N8n

5 min read

Lernreise 7/7: n8n, a Dead ThinkPad, and What's Next

Every project like this ends with a set of opinions you did not have before. Here are mine. n8n I will be charitable and say: n8n is excellent for linear workflows of three to five nodes. Trigger, action, done. For anything more complex, it becomes something I would describe, with some restraint, as binary toxic waste. Visual workflow tools have an inherent problem: the visual representation is the code. You cannot refactor it the way you refactor code. You cannot diff it sensibly. You cannot review it in a pull request. When a node is producing wrong output and you need to understand why, you are clicking through a canvas, unfolding nested expressions, reading JavaScript embedded in a UI field that was not designed to hold much JavaScript.

lernreise ai n8n lessons-learned homelab
5 min read

Lernreise 5/7: Day 3: Fifty Nodes and a Burning Budget

By day three, the main workflow had fifty-two nodes. I want you to sit with that number for a moment. Fifty-two nodes in n8n. Conditional branches, error handlers, HTTP request nodes, code nodes with JavaScript doing things that code nodes in a visual workflow tool were never meant to do. Sub-expressions referencing field names from nodes seventeen steps back. The canvas was a tangle of lines that looked, from a distance, like someone had dropped a bowl of spaghetti on a circuit board and decided to ship it.

lernreise n8n ai debugging
4 min read

Lernreise 4/7: The Grand Plan: RAG, Vectors, and a 7-Cent Bargain

Before touching a single node in n8n, I asked Gemini a sensible question: for this problem, is n8n or Python the better choice? Gemini said n8n, clearly and confidently. It was the right tool for orchestration, it said. Visual workflows, lower barrier, easier to iterate. Perfect for this use case. I want to note this for the record, because it becomes relevant later. The architecture I had in mind had several parts.

lernreise ai rag chromadb mistral n8n paperless-ngx
3 min read

Lernreise 2/7: The Starting Point: A Thousand Untagged Documents

Six months ago I migrated my homelab. The old machine was a netbook that had served faithfully for years, and by the end of its life it was doing things that its manufacturer had never intended and would probably have considered unkind. I replaced it with a MiniPC: an N150 processor, 16 GB of RAM, a form factor that fits in a drawer. It runs Proxmox. It is fast. It is quiet. I am unreasonably pleased with it.

lernreise ai paperless-ngx homelab n8n mistral