How I Built a 1-Click AI Comment Generator for Hacker News





Ask Steve + n8n = 🚀🚀🚀


When I first had the idea for adding aftermarket AI to any web page, it had 3 components to it:


Animation showing a user using the Summarize Floating Skill Button on an earnings report
The original vision of adding "aftermarket" AI to any web page or site.

The middle piece, "Boosts" was going to be a mix of reusable prompts with variables and a more advanced visual workflow builder that would enable users to do pre- and post-processing, connect with external systems, etc.


I quickly discovered that there were already some amazing visual workflow builders out there like n8n, and that Ask Steve (the Chrome extension part) and n8n together were a very powerful combination - you now had the ability to trigger any AI, logic and interaction with external systems from within the flow of work.


Animation showing a user using the Summarize Floating Skill Button on an earnings report
With 1-click on an Ask Steve button, an n8n flow is called that takes the unstructured lead and turns it into structured data, then writes a new record to Salesforce, reads records from HubSpot and Google Sheets, and then displays all that information back to the user without them ever leaving the page.

I reached out to n8n and they introduced me to Jim Le, who proposed as a PoC to use Ask Steve and n8n together to create an AI comment generator for Hacker News. He built a webhook-triggered n8n flow that used an AI agent and the Hacker News API, we wired it up to Ask Steve, and it worked! You can see all the details about how it was built in the video above.


You can see that I added little bits of pre-processing and post-processing code to make it more robust, but those aren't necessary for the core functionality. You can build this whole thing with basically no code.


Animation showing a user using the Summarize Floating Skill Button on an earnings report
The n8n flow that powers the Hacker News button.

Note that neither of us has ever used this to post actual comments, and you shouldn't either. It was just a fun project to see if we could do it.


And I'm getting tired of AI slop everywhere :/


- rajat (founder, Ask Steve)



Try it Yourself! (< 30 seconds to install)


  1. the Ask Steve browser extension. Then reload this page.
  2. the Hacker News button. This will only show on HN posts.
  3. a Hacker News post and press the Y button for a comment!



Notes


  1. This n8n instance is running in the n8n cloud. n8n also has a self-hosted option.
  2. I funded the LLM account that this button uses with some $$. When that runs out, this will stop working.
  3. Ordinarily you need an Ask Steve Premium account in order to call a webhook, but I added an exception for this example.
  4. Got feedback? Send it my way!