Keeping up the self-accountability spirit of this community, I’m committing to a 30-day project and will share my progress daily. During an AI awareness workshop at my company, we explored how AI could be integrated into everyday workflows. One pain point that surfaced was the repetitive nature of tender responses as some of the questions asked on tenders documents are very similar to past tenders. That sparked an idea this could be an interesting problem to solve! Has anyone here attempted something similar before?

Client 1. Invoice automation. Built it perfectly. Tested it thoroughly. Went live. Day 3 it broke. Client furious. I panicked. Fixed in 15 minutes. Learned the most important lesson about automation. THE BUILD: Email trigger → PDF parsing → Data extraction → Post to QuickBooks → Done Tested with 10 sample invoices. All worked perfectly. Deployed confidently. DAY 3 DISASTER: Client calls: "The automation isn't working. Nothing posted to QuickBooks today." Checked workflow. Processing fine. Data extracting fine. Then I saw it. QuickBooks authentication expired. THE MISTAKE: I built workflow assuming perfect conditions. Never planned for failure modes. API tokens expire. Internet disconnects. Services go down. Formats change. My automation had zero error handling. THE 15-MINUTE FIX: Added error catching: If QuickBooks post fails → retry 3 times with 5-minute delays If still fails → send me Slack alert with details Quarantine failed invoices in separate sheet for manual review 15 minutes of setup. Never broke again. THE LESSON: Perfect automation doesn't exist. Resilient automation does. Build for failure modes, not just success paths. ERROR HANDLING CHECKLIST: API AUTHENTICATION: - Check before processing - Graceful reconnection - Alert when auth expires RETRY LOGIC: - 3 attempts with delays - Different error types - Exponential backoff ALERT SYSTEM: - Slack or email when fails - Include error details - Link to failed item MANUAL REVIEW QUEUE: - Separate location for failures - Easy to reprocess - Track resolution My workflows now include all four. Takes 20 extra minutes building. Saves hours troubleshooting. WHAT ACTUALLY BREAKS: APIs rate limit or go down temporarily Authentication tokens expire Document formats change slightly Internet hiccups during processing Services update and break integrations Plan for all of it. THE MONITORING SETUP: Daily health check email showing: - Successful processing count - Failed items count - Error types encountered

Hello everyone, my name is Ezra, I am delighted to join this community! It's good to see the progress everyone has made! I work in the medical device industry, and lately I’ve become very interested in how AI automation can help fast track repetitive documentation tasks. I have some experience building workflows with n8n and Make.com, and I’m curious about how far these tools can go in regulated environments. Duy is absolutely right, there are huge opportunities for AI automation in documentation. I’d love to hear your thoughts: • Has anyone here built workflows for documentation in regulated industries? • What challenges or successes have you seen? Looking forward to learning from your experiences and even collaborating on projects in the future!