Request for feedback Node Generator MVP (with demo!)

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Hi everyone!

My team and I have been working hard on an internal tool for n8n to generate nodes, as we initially described in this forum post. We have completed the MVP and are looking for feedback!

After watching the demo video here, we would love to know your thoughts on:

  • The user interface: is there anything that seems unintuitive? How can we improve the experience for developers?
  • Are there any glaring features missing? Right now, our next steps include:
    • Generation support for basic trigger nodes
    • Generation support for documentation
    • Support to enter extra display restrictions and typeOptions on fields
    • Input validation
    • A preview feature.
  • Any other thoughts on the project! We plan on making this open-source soon.

Thank you for any and all feedback :slight_smile:

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So, feedback…here we go!

To start, congratulations on all the hard work that you have done to produce this. It is apparent that you have spend a lot of time and effort building this tool. I can see how it is going to become a critical tool for developers, not only of n8n, but also of web services who have an API on their service. This will allow them to quickly and easily build a n8n node and release it “into the file” that will connect into their service. This will also make n8n a de-facto automation choice for users of these services. Win-Win!

I feel as though your target audience is probably developers, not end users. This tools will probably be used as a quick start tool to create an initial usable node to an API and then tweaked at the code level until it performs exactly how the developer intends. It feels as though you really need to understand the API very well to produce a node for it in this manner.

I was hoping for a “Scan API Now!” button that would crawl and API based on an API standardized framework. But, for all I know, that may be on the way.

I don’t recall (and I could have just missed it but I’m too lazy to go back and look), but I don’t remember any authentication. Does this mean that this API node is restricted to public facing APIs or will the authentication need to be added manually later?

This is an absolutely wonderful start! Keep going! I can’t wait to see where you take this!

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