Week 38: n8n is still used in 🇪🇪

It has been one year since my last visit to product tank Tallinn.

This is event is hold in Trinidad Wiseman. The building is designed to have scaffoldings around. Well, a lot buildings in Estonia are designed like this.

I was on the table of the topic Automating incoming requests: turning messy Slack messages into structured work items. I was more interested in the topic AI as a discovery tool: to make sense of unclear ideas, complaints and stakeholder requests, because they mention integration web search into linear tickets. However, too many people were on that table.

Anyway, it was a great to stay on the first table. Not about the topic, it is very easy to integrate slack and Jira with the modern harness tools. Nikolay introduced that there is a skill market in Bolt to allow employees to use, blah, blah, blah…

I found something interesting. It is that n8n is still used in Bolt. I mean n8n was viral last year. In my opinion, what n8n workflow can do has too many similarity to what skills can do. And skills, which is assembled from markdowns and python codes, they are much easier to audit than n8n workflows.

Well, most of the people on the table, they believe n8n is easy to use and more stable. Still, I believe the no-code platforms are always small group market. Think about the biggest no-code platform, should be unreal engine, they are going to shut down blueprint in 2027… However, since it is widely used in EU, I will consider to make an extension for n8n during this weekend’s hackathon. And I guess n8n story does not end here, if Jev works, it can be used in n8n.

During the whole time, we cannot get out of that AI will lose context. There is no best practice to share the context with your teammates, the skill may only work on your own device.

It also brought another problem, what if some context we do not want to share with AI? Is it possible to audit from logs? We have an IT auditor on the table, he shared a lot auditing stories. Including once he was auditing a data loss happened in Finn Air, and eventually because the employee watching porn on the devices and accidentally removed the data, lol.

After the event, it was dark and rainy outside. Normal Tallinn weather, the road outside feels like Lvbo village in Dalian. Very nice experience.