Your First Automation (Tutorial)

In this tutorial, you'll create your first automation flow in Donobu Studio. You'll tell the AI what to do in plain English, watch it navigate a website, and review the results.

Prerequisites

• Donobu Studio installed and running (download)
• At least one LLM provider key configured in Studio settings

Step 1: Open Studio and start a new flow

Launch the Donobu Studio application. You'll see the main screen with the flow creation area.

Step 2: Enter a website and objective

1. In the URL field, enter the website you want to automate. For this tutorial, try a public site like https://en.wikipedia.org.
2. In the Objective field, describe what you want Donobu to do. For example:

   Search for "artificial intelligence" and navigate to the article page.

3. Leave the other settings at their defaults for now.

Step 3: Submit and watch Flow Pilot work

Click Submit. Donobu will:

1. Open a browser window
2. Navigate to the website
3. Use Flow Pilot (the AI agent) to figure out the best sequence of actions
4. Execute each action — searching, clicking, typing — to achieve your objective
5. Capture a screenshot after each action

You can watch the flow execute in real time. If something goes wrong, you can cancel the flow at any time by clicking the Stop button.

<!-- [SCREENSHOT: Donobu Studio showing a flow in progress with the browser visible and actions appearing in the timeline] -->

Step 4: Review the results

Once the flow completes, you'll see the results in Studio:

1. Click on the flow in the flow list to open its detail view.
2. The title bar of the screen shows overall flow information: name, AI agent, run mode (Autonomous for this first run), number of actions, and status (Success in this case).
3. Under that, you'll see some additional information: the objective, ID, runtime, and token usage.
4. If video recording is enabled, you can play back the full session.
5. The Timeline shows every action Flow Pilot took, with thumbnail, description, and duration for each.
6. Click on the thumbnail in any step to see the screenshot captured at that point.

<!-- [SCREENSHOT: Flow detail view showing the completed timeline with screenshots] -->

Step 5: Try rerunning the flow

Now that you have a successful flow, you can Rerun it. A rerun replays the exact same actions without using the AI, making it fast and free.

1. Open the flow's detail view.
2. Click the Execute button.
3. Watch the flow execute the same steps — this time in Deterministic mode.

This is the basis of regression testing in Studio: run a flow once with AI, then rerun it as many times as you need.

What to try next

• Change the objective to something more complex, like "Search for artificial intelligence, then navigate to the History section of the article."
• Try a different website — any public site will work.
• Export the flow as code — on the Code tab, click the Download button to generate an executable Playwright script from the flow. For more information on writing and executing Donobu-powered Playwright tests, see the documentation and tutorials for the Donobu Playwright Extension.
• Follow the Form Automation tutorial to learn about environment variables and data validation.