After nine months of job hunting, I still couldn’t find a tool that did the one thing I actually wanted.

I didn’t want another job board or meta-search. I didn’t want more AI-generated company matches from some algorithm. I have all that covered.

What I wanted was something simple: to monitor specific companies for specific roles, every single day.

All of my existing solutions were built for breadth, not depth. They wanted to show me unknown opportunities, which absolutely has value. But I also wanted to watch fifty companies closely, and jump on anything that was a good match quickly.

Then, in one week, everything shifted.

December 11th, I attended an n8n workshop by Hamza Farooq. A week later, a different one taught by Robin van Veen. For those who haven’t seen it, n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform — like Zapier, but with more power and more complexity.

I’ve spent decades in systems engineering and architecture. I’ve built pipelines, designed integrations, thought in terms of data flows and transformations longer than I can remember.

When I saw n8n, it whispered in my ear: "What took you so long?"

I saw a solution. Not "maybe this could work someday." I saw exactly how to build what I needed.

Seventeen days later — mostly over the holidays — I had a working system sending me daily emails with evaluated job matches from 50+ companies. I get a handful a day to check out personally.

This is the story of how I built it, what broke along the way, and what I learned about building with AI instead of just using AI.

Next up: why some tools click instantly, and what it means when they do.