An email arrives with three PDF attachments. Ninety seconds later a structured reply is in the same thread. Nobody opened the PDFs.

I built this for a client whose real version I can't share, so here is the pattern with the confidential parts removed: an n8n workflow, Claude reading the attachments by vision (not OCR — vision handles the scanned forms OCR chokes on), and a schema the reply has to fit before it's allowed to send.

The guardrails took longer than the happy path. They always do.

Full write-up, guardrails included: https://contra.com/p/eMPB72ZX-pdf-reader-agent-reading-documents-inside-n8n