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n8n

n8n is a workflow automation tool: you connect apps, code and AI steps as nodes on a canvas, and a trigger, like a schedule or a new email, runs the workflow on its own.

Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.

Every hour, an n8n workflow reads the Orders sheet and sends one Slack message per row. 5 orders arrive each hour. How many messages does the 4th run send?

An n8n workflow that runs every hour, reads the Orders sheet and sends one message per row. Example calculation.

What it's for: automating work that moves between apps: when an email arrives, save the attachment and tell the team; every hour, read a sheet and send a summary. Each step is a node, and you connect them with arrows on a canvas.

How it works: a trigger (a schedule, an email, a form) starts the workflow. Each node receives a list of items, usually as JSON, does something with them and passes them on. There are nodes for hundreds of apps, and an AI agent node that uses an LLM with tools.

Cloud or self-hosted: you can use n8n's cloud or install it on your own server. Its license (the Sustainable Use License) lets you use it free inside your company, but it isn't open source in the strict sense.

Where it breaks: a workflow runs on its own, at any hour, and nobody watches every run. Spot-check a few executions before you trust it.

How it's used

A workflow, node by node

Order summary to Slack

  1. marked: Schedule Trigger: every hourThe trigger decides when it runs; nobody clicks anything.
  2. Google Sheets: read the rows in OrdersEach node passes a list of items to the next.
  3. AI Agent: write a summary of each orderAn LLM inside the workflow, with whatever tools you connect.
  4. Slack: send the summary to the shipping teamIt runs once for every item it receives.
Each node does one thing and hands its items to the next. To see what the workflow did, open the execution and check how many items went into and out of each node.

When to look closer

Execution: Succeeded

The 9:00 a.m. execution

  1. marked: Status: Succeeded · 1.4 s

The execution came out green. How would you know it actually sent the messages?

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Related terms

  • AI agent

    A program that pairs a language model with tools, such as terminal commands and files, to carry out a task in several steps: it reads its context, acts, looks at the result and repeats.

  • JSON

    JSON is a text format for structured data: labels and values inside curly braces, lists inside square brackets. Programs use it to pass data to each other.

  • LLM (large language model)

    An LLM is a program trained on huge amounts of text to continue a piece of text one chunk at a time: it works out which chunk is likeliest to come next and writes it. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all run on an LLM.

  • Spot check

    Taking a few rows spread across the data (from the start, the middle and the end) and comparing them by hand with what you expect.

The whole glossary