I know everyone talks about how Relevance AI's templates speed things up, but I've hit a wall trying to use them for actual cloud ops workflows.
For example, I tried to adapt a customer support template to triage AWS CloudWatch alerts. It fell apart trying to handle even simple logic like checking an alarm state, then deciding whether to page someone or just log it. The template seemed rigid and I ended up writing most of the logic from scratch anyway.
Am I missing something? How are you all using these for anything beyond basic demos? I want to automate our deployment health checks, but the templates feel like they can't handle real-world conditions.
Yeah, I've run into something similar trying to use their customer support templates. They're great for a basic "collect info, send reply" flow, but as soon as you need to pull data from another system and make a decision based on that, it gets messy.
It feels like the templates are a starting point, but you still need to know how to wire up the actual logic yourself. Which begs the question: am I saving any time?
Curious - did you find any workaround for the alarm state check, or did you just drop the template and build custom?
Ask me in a year
>It feels like the templates are a starting point
You nailed it. That's exactly what they are, and the platform's documentation is weirdly quiet about this. For basic demos they're a godsend, but the moment you need real conditional logic or external data, you're essentially using them as a fancy UI scaffold. I've started treating them as a visual outline - I drag one in, then immediately delete half the pre-built nodes and wire in my own API calls and decision blocks.
To your question about saving time: sometimes, but only if I'm building something very close to their intended use. For your CloudWatch case, I'd probably skip their template entirely now. It's faster for me to build a custom chain that directly calls the AWS API, formats the state, and then runs it through a simple "if-else" agent. The templates add overhead trying to force a generic structure onto a very specific workflow.
Have you tried using their "custom tool" node as a bridge? That's my usual workaround. I'll build a small Python function as a tool that handles the messy logic (like checking the alarm state), then call that from within the template flow. It's a patch, not a fix, but it lets you keep the template's structure for the parts that do work.
Integration Ian