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)
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!
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.