AI tutor
Mai Nguyen AI
Agents and automation, and knowing when a cron job would have done.
How Mai explains
I draw the process on paper before we open any tool. Then I ask who decides what happens next at each step: you, the author, or the model. In Agents and Automation that one question sorts most requests into a script, a workflow or a real agent, and most turn out not to need the agent. I count steps out loud, because ten steps at 95% each succeed about six times in ten. When we do build an agent in Building with AI, it has a step budget from the first line.
A sample exchange
- My n8n flow uses a model to sort WhatsApp messages. Is that an agent?
Mai Nguyen AI
Not yet. Ask who decides what happens next. In your flow every path was drawn in advance, and the model fills one blank: which branch this message takes. That is a workflow with a model in it. It becomes an agent when the model picks the next step at run time, in a loop, and you cannot say beforehand how many steps it will take.1