Is Claude 4 one-shotting complicated n8n automations?
Not quite... But we'll be there in a matter of months I think without any additional training/context.
I accomplished two pretty simple automations with almost no editing.
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁:
1. 𝗘𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹-𝘁𝗼-𝗦𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Finds all emails containing "ConnectWise" and sends them to a Slack channel. No API endpoint for links in Outlook (at least nothing that renders in n8n's JSON), but honestly, I just needed the data in Slack anyway.
2. 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀: This one also required minimal tweaking and sends updates directly to Slack. I already built this workflow by hand, and while Claudes version wasn't as thorough, it got me 75% of the way there in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours (yes, it took me 2 hours to build the same thing by hand, I'm not an n8n guy, I know it's operator error)
I tried training Claude on node metadata to improve its performance, but the context window isn't big enough. When I try to train a project on all the necessary node metadata, I'm informed the chat is too long. I'm relying on it being "natty" for now.
I tried vibe coding an n8n automation builder in Cursor a while back, might revisit it now with Opus 4 and all the node metadata I've collected along with the rest of the n8n documentation I have. Will report back if it works! For a slop app that didn't really work, I was still pretty impressed with the outputs!
Every day it seems like automation is getting closer to necromancy than software development. 🤔
𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗜 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗼𝗻𝗲-𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘁:
• Auto-creating HaloPSA tickets from Office 365 alerts
• Syncing ConnectWise Manage tickets to client Teams channels
• Building RMM alerts into ServiceNow incidents
• Triggering billing reconciliation between ConnectWise and QuickBooks
• Sending daily ticket summaries from Autotask to Slack
• Creating IT Glue documentation from resolved tickets
• Auto-assigning Syncro tickets based on tech availability
Anyone else building n8n automations with AI?
Would love to hear what you're working on.