I tried using this a year or two ago—seemed like a really cool idea, and I still think it is—but I couldn't find an actually useful application for it in my life.
Not saying there aren't plenty of neat applications out there, but once the initial "that's cool" feeling wore off, I wasn't sure how to actually get some value out of the system. For me, it felt like a time sink.
Curious to know if others have found use cases that are low-maintenance and high-value.
I setup huginn about two years ago primarily just because it looked interesting. I then sat there for a while wondering what to do with it. I setup the basic things like a morning weather alert, and daily digest email and basically ended up with the same feeling. I decided to leave it for a couple weeks or so and just see if I came up with anything else more useful. That was definitely the right way for me to get going with Huginn. It's ultimately a bit of a multi tool, if you keep it around you're bound to reach for it although you may not need it the second you buy it.
Since having it setup I've used it to:
* Monitor covid travel restriction changes on the UK gov site and email me when updates are made.
* Scrape the site of a housing development where I wanted to view a house early as a potential purchase to know first when they opened viewings.
* Look for a price drop on some computer monitors on Amazon as the price was quite high when I found them.
* Daily discord report on the price of flights on a particular date when I and a group of friends were thinking about a holiday together.
* Alert when an exchange rate dropped or increased by a certain amount to help figure out when to exchange money for the same trip.
I find most of my uses include some kind of web scraping, although not always, and are usually things I want to run frequently and have run reliably. Most don't live more than a few months but it's a great tool to have knocking around as the effort to spin up an automation is much lower compared to writing a custom script each time.
I actually have n8n.io self-hosted as well because it has some nice pre-bundled integrations with various services like Spotify which huginn doesn't. That said, I've not really enjoyed using it, I find myself hitting F5 a lot because the UI breaks and won't recover and while it's more visual it's actually much harder to view the logs of a workflow. I tend to default to huginn unless n8n has a particular integration which will make the task faster to setup. Once setup though, I've not had any problems with it.
I agree, I've never quite been able to figure out anything useful over alternatives. Like the usual "send me an SMS when the weather will be rainy" example - I use a highly customizable weather app that gives me more power to send me stuff like that without having to fiddle with a new system.
This system's integration with Mechanical Turk could be interesting, but I'm too dumb right now to figure out some cool things I could do with it.
I have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter. Similarly startups I want to know if they’ve stagnated or gotten funding. I would like to get earnings calls emails for some companies I like. I want to get a ping if the forex rate changes for some combos, or if gold price drops by some percent. I and family have many bank accounts and it’s a real thing that you need to keep an eye on the finances of your banks here (one goes down every few years). I will like to have news alerts on all the small towns my family is in so I know if something big happened anywhere.
I think it’s definitely a mindset to think of everything you do or read every day and think if you can offload it to someone or something else. Once you switch that knob on you notice so much every day.
> I have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter.
That sounds so far away from how I deal with "frenemies" (I just ignore them) that I have to ask: What do you get out of reading what they are up to on Twitter and LinkedIn?
Not saying there aren't plenty of neat applications out there, but once the initial "that's cool" feeling wore off, I wasn't sure how to actually get some value out of the system. For me, it felt like a time sink.
Curious to know if others have found use cases that are low-maintenance and high-value.