This looks worth checking out but I’d love to see a Lambda version of it
Yes, that would be the killer feature
Related idea that was on HN a few days ago: https://gist.github.com/nileshtrivedi/6024434121b073789e6d58...
Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
31–40 of 149 posts
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#32I don't see a list of all supported agents or a way to search.
It's in the wiki https://github.com/huginn/huginn/wiki/Agent-Types-&-Descript...
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#33For those using expensive/advanced connectors like Zapier, Tray.io, etc. I find that https://n8n.io serves as a far welcoming open-source alternative that is worth looking at.
This is nowhere near as robust as Zapier and has significant limitations.
n8n does also have way fewer integrations.
About the "robust" part. A startup I know had a lot of issues with Zapier and switched to n8n and are quite happy as they did not have any issues since. I am sure you are right and you did your research but would love to hear what exactly you are referring to as it will help me to improve n8n. The same with the limitations. Anything specific?
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#34Zapier has exponentially more integrations than this or anything else, but is surprisingly difficult to use, and more so since they updated their UI. Editing Zaps is pure torture because refresh is so difficult. Exception handling is pure pain. In most instances the breadth of API calls is so narrow, and so rarely updated by vendors that you end up switching to a custom integration. I've also noticed vendors rapidly…
> The "retail" integration space remains underserved
This is accurate, there's a significant opportunity in this space but it won't stay that way for long.
There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone.
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#35This, as well as related projects like n8n & node-red, is a very cool project. I always wonder what people use it for in real life though. It seems a lot of trouble (setting up, learning curve, maintaining) for an action that usually takes a couple of seconds, like checking the weather or opening twitter. Does anybody have useful workflows going on?
Ever notice when someone criticizes a company on HN, and suddenly the CEO shows up and engages after 6 months of inactivity? Likely they are using a tool like this along with Google Alerts, etc, to monitor sites for mentions of the company and maybe flag negative sentiment. Also, same thing but for politics.
Yes, very interesting indeed! Either there is a big conspiracy to uncover or said CEO reads HN and if something is number 1 and is related to his product he pays close attention. We will maybe never find out the truth...
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#36Zapier has exponentially more integrations than this or anything else, but is surprisingly difficult to use, and more so since they updated their UI. Editing Zaps is pure torture because refresh is so difficult. Exception handling is pure pain. In most instances the breadth of API calls is so narrow, and so rarely updated by vendors that you end up switching to a custom integration. I've also noticed vendors rapidly…
> The "retail" integration space remains underserved This is accurate, there's a significant opportunity in this space but it won't stay that way for long. There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone.
> There's a well-known entrepreneur I know with significant exits and capital entering this space that's going after Zapier's market and I'm certain he's not alone.
Having seen how the sausage is made and what it takes to build and support such a product, I will say that past success is no guarantee of success in this market. It is a grind, day and day out of dealing with queues, API integrations that fail or degrade either loudly or silently and you have no visibility into them, non-technical users who are are not happy when the magic isn't working, blobs of data that just shouldn't be, spending hours tracking down single edge cases or failures, and so on.
It's not "write some code, here's your $1B exit" (but you will be writing a lot of code!). It is constant tending of a complex piece of machinery, and failures are painful (outages somewhat, data loss exceptionally so).
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#37I have been running huginn on my home server for a while. I've mainly used it to filter RSS feeds and then generate new feeds with the filtered items. Another use-case for me is ingesting webcomic RSS feeds (or scrape a page) and post the comics to a private Telegram channel. Once I also had an agent scraping a page and notifying me if something changed (realestate listing). I have tried a couple alternatives, e.g. n…
> One thing I have not figured out about huginn and which all of these automation tools seem to lack are loops.
I do some very complex stuff using the "Shell Command Agent". You might want to look into using that if you haven't already.
You can also create your own agent gem https://github.com/huginn/huginn_agent
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#38This, as well as related projects like n8n & node-red, is a very cool project. I always wonder what people use it for in real life though. It seems a lot of trouble (setting up, learning curve, maintaining) for an action that usually takes a couple of seconds, like checking the weather or opening twitter. Does anybody have useful workflows going on?
> checking the weather
I actually use Huginn to check the weather, compare it with weather conditions for the previous two days and send the result to my Telegram as a simple text ("It should be a bit warmer than yesterday in the first half of the day").
I do this because I have a hard time understanding if wearing a coat would be enough for '-5 deg. Celsium, NW wind 30 kmph'. Comparison with previous days helps a lot since I already know that I was feeling ok in my coat yesterday.
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#39I have been running huginn on my home server for a while. I've mainly used it to filter RSS feeds and then generate new feeds with the filtered items. Another use-case for me is ingesting webcomic RSS feeds (or scrape a page) and post the comics to a private Telegram channel. Once I also had an agent scraping a page and notifying me if something changed (realestate listing). I have tried a couple alternatives, e.g. n…
Yeah I just use the Javascript agent for v complex stuff like this.
Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf
#40Something I'm not entirely clear on:
One use case for Zapier (from a developer/company standpoint) is to allow customers to connect their existing services to actions inside your own app. For instance, if a customer updates a CRM record, you can have a custom zap update a record in your own SaaS platform.
To pull that off with huginn, is that as simple as connecting this up to Singer.io? Or would that require a big marketplace of huginn agents for popular integrations?