Building workflows, start to finish

1 · Three ways to start

Press Start a workflow and you get all three:

Describe it

Type a sentence — “Monitor AI news and put useful summaries on my dashboard” — and AWO drafts the whole workflow onto the canvas, names each step, and even creates the dashboard it will fill. You review and press Test run; nothing runs until you say so.

Use a recipe

Fifty fill-in-the-blank recipes — job boards, price drops, news digests, lead qualification. You answer two or three plain questions (which page? which tickers?) and AWO writes the workflow. Every recipe can finish on a dashboard of your own, so none of them require a chat account.

Build by hand

Click steps from the left-hand palette onto the canvas. New steps arrive pre-configured from whatever they connect to, so you adjust rather than start from blank.

2 · Pick what starts it — the input

Every workflow begins with one thing happening. Four kinds cover nearly everything:

When a page changes

AWO checks a web page on a schedule you choose and runs only when the page actually changed — the steps read what changed, not the whole page. Right for job boards, price pages, news sections, status pages. Five minutes is the polite floor for other people's sites, and AWO says so while you set it.

When something calls in

AWO gives the workflow its own web address; anything that can send a message — a form, a script, another tool — posts to it and the workflow runs with what arrived. Tick “collect a group” and AWO holds events for a window (say, ten minutes or 200 events) and runs once over the whole batch — one digest, not one alert per message.

On a schedule

Runs at a fixed interval whether or not anything changed — a morning brief, an hourly check.

Only when you run it

Sits quiet until you press the button. Good for on-demand jobs.

A workflow can have several inputs feeding one graph — each event runs only the branch its own input reaches.

3 · Let the AI work it out

The heart of most workflows is one Ask the AI step: it hands what arrived to your model with your question — “is this worth telling me about, and why?” It uses the model you picked once in Setup (a local Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic — your choice, your key), unless a workflow picks its own.

The one decision that matters here is the shape of the answer:

One piece of text

The default. The AI answers in prose — right for a message that gets posted somewhere as-is.

Return typed pieces

Tick this and the AI returns display-ready pieces — a number, a table, a status, a paragraph — that dashboards can draw and channels can format. If you want a chart of a price or a table of leads, you want typed pieces. AWO tells the model the exact shape, checks what comes back, and even repairs a near-miss once, so the format is never your problem.

4 · Only continue when it matters

An Only continue if… step is a gate: it checks one value and lets the rest of the workflow run only when the check passes. “Only when the AI said this is worth telling me about.” When the gate closes, nothing downstream runs and nothing is sent — that is a quiet day working correctly, and the run history shows it as exactly that.

Two more workers for special shapes: For each item… repeats the following steps once per item in a list, and Pull out data grabs a piece of what arrived without involving the AI.

5 · Send it somewhere you will see it

The last step answers “where should the result go?” — three cards:

A dashboard

The one that always works: nothing to set up, no account, no address. AWO creates the board if it doesn't exist and chooses sensible widgets from what you publish — a number becomes a figure and a chart of how it has moved, words become a panel, records with names become a table, and everything joins a feed. Boards are yours to rearrange: drag, resize, add, remove.

A message

Discord, Slack or Telegram. Paste the channel's webhook address once in Setup and every workflow can use it. AWO checks the address's shape before you ever run, because a nearly-right one is the commonest mistake there is.

Another app

A plain web request to any address — Zapier, Make, your own service.

One step can do both — post to your channel and fill your board from the same run.

6 · Test it — for real

Test run is a real run: the model is called and messages really send; only the triggering event is a stand-in AWO invents for you. The canvas lights up step by step, and the result panel shows exactly what each step decided, in its own name — with a link straight to the board it just filled.

Anything a template couldn't know — which page, which channel — arrives as a stand-in, and a line above the canvas names each one; press it and the cursor lands in the right box with the stand-in selected, ready to be typed over. Press Check for problems any time and AWO inspects the whole workflow before anything runs; where a problem states its own fix, there's a button that applies it.

7 · Set it watching

Press Start watching and the workflow runs on its own — on its schedule, or whenever events arrive — even with the tab closed. The Watching screen tells the truth about every watcher: when it last ran, when it checks next, and — if nothing is arriving at its address — it says so and names the address to check, instead of looking identical to a healthy one. AWO refuses to start a watcher it can prove will fail — a stand-in never filled in, a step reading a value that cannot exist — and the refusal names the fix.

Edit a running workflow and AWO notices the running copy is older and offers Use my changes — nothing silently keeps running stale.

8 · When you're unsure, ask the product

Every workflow carries a one-sentence summary of what it does, updating as you edit. Press Explain and your own model walks through it in a paragraph — what starts it, what each step contributes, where results land, and what a quiet day means. Every error is written in plain words: what happened, why, and the fix — with the fix as a button whenever AWO can apply it for you. The full reference lives under Help, inside the product.

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