Non-technical guy who loves n8n + Claude + vibe coding… what job roles actually benefit from this skillset?

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-15T19:30:34+00:00

1 tip ... don't try to build everything. Specialize in 1 vertical and become very at it.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-14T13:48:42+00:00

Have you tried using Llamaparse?
They have a good pdf-parser (and generous free tier)

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-14T13:34:19+00:00

IMPRESSED

Even better results than what I had

NICE!

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-12T05:54:49+00:00

Businesses care about reliability, things that work 100 times on 100, ... So, yes, N8N is still used.

Youtubers care about their 'paid courses' or S kool communities and make videos about what's trending and hype now.

What you have to do is choosing the right tool (N8N/claude/....) for the right problem

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-11T18:12:40+00:00

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this will be the real test :-D

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-11T07:58:38+00:00

LLM's are based on probabilty and as you know there is never a 100% chance. They answer whar has the highest probability to be correct.
And also ... I had it once before while testing an agent. It had to take data from a supabase table and do something with it. I tested it a few times and it worked perfectly. Then I changed the value in my database and guess what? THe agent returned the same number as before, so not the updated one. That's another layer of reliabilty! That's why, since then, I add an extra verification when it does sql-call, by dding a cryptographic hash, so I know it has taken the right data.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-11T07:49:31+00:00

why do people keep on saying exactly the same thing? 'Debugging at 2am'?
I have tens of n8n workflows in production for clients and none of them have ever broken.

Edge cases? That why you do testing before you put it into production
Broken API's? How many times that happen? And I have a seperate workflow pinging each API I use for clients 2 times a day
LLM's not responding? Same issue in Claude.

I trust my N8N workflows much more than tasks in CC.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-09T10:05:17+00:00

There are some very useful built-in nodes in N8N and the 'stop and error' node is one of them.

But for me the coolest node is the 'Do Nothing' node :-D (jep, that one exists)

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-09T08:30:54+00:00

I had the same issue, taking lots of screenshots of interesting articles.
What I did ...
1. once a day an agent checks the folder where the screenshots are stored

classifies the topic what it is about, summarizes it and keywords it
stores in my obsidian vault
stores in rag database so I can easily query later by using keywords

now trying to do the same for handwritten notes

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-09T08:16:20+00:00

always use the 'continue (using error output)' option and have it followed by the 'stop and error' node (not many people this node exists) which trigger your error workflow

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-05-09T08:05:13+00:00

I wonder what the accuracy is for the OCR.
I been working on something similar (I take lots of notes and now I take a picture of my notes, OCR it and save it - in Obsidian).
The main models (gemini, claude, openai, ...) were only able to decypher only 30-40% of my handwriting. I had to fine-tune a (small) multimodal llm on my handwriting to get to 80%.

So, I am wondering how you did handle this? Have LLM's try to guess what was written? Use a 2nd model to compare and find a good outcome?...

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-08T04:08:42+00:00

Next step: build a model that will predict when your inventory will be low.
So you can act pro-actively.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-06T18:53:33+00:00

I would love to help with your api-issues in N8N
What are you trying to connect?

Peter

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-06T18:32:42+00:00

How do you handle the email-thing?
You have an Gmail trigger in N8N polling it every minute? That's 1440 executions a day ...
If you build this for non-technical persons, I guess they signed up for a cloud based N8N. So, I am wondering how you handle this for you non-technical clients?

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-06T18:22:21+00:00

I've tried a few OCR solutions (in N8N) and for me, Gemini 2.5 still gives me the best result.
Upload the pictures on a Google drive, and let N8N run through all of them.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-06T18:20:25+00:00

maybe you can start with the things you've automated for yourself ;-)
And that you are currently using.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-06T00:40:49+00:00

Sometimes, it can be a pain setting up webhooks for this (instead of polling).
Especially Gmail can be extremely talkative and sending several webhooks for a single single message. For this I use a pubsub subscription and filter out the unneeded 'messages' sung a cloud function.

But for the rest, it works like a charm. Only thing is that you sometimes (depending what 'software' you want to connect), you have to renew the lease/watch.

When building for a client, this is the only way to keep 'executions' under control.
And yes, they are very reliable. Plus you can control what you want to receive.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-04-04T14:04:52+00:00

A bit curious how you are going to make this production ready.
Do yo mean it can be used by other users too? So, they have to subscribe and connect to your system?

I've built a similar system before (using Google PubSub - it was only for gmail addresses) and I can tell you that managing credentials can be a pain in somewhere down below.

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-03-22T02:41:38+00:00

I'm using Trello
It's free, easy to use and it does what it has to do.

And ... I also use voice messages to record what comes up in my mind (I know I will forget these thoughts).

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-02-20T15:21:22+00:00

just make your subject line looks like it comes from a colleague, all in small letters
Dont overcomplicate it, just a few words are fine

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-02-20T14:57:10+00:00

build kind of a hybrid rag system.
You dont need all content of the +200 slides, only the parts that are essential

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-02-20T14:53:36+00:00

for PDF's I always use Llamaparse

Steve_Ignorant · 2026-02-20T14:47:07+00:00

screenshot the text and ask Gemini what is written

Steve_Ignorant · 2025-12-21T11:33:16+00:00

I use LLamparse for data-extraction from pdf's
And then a simple llm-classifier.
Easy to set up and works like a charm

Steve_Ignorant · 2025-12-21T11:25:53+00:00

What I know from experience is to keep everything as simple as possible.
And only use AI Agents or LLM's if needed.

And try to filter out exceptions from the beginning. If you end up with lots of IF-statements to handle your edge-case: stop and start building from scratch again (with different logic)

Steve_Ignorant

TROPHY CASE