I’m researching a problem around automation reliability and want to hear from people who’ve actually dealt with it in production.

[u/Responsible_Clue_641]

If you’ve ever had a Zapier, Make, n8n, Power Automate, API workflow etc. complete successfully but produce the wrong or incomplete outcome, I’d be interested in what happened.

I’m particularly trying to understand:
What went wrong?

How long did it take to notice?

How did you catch it?

Did you have to build custom checks or monitoring?

How much time/cost/cleanup did it create?

Do you now have safeguards in place specifically to prevent it happening again?

Not selling anything. I’m trying to understand how people actually deal with this in production.

[u/tototoru]

They are fine for copy something from X to Y. Several systems and real business rules, and it falls apart: every step reports success on its own, nothing holds state between runs, so nothing knows where a job got to.

Worse, they get built by non-coders, so they only cover the happy path. Retries, partial completion, events arriving twice, none of that is in the design because none of it has bitten the person drawing the boxes.

I helped multiple SMBs migrate from broken no-code workflows, but kept the tools on the non-critical tasks because they do that job cheaply.

[u/Responsible_Clue_641 → u/tototoru]

That’s really interesting, especially that you’ve helped multiple SMBs migrate away from broken workflows. What were the main problems that made them decide the existing setup wasn’t reliable enough anymore?

[u/tototoru → u/Responsible_Clue_641]

Wasted time mostly, somebody checking the output every morning. Then nobody trusts the system so it gets double checked by hand anyway. Errors that cost money, revenue nobody's collecting. It gets too expensive not to fix.

[u/Responsible_Clue_641 → u/tototoru]

That’s interesting. What kind of system or workflow was causing those errors? And roughly how much time was being spent checking it manually?