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Cover image for Underfoot: The ChatPot for Hidden Places (and Why I Don’t Do Hackathons)
Ashley Childress
Ashley Childress

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Underfoot: The ChatPot for Hidden Places (and Why I Don’t Do Hackathons)

n8n and Bright Challenge: Unstoppable Workflow

This is a submission for the AI Agents Challenge powered by n8n and Bright Data

What I Built

Underfoot is a chatbot that finds locals-only, off-the-map places you won’t see on Yelp or TripAdvisor. You give it a location and intent (music, coffee, hiking, spider farms…) and it returns unique results with a “Stonewalker” rating. Each query also adds anonymous “whispers” to the cache, so the dataset grows as people use it.

Repo: CheckMarKDevTools/underfoot-underground-travel-planner

Demo

Go easy on him, he's not been in the world very long!
Underfoot - The Stonewalker Agent

n8n Workflow

  • Central AI agent (GPT-4.1-mini) acting as The Stonewalker.
  • Triggers: Webhook + Chat.
  • Sources: Google SERP (backup), internal cache, Reddit, Facebook events.
  • Output: structured parser + secondary normalizer.
  • Error handling: Discord notifier (very loud).
  • Planned: Bright Data Google Maps dataset (undelivered).

Technical Implementation

  • System Instructions: Stonewalker persona.
  • Model: GPT-4.1-mini.
  • Memory/Cache: stores normalized results for reuse.
  • Nodes: HTTP Request, Function (normalize/dedupe), Discord notifier.

Bright Data Verified Node

Planned integration with a Google Maps dataset. Didn’t land before the deadline, so SERP acted as backup.


Journey

First hackathon since college — and I remembered why I avoid them. I can’t do simple. Built, scrapped, rebuilt. UI detours, caches, ADRs, Discord server, memory blowups in n8n. Dataset never arrived, so I hacked a backup. Up to the last second, I was still trying to do everything.

But I learned n8n, Bright Data, Supabase, Leonardo, React, and more — mission accomplished. Full juicy write-up coming once I’ve recovered.


🛡️ ChatGPT and Copilot helped this entire project

And I realized 2 seconds after the fact that neither included a footer to say so 🫠

Top comments (2)

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prema_ananda profile image
Prema Ananda

I completely understand! The "I can't do simple" problem is very real. I often start with a basic MVP, and before I know it, I'm already building a full-scale system instead of a working prototype.
Finding the balance between perfectionist tendencies and actually shipping something functional within reasonable timeframes is an ongoing struggle.
Thanks for the honest account of your development journey!

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anik_sikder_313 profile image
Anik Sikder

This feels like the kind of project that crawled out of a cave with a flashlight and a map nobody else had. Love the Stonewalker persona and the way whispers build the cache feels like folklore meets tech. The n8n chaos, Discord screams, and last-minute dataset hacks? Classic indie dev energy. Can’t wait for the full write-up. Underfoot deserves its own genre.