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Visual Workflow Builder — getting started

How to build your first automation in Miton's Workflow Surface, from trigger to scheduled run.

Product stage
Development build
Last reviewed
2026-08-27
Successful result
The change is visible in the active project.

What this accomplishes

How to build your first automation in Miton’s Automation workspace, from trigger to scheduled run.

Automation is a visual node-graph builder for automations that run on a schedule, on a webhook, or on demand. This guide walks you through building a first workflow.

Current availability

This page documents behaviour verified in Miton development builds. Miton is still pre-release and is not publicly downloadable; invited beta users will receive a signed desktop build with automatic updates.

Before you start

  • A Miton development build and an active project.
  • A connected cloud or local model, plus any credentials or local runtime required by this task.

Opening Automation

From the workspace switcher, select Automation. A blank canvas opens for a new workflow, or your project’s existing workflows appear for you to pick up.

Anatomy of a workflow

A workflow has three parts:

  1. Trigger — what starts the run (a schedule, a webhook, or a manual run command)
  2. Nodes — the steps the workflow executes, connected by edges
  3. Output — the result of the last node (written to a file, sent as a notification, etc.)

Your first workflow: a daily brief

This example pulls a summary of today’s tasks and writes it to a file every morning.

Step 1 — Add a trigger

Right-click the canvas and choose Trigger from the node menu. Open the node’s panel and set Trigger kind to Scheduled, then set the cron schedule:

0 8 * * 1-5

This fires at 8:00 AM, Monday to Friday.

Step 2 — Add an LLM Call node

Right-click the canvas and choose LLM Call. Connect it after the trigger. In the node panel, set the provider and model (or leave the defaults) and enter a user prompt:

Summarise today's most important tasks in plain English. Keep it under 200 words.

The LLM Call node runs this prompt every time the trigger fires.

Step 3 — Add a Tool node to write the file

Right-click the canvas and choose Tool. Connect it after the LLM Call node. Set Tool name to write and give it an input template with the target path, for example:

~/Documents/daily-brief.md

Step 4 — Run it

Click Run now in the toolbar. The workflow executes immediately, outside the schedule. The run appears in the Run Inspector, where you can see each step’s input and output — the trigger, the LLM call, and the file write.

If the output looks right, enable the workflow. It’s now scheduled and will run automatically.

Node types

Miton ships 18 node kinds — every node in a workflow graph is one of these:

Category Nodes
Triggers trigger (manual, scheduled via cron, webhook)
Input / Output input (typed variables), output (structured result)
AI & Execution llm (any provider/model), tool (any registered tool), code (JavaScript or Python), subagent (spawn an isolated daemon)
Flow control branch (if/else), loop (iterate), merge (join branches)
Integration http (REST with auth), rss (parse feeds), email (SMTP send)
Events & gates fs-watch (file-system watcher), git-event (branch/tag/commit), approval (human gate)
Miton-native goal advance (updates Project Goals milestone progress), memory_write (write to memory store)

All node kinds ship in Community Edition — there is no separate node pack. $vault.X injects secrets at execution time; they never appear in the graph JSON.

The cron scheduler

The workflow scheduler runs on your machine. It is not a cloud trigger — it executes locally. If your machine is off when a run was scheduled, missed-fire backfill kicks in on next startup and runs any skipped executions.

Using workflow presets

Click Templates in the toolbar to open the preset library. Eleven presets are available:

  • wf-rss-email — RSS feed → email digest
  • wf-daily-standup — daily LLM briefing
  • wf-social-scheduler — schedule social media posts
  • wf-file-backup — backup files on a schedule
  • wf-form-spreadsheet — collect form responses
  • wf-scheduled-report — periodic report generation
  • wf-webhook-receiver — HTTP-triggered workflow
  • wf-weekly-summary — weekly project summary
  • wf-calendar-prep — calendar event preparation
  • wf-content-monitor — monitor content for changes
  • wf-data-pipeline — watch a folder for new CSV/Excel files, transform them with a Python step, and export a tidy CSV

Select a preset to load it as a starting point. All nodes are editable.

What success looks like

How to build your first automation in Miton’s Workflow Surface, from trigger to scheduled run. The result remains attached to the active project when you move to another workspace.

Common failures and recovery

  • Confirm the correct project and model are active.
  • Read the exact error and the requested permission before retrying.
  • Retry only the failed step so completed project work remains intact.