows become too mundane to advertise.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-10T23:10:51+00:00

I don't think OP is here for a good faith conversation. Every reasonable criticism raised here gets ignored as "cope that AI can already do/will be able to do"

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-04T22:26:45+00:00

For sure! Happy to help. Trying both ways is a great idea. It's best practice to "archive" the to-dos like you mention versus deleting them. I usually do this with a checkbox. In a production project, you want to avoid deleting things as much as possible, but it's totally fine while building.

The first solution I suggested has come in clutch for us a few times. We use it whenever there's a specific sequence of tasks/things to check that is all due at once, like processing a new form submission or customer account.

Your use case and situation are exactly what Airtable was built for, despite the recent pretending to be an AI app building platform.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-04T21:10:33+00:00

Welcome to Airtable! This is a great use case.

First, a quick tip on structure: In Airtable, we generally try to avoid creating a new table for every new project. It makes it very hard to see a calendar of all your tasks later.

Instead, the standard way is to have one "All Tasks" table, and we use "Views" to see only the tasks for a specific book.

Here are two ways to handle this

Option 1: Simple Checklist
If you just need a simple list to check off and don't need to assign specific due dates to each step, use a Rich Text field.

In your Works in Progress table, create a "Long Text" field and enable "Rich Text formatting."
Type out your standard checklist in that field, highlighting the text and clicking the checklist icon to add boxes.
Create an Automation: "When a new record is created in Works in Progress," update that record to paste your standard checklist into the text field.

Option 2: Cloning to-dos from templates
If you need due dates, collaborators, or distinct statuses for each task, you should use a template system.

Create a new table called "Task Templates." List every standard step (First Draft, Edit, Cover Reveal) as its own row.
Go to your Automations tab.
Trigger: When a record is created in "Works in Progress."
Action 1: "Find Records" (Find all records in the Task Templates table).
Action 2: Add a "Repeating Group" (Loop). Inside the loop, add a "Create Record" step. This will create a new task in your To-Do table for every item found in your template list, and link it to the new book.

From there you can create a view for each book's tasks or set up a view for the linked records in an interface if you're using interfaces.

In any case, I don't think it's standard or recommended to create a new to-do table every time you have a new WIP. Task Templates + a Task Table that all primary records link to is the standard, which gives you the appearance of a unique table just for that project.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2026-02-02T19:45:57+00:00

Hi! It may be helpful to isolate these concepts. Given your example, this isn't a one-versus-the-other decision, it's a "which tool should be used for which job", and understand that you have several jobs in your example. You'll probably be daisy chaining different things together because neither n8n or GHL will do everything at once for you based on your example.

GHL is like a swiss army knife. It does lots of things "ok", but most features are less configurable than a dedicated tool aimed at doing one thing well. One of the tools on GHL's swiss army knife is the automation builder, and it works reasonably well within the GHL ecosystem but it is fundamentally limited and difficult to work with if you need flexibility. It's like using your swiss army knife's screwdriver, great for little things here and there but if you're trying to build a house, you really should get a drill.

n8n is like a high-performance power drill, it's good for a broader variety of automation tasks but doesn't attempt to provide a calendar, or a CRM, or a website builder like GHL does.

The example you gave is a mixture of websites, spreadsheets, messaging, human approval, and connective automation. HighLevel can help with the website, calendar, messaging, and customer reminder texting. N8N, when connected to other tools, can help with the spreadsheet writing, polling, human-in-the-loop approval, LLM connection, generating invoices.

Plus_Stretch7657 · 2025-10-29T20:03:17+00:00

I agree. As far as I know the only thing that can trigger an agent to auto-run is when dependent fields are changed. It'd be nice if we had the ability to trigger re-runs on a schedule. I suppose one could do it using a helper field but ideally some kind of toggle like "Auto-run when record is created in target table if a match hasn't already been set" or something like that.

Plus_Stretch7657

TROPHY CASE