How to Build Powerful AI Agents with a Single Prompt

You've probably seen those complex AI agent workflows posted across social media by automation influencers. They seem tempting on the surface, but in reality, setting them up in tools like n8n can be way more complicated than you ever imagined. But what if you could build an agent with just one prompt, telling it exactly what you want it to do?

Today, we're going to explore a tool that claims to do exactly that. It's called String, by a company called Pipedream. This could be the future of building AI agents, where all you do is describe what you want in a single prompt, and it goes away and builds the AI agent for you. This is the next wave of incredible businesses is going to be built using these AI tools. With that said, let's get straight into String and see what it can do.

Prompt, Run, and Deploy AI Agents in Seconds

String claims to be able to prompt, run, edit, and deploy AI agents in seconds. It presents a very familiar interface for those of you who are familiar with any sort of AI tool, where you basically just have a chat window to start and you just tell it what you want it to do. In this instance, we're going to tell it what AI agents we want it to create so that we can automate a bunch of stuff in our business or for our clients.

If you're familiar with using something like n8n to build AI agents and you've seen all of those complicated workflows, then this is basically a really simplified way of creating those agent workflows without needing to connect all of those blocks manually. The agent will go away and build the agent for you. Basically, it's an AI agent that builds AI agents, which is a bit meta, but there you go.

This is the way that AI agent building is going—towards building in natural language and hiding all of that complicated stuff behind the scenes. In this article, you'll see exactly how to use String to create powerful workflows for your own business that you can steal and go away and create yourself today.

Building an Agent to Generate Viral Content

The first AI agent I want to create today is one that will generate viral content to post on X based on the latest AI tools. Let's put a prompt in to build that.

"Go to Product Hunt at the end of every day. Look at the tools on Product Hunt that have got the most upvotes from that day. Create an email to send to me the following morning with the list of the top five upvoted tools with a brief summary of what they do. Also in the email, include two social posts for X in a thread format with the potential to go viral that starts with a hook post, has a couple of posts explaining what the tool does, and then ends with a call to action to follow me or repost the first post. These two posts should be based on the two tools that you think have the most potential to go viral."

Let's send that to String and see what it comes back with. Very similar to other AI tools, String works in a chat mode. You pay a subscription to get a certain number of tokens, and all the API functionality is built-in, so you don't have to worry about connecting your own APIs or monitoring usage.

String put together a plan that I can then approve:

• The agent will run on a schedule at the end of every day.
• It will identify the two most viral-worthy posts.
• The agent will use AI to create brief summaries.
• It will analyze which two tools have the highest viral potential.
• It will generate X thread content and send a morning email.

It connects to all the tools it needs via MCP, and you don't even have to know what MCP is. Let's approve this plan and start building.

On the right-hand side, a view appears with "Progress" and "Preview" tabs. The progress tab shows all the steps String is taking. It needs OpenAI for content generation, Gmail to send the summary, and a scheduling capability (a timer trigger). These would be nodes in n8n or Make.com, but here it's all done for me.

The preview shows the nodes being created, and you can even click on them to add manual configuration. This gives you the best of both worlds: create agents from a prompt, but also have the ability to manually tweak them.

After authorizing access to a Product Hunt account, the agent ran into an error. It couldn't get the votes count. Without any further prompting, String saw the error, tested it itself, and went back to fix it. It figured out a way to correct the process for getting the correct vote count. If you were building this in n8n, you would have to test this manually, get the error, and figure out how to fix it yourself.

After the fix, the step worked perfectly. The quality of the output really depends on the prompt you provide. What's great is that I can scaffold a basic agent and then go in and tweak things later. You don't need to pay influencers for their n8n templates; just come to String, type what you want, and it will build it for you.

The first email it sent didn't work perfectly. The content was there, but the formatting was off, and it pulled outdated tools like ChatGPT-4o and Midjourney V6. This is because it was fetching products based on all-time most upvotes, not the latest ones.

After going back through the automation and improving some steps, the agent is now working correctly. I also asked String to reformat the email into a more friendly HTML format instead of raw JSON.

Here is the final, usable output I receive daily:

• Top 5+ Products of the Day:
  • A list of the top products with their upvote counts.
  • A link to view each product.
• Viral Threads:
  • Fully-formed X threads for the top two products.
  • Each post is called out in a separate card.

For example, for a tool called "Magic Right AI," it generated:

"Meet the secret content weapon top creators are using in 2024... and it's changing the game for everyone."

While the tone might still need some work to feel less AI-generated and more casual, it has successfully pulled together X threads that I can post. This is an agent that sends me an email every single day with these ideas, all created from a single prompt and a few iterations.

Creating a Daily AI Startup Idea Generator

Next, let's try to build an AI agent that reads tech websites and updates a spreadsheet with startup ideas from the latest news every single day.

Here's the prompt:

"Every day at 9:00 a.m., go to the following websites: The Verge, IndieHackers, The Rundown, and Superhuman.ai. Find the latest news from that day. Then, create a highly leveraged AI startup idea from each news story. For each startup idea, create the idea name, a short description, the target customer, why it works, what tech to use, and how to get started. Then add that information to a Google Sheet."

You can really customize this to your interests, for example, by specifying an industry or a customer type.

String generated a plan: 1. Set up a daily trigger. 2. Add code to scrape content from each website. 3. Use OpenAI to analyze the news and generate startup ideas. 4. Format the data and add it to a Google Sheet.

During the build, the agent had a few issues. String suggested that instead of scraping websites from the URL, we should use RSS feeds, which was the recommended option. I simplified the data fetching to just TechCrunch's RSS feed and changed the output from Google Sheets to Google Docs due to a formatting issue.

The agent now runs daily at 9:00 a.m. and adds startup ideas to a Google Doc. While the formatting still looks a bit like JSON, the ideas are solid.

Example Startup Idea:

• Source: "AI job predictions become corporate America's newest competitive sport."
• Idea Name: Skillshift AI
• Description: An adaptive career transition platform that uses generative AI to map each worker's transferable skills to in-demand future jobs and delivers personalized, interactive training to bridge any gaps.
• Includes: Target customer, why it works, what tech to use, and how to get started.

Another Example:

• Idea Name: Finttegrity AI
• Description: An end-to-end compliance and financial insight engine for European B2B neo-banks and small and medium business lenders. It leverages advanced AI to scan customer transactions, onboarding documents, and operational behaviors to find regulatory anomalies, potential fraud, and early signs of financial risk.

These are genuinely great ideas.

The Future of AI Agent Creation

You can see the power of something like String in action, building AI agents using natural language prompts. I do think there will be other companies and tools in this space. Most likely, n8n, Zapier, and other platforms will allow you to build AI agents this way at some point.

But this really is the future: writing a prompt, creating an agent from scratch, and then deploying it for use in your apps or to automate business workflows. The real benefit of using String is that you can use text to create your AI agent from scratch, and it provides a familiar no-code building method that visualizes all the steps and allows you to edit them manually.

If you use n8n in any capacity, you should start testing this new AI agent creation workflow to build your agents much quicker and in a more natural way.