Build 1 of AI Agents done — a Telegram Receipt Analysis Assistant on n8n.

Quick heads up for anyone building this on Community Edition: "Build with AI" is cloud-only, so you're building every node manually. Not a bad thing. You end up actually understanding the architecture rather than just generating it.

A few things that tripped me up:

ngrok order matters. Start ngrok first, then set your WEBHOOK_URL environment variable in the same terminal window, then run n8n start. Every session, no exceptions.

For the AI Agent's tool nodes, make sure you're using the Tool variants specifically — not the standard node versions. Wrong type = "Human review" errors that look unrelated.

If Gemini is responding in markdown and Telegram can't parse it, add a plain text instruction directly in your system prompt and set Parse Mode to Markdown Legacy on the Telegram reply node.

Hardcode your sheet name as a fixed value. The agent will guess and it will get it wrong.

One known limitation: image OCR (actual receipt photo processing) isn't natively supported through the AI Agent node — Gemini Vision needs a direct API call for that. Documented it as a planned feature for now.

Full breakdown on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mark-mwila-1bb779262_aiagents-n8n-telegram-share-7475967879604248576-1uIl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAECKqN8B08HCNLn9gnczhcsNpq3kEDCKvWM

On to build 2. 🙏

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Build 1 of AI Agents done — a Telegram Receipt Analysis Assistant on n8n.