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Demo: The Hedgerow Herald, End to End

Every concept in these docs comes together in one place: The Hedgerow Herald, a gentle garden newspaper for young children, built as a complete working example of Circus orchestrating a content pipeline. Running it is the fastest way to feel how the pieces fit — configuration, workspaces, statuses, workflows, and cost — as a single experience rather than separate features.

The demo ships as reference material (in the default plugin's demo/ directory): system context, models, agents, prompts, service definitions, and three n8n workflows. Below is the shape of it; the demo artifacts hold the exact values to copy in.

Configure in dependency order​

Because the configuration chain flows one way, you build it bottom-up. The demo follows exactly this order:

  1. System Context — the Herald's brand voice, audience, tone, and visual style (the environment your agents work in).
  2. System-Wide Configuration — global parameters (image model, resolution, your storage bucket).
  3. Models — the LLMs (Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini) with their pricing.
  4. Agents — the roles: a Reporter, an Editor, an Illustrator.
  5. Prompts — each agent's job, organised into families and versioned.
  6. Workflow Engines — your n8n connection (remember the host.docker.internal rule for local Docker).
  7. Services — the non-LLM vendors: an image generator and a text-to-speech provider.
  8. Workflow Configs — bind each agent to a model and a prompt.
  9. Service Config Sets — give the services their methods, headers, and variables.
  10. Workflows — register three: News Generator, News Revision, and Generate Media.

Steps 1–7 have no dependencies and can be done in any order; 8–10 build on what came before. Each step has its own article in this package if you want the detail.

The n8n side — importing the three workflow files, wiring up credentials, and configuring the shared secrets — is a workflow-developer / operations task. It's covered in the Workflow Developer docs, and the demo artifacts include a full pre-flight checklist. If you're the whole team at once, you'll do both halves.

Run it​

With everything in place, the operator loop is delightful:

  1. Go to Things and Add a Thing — a title and a short briefing, which is the story you want. (The demo suggests a couple, like "Wren Family Moves Into the Old Watering Can.")
  2. On its Manage page, the launcher offers News Generator — the only workflow eligible from the new status. Run it (the "Run as test webhook" checkbox is handy while you're still setting up). The Reporter writes a full report, and the workspace moves to text_generated.
  3. Read the report, add your input — revision notes — and that transition unlocks News Revision, which applies only the changes you asked for. It creates a new workspace, so your original stays intact for comparison.
  4. When you're happy, run Generate Media — the Illustrator picks the most illustratable moment, an image is generated, audio narration is produced, and the workspace reaches completed.

Watch the whole thing in the execution log: the timeline, each step's cost, and the snapshots that pinned the run to its configuration. Then, if you like, finalize the Thing to mark that workspace as its canonical version.

That's Circus end to end — you configured the staff and their environment, and drove one piece of work from a one-line briefing to a finished, illustrated, narrated story, with every cost and decision on the record.