[alwa]

Even after clicking around the product pages a little, I’m afraid I still don’t understand what an n8n is or what it’s seeking to automate. Is “n8n” a colloquialism amongst front-end people, like “i18n” or “a11y”? And as to “automation,” I’m guessing from context that this is like a Zapier kind of product?

And that the present announcement is that this product has an integration with OpenAI Vision API now, provided you’re willing to store your API keys in the open?

I’m surprised to see it characterized as “no-code” but then require HTTP headers to be entered by hand, and a valid JSON payload to be hand-built to send over to the relevant OpenAI API.

The broader concept, though, seems cool. I can imagine the sort of visual, business-side-person kind of power user who might have a lot of fun playing with this type of workflow tool.

[toomuchtodo]

n8n is a direct Zapier competitor with source available ("fair code license"), https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=janober is the founder.

Lots of interesting ways to extend workflow systems involving LLMs and interfaces to them.

https://docs.n8n.io/choose-n8n/faircode-license/

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=n8n

[crazytest]

n8n is the tool that is used to build the automation shown in the tutorial, leveraging the OpenAI Vision API. That is possible because it offers quite an open way to make HTTP Requests, using the node for it. Yes, you need to define a valid JSON as an input for the API, but I would still consider it way more beginner-friendly than using the SDKs where you would have to write "real" code and care about deployment and executions.