Lessons-Learned

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.

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4 min read

Lernreise 6/7: What AI Actually Can (and Cannot) Do

I want to write this post carefully, because the nuance matters and most things written about AI productivity are not careful. The AI tools I used this week were remarkable and frustrating in roughly equal measure, at different times, for different reasons. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other. Start with the remarkable. The wiki documentation was worth the experiment on its own. Every piece of infrastructure I provisioned, every workflow component I built, ended up documented in the Gitea wiki in language that a human could read and learn from. Not command logs. Actual explanations: what was built, why this approach was chosen, what to watch out for. This is documentation that would never have existed if I had done the work alone, because I am the kind of person who documents things enthusiastically on day one and then never again.

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