Chat-Powered AI Agent for Hacker News Insights

Unlock Instant Tech Insights with this AI Agent

This n8n workflow sets up an AI Agent that acts as your personal research assistant for Hacker News. Engage in a natural chat conversation to ask about top posts, specific topics, or general trends discussed within the Hacker News community. The agent intelligently utilizes a custom-built tool—a sub-workflow within this template—to fetch real-time data (top 50 posts) directly from Hacker News. This data is then processed by an OpenAI language model (GPT) to understand your query and provide you with concise, relevant answers. It's a powerful demonstration of how AI-driven automation can streamline information gathering and keep you informed on tech developments.

Key Features & Benefits

• Conversational Research: Get Hacker News insights through a simple chat interface, making data retrieval intuitive.
• Custom Tool Integration: Demonstrates a practical example of an AI Agent using a toolWorkflow node to call a sub-workflow for specialized data fetching (Hacker News posts).
• AI-Powered Q&A: Leverages OpenAI's GPT models for natural language understanding and generating answers based on the retrieved Hacker News content.
• Real-time Data Access: The custom tool pulls the latest top posts from Hacker News, ensuring your insights are current.
• Data Preprocessing: Includes nodes to clean and format Hacker News data, optimizing it for the AI model.
• Extensible Template: Easily adapt the custom tool to query other APIs or data sources, or modify the agent's instructions for different research tasks.
• Efficient Information Gathering: Save significant time by automating the process of searching and sifting through Hacker News.

• An n8n instance (Cloud or self-hosted).
• OpenAI API Key with access to a suitable model (e.g., gpt-3.5-turbo or gpt-4).
• The @n8n/n8n-nodes-langchain package installed in your n8n instance.

1. Download the n8n workflow JSON file.
2. Import the workflow into your n8n instance.
3. This workflow contains both the main AI Agent logic and a sub-workflow it uses as a custom tool.
4. Locate the 'OpenAI Chat Model' node. Configure it with your OpenAI API Key and select your preferred model.
5. The 'Custom tool to call the wf below' node (hn_tool) is configured to use the current workflow's ID (={{ $workflow.id }}) to call the sub-workflow part. This typically works out-of-the-box.
6. The sub-workflow (starting with 'Execute Workflow Trigger' and including 'Hacker News', 'Clean up data', 'Stringify' nodes) fetches and formats Hacker News data. It requires no special credential setup, assuming your n8n instance can access the internet.
7. Activate the workflow.
8. To interact with the agent, click the 'Chat' button on the 'On new manual Chat Message' trigger node. Try the example prompt: 'What is the 5th most popular post ever on Hacker News?'