Part Five · Reference

The recommended sequence.

The single most common failure mode is trying to build a general-purpose “AI assistant” first. Don’t. Pick one workflow. Pick a workflow that (a) is painful this month, (b) has a clear deliverable, (c) has a bounded number of tools. Build that. Then build the next.

Weeks 1-2: Pick a workflow. Write the requirements as a paragraph. Not a spec. A paragraph.

Weeks 3-4: Deploy an n8n instance ($6/mo Hetzner or n8n Cloud starter). Wire the workflow. Every LLM call goes through LiteLLM with a per-workflow cost cap.

Weeks 5-6: Run the workflow read-only for a week. Route errors to a shared alert channel. Fix what’s flaky.

Weeks 7-8: Enable writes. Log everything. Watch for drift.

Month 3 onward: Add the second workflow. Then the third. Never try to build ten at once.

The pattern is: pick a small painful thing, ship it, prove it, repeat. Nothing else works reliably.

The pattern is compounding. Every workflow you ship makes the next one easier. Every LLM call teaches you what the model is good at. In eighteen months you have a real internal AI capability.