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👋 Welcome to Dify 101#

We are going to take you from Zero to Hero. By the end of this course, you will build your very own Advanced AI Email Assistant.

Let’s leave coding behind for a second and talk about cooking.

Imagine you want to cook a dish that you haven’t made before. To make that happen, you need a Recipe. A recipe is just like a workflow! It tells you exactly what to do, in what order, to get the dish you want.

Meet Workflow#

In Dify, you are the head chef who writes a Recipe for the AI to follow. Here’re the things you need to prepare beforehand:

  1. Input (Ingredients): The information you give the AI. This could be a user’s question, a PDF document, or a messy email draft.
  2. Process (Instructions): The steps you force the AI to take. For example: First, summarize this text. Next, translate it into Spanish. Finally, format it as a LinkedIn post.
  3. Output (The Dish): The final result the AI hands back to you.

To sum up, a workflow is a flowchart that asks AI to complete tasks in a specific order.

This is a Smart ID Scanner workflow. Its job is to extract the information on front and back of an ID card, then send these texts back to you.

Workflow Example

Node#

Let’s have a closer look of the workflow above. That whole process is simply made up of a few connected steps: Uploading the image, Extracting the information, and Combining the results.

Each of these steps is called a Node.

Think of them like runners in a relay race: each node has a specific task. Once it finishes its turn, it passes the baton to the next node in line.

Dify offers you a box of ready-to-use nodes, such as the LLM, Knowledge Retrieval, If/Else, Tools, etc.

You can connect these nodes just by dragging and dropping—it’s like building with the Lego blocks! You can easily snap them together to create a powerful automated workflow.

It’s Your Turn#

  1. Go Dify and click Get Started in the upper right corner.

  2. Click on Explore. This is a library which collects different workflow of different scenarios.

    Explore

  3. Pick a template that looks like a right fit for you. Don’t worry if you don’t understand every setting yet—just look at how the nodes are connected.