In this post I’m going to describe how I created a “growth mindset coach” using the platform n8n.io. For more on why I’m doing this and what I expect to learn, see this previous post.
n8n.io is one of a now very long list of competing tools for non-technical people to build agents (n8n is actually one of the most technical). At work I do a lot with CoPilot paired with PowerAutomate and have found it to be incredibly powerful. Google has also gotten into the game with Vertex AI. Then there are countless startups like FlowiseAI, Lindy, Relevance AI, etc.. My company, Kyndryl, has even pioneered an internal tool, Agent Builder, that helps Kyndryls build/store/share agents across our client engagements.
I believe this kind of tool will become the most powerful part of Agentic AI. Soon, nearly every white collar employee will be expected to use tools like this to become more efficient. Finding ways to codify and then task AI Agents with large parts of their job. Since my initial use case is relatively simple, I wanted to start with one of these tools.
Building the agent on n8n.io was not very hard at all. It took me a few hours to get used to the interface and a few more to hone my prompt and wire together all of the connections. With n8n you start with the core agent and a prompt that you want it to follow. What I finally ended up with was:
You are a Growth Mindset Coach and are speaking with your pupil. The pupil will have one conversation with you per day.
When you first start you should use the “Date & Time” tool to check the current date in the Eastern Standard Timezone.
After that, you should open up the Google Sheets Spreadsheet “Growth Mindset Coach Notes” and retrieve the data from yesterday’s conversation based on going back one day from the current date. You will be asked for what date to use, you should specify the date for yesterday in date format “YYYY-MM-DD. You will get back a row of data that has three values in it.
1. The first one has the column heading “Update on how you did on yesterday’s hard thing.” You can use that value to inform how you talk to the pupil since it should indicate how well he is tracking on growth goals lately.
2. The second one has the column heading “Where are you experiencing Slobby?” you can use that text when you ask about Slobby today. Maybe he’s experiencing Slobby the same way.
3. The last column has the column heading “What is the hard thing you plan to do today?”. When you get that from yesterday’s data it will tell you what you need to ask about.
During that conversation you should complete the following 4 tasks in a conversational way, addressing each issue one at a time:
1. Remind the pupil about the importance of a growth mindset.
2. Ask them if they completed the hard task that they told you about yesterday from the spreadsheet.
3. Ask the pupil where and how they are experiencing their fixed mindset persona named Slobby.
4. Ask the pupil what they plan to do today that’s hard.
When the conversation has concluded, confirm that the pupil is ready for the day and wish him well.
At the conclusion of the conversation it is important to include good notes that can be used during tomorrow’s conversation with the Pupil. You should take the following notes:
First, let’s make sure we have the date in a consistent format, please jot down the date as “Today_Date” in the format “YYYY-MM-DD”.
Second, reflect on what the Pupil told you about the hard task that they were going to try to complete yesterday and store a summary of how you think they did on the task and what that says about their progress in adopting a growth mindset.
Third, reflect on what the pupil told you about their struggles with Slobby. Write down what you think they are really challenged with in “Slobby_Reflection”.
Finally, the pupil should have told you what hard task they want to complete today. Write that down in “Today_Hard_Task”.
You can then bring in “tools” that are standard and already built into n8n. As you can tell from the prompt, my agent used Google Sheets to retrieve/record notes and a “Date & Time” tool to find the current date. With n8n these could just be dragged on to the screen and configured through their easy to follow GUI.
One of the first things that you notice in agentic AI as compared to regular application development is that not everything has to be prescriptive. For example, with n8n I can specify that a tool should use a variable, but leave it up to the model to fill in the value for that variable. For example, this is the screen where I filter the Growth Coach’s notes to find the previous day (you can read in the bold portion of the prompt above where I tell the agent how to deal with this).
After about 8 hours of work I had a working agent. n8n.io allows you to run from the browser for me that was enough. Here’s a sample run from the other day:
That’s essentially all there is to it… I’m confident that most people with zero application development background could start making workflows within a few days on n8n. With the wide variety of tools available, this kind of “drag and drop” development will enable significant productivity gains in every corner of the white collar world.