n8n makes it deceptively easy to wire up a working automation in an afternoon — and deceptively easy to end up with a workflow that fails silently in production three weeks later. Here are five patterns that consistently separate "works in the demo" from "actually reliable." 1. Never trust a single HTTP node without error output handling By default, a failed HTTP Request node just stops the workflow (or worse, continues with an empty item if you're not careful with "Continue on F...