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14 posts · no hype

Notes on agents, automation and shipping things that hold up.

What I've learned building AI agents and automation that run in production — including the parts that went wrong. Written for people deciding what to build and what to pay for it.

FeaturedAutomation

How to Connect Google Sheets to Slack with n8n (Free Workflow Included)

Three nodes, about fifteen minutes, and most of that is credentials. Here's the full build — including the JSON you can paste straight onto your canvas — plus the two mistakes that break it for almost everyone.

13 min read
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Automation

n8n vs Zapier for Lead Routing: Which Actually Costs Less at Scale?

Same workflow, same leads, two totally different bills. Zapier charges per task; n8n charges per execution — and at real volume that difference stops being academic.

12 min read
Automation

n8n vs Make for E-commerce Order Automation: A Real Cost Breakdown

An order isn't one step — it's inventory checks, fulfilment routing, notifications and a dozen operations behind the scenes. Here's what that actually costs on Make versus n8n once volume gets real.

12 min read
Automation

n8n vs Zapier for CRM Automation: What I'd Actually Recommend

Skip the feature-by-feature table. Here's the actual decision — based on three questions — and what I tell clients who ask me this exact thing every month.

11 min read
Automation

How to Connect Google Sheets to Slack with n8n (Free Workflow Included)

Three nodes, about fifteen minutes, and most of that is credentials. Here's the full build — including the JSON you can paste straight onto your canvas — plus the two mistakes that break it for almost everyone.

13 min read
Automation

How to Sync Stripe Payments to Google Sheets Using n8n

The naive version of this workflow logs every payment twice, off by a factor of 100, with a blank email column. Here's the build that doesn't — and why each of those three things happens.

11 min read
Automation

n8n + Gmail + Notion: Auto-Log Every Client Email in 10 Minutes

Four nodes that turn your inbox into a searchable client record in Notion. The interesting parts are the Gmail search query and the dedupe step — without them you log everything, twice.

12 min read
Cost

The Most Expensive AI Automation Mistake: Using a Frontier Model for Everything

A workflow that runs five times a day through a frontier model can cost $200 a month. Multiply that by twenty recurring tasks and you're paying frontier prices for work that never needed frontier reasoning.

6 min read
Pricing

AI Agent Development Cost in 2026: What You'll Actually Pay

Quotes for the same agent range from $1,500 to $250,000. Here's what drives that spread, what each tier really buys you, and the four costs almost nobody puts in the proposal.

9 min read
Architecture

Agentic AI vs Automation: When You Actually Need an Agent

If you can draw the flowchart, you don't need an agent. A practical framework for telling genuine agentic problems apart from automation with a language model bolted on.

7 min read
Engineering

Why AI Agents Fail in Production (And How to Build Ones That Don't)

The demo worked. Then real users arrived and it fell apart. Six failure modes that kill production agents — and what actually prevents each one.

8 min read
Architecture

Build vs Buy: When Custom AI Agents Actually Beat Off-the-Shelf

Buying is usually the right answer, and most 'we need custom' instincts are wrong. Here are the six situations where they aren't.

7 min read
Engineering

Voice AI Agents: Latency Is the Whole Product

The models sound human already. Nobody abandons a call because the voice was unconvincing — they abandon it because of the pause before the answer.

6 min read
Engineering

AI Coding Agents: Where They Pay Off, and Where They Quietly Cost You

Agents are great at work a test can check and quietly expensive at everything else. The rule that decides which is which.

7 min read
Product

Your MVP Is Too Big: Scope Discipline for 0 → 1

Nine months and a full feature set is not an MVP — it's a bet placed before you were allowed to see the cards.

6 min read