Currently the tools an agent can call are limited to single nodes. If I want it to call a workflow, I have to make that node a call workflow tool, and then host my workflow either in external workflows, or, if I want multiple workflows in a single file that the tool can call, use a switch node. It’s a time consuming an unintuitive way of building agents. It would be far easier if in the workflow editor you could attach workflows directly to tool nodes.
Thanks a lot for that suggestion. I agree, would make some things easier. The very first version I implemented even worked that way (was never publicly released and just exist for a few hours). But then changed it as I did fear that it would be quite confusing having kind of multiple “layers” combined into a single one.
People could then for example start to have a Merge Node which gets data from the main workflow and the tool one.
Or workflows would get even harder to debug because this tool-workflow would potentially be called multiple times. Displaying then multiple executions (main one + n tool ones ) in one view would be painful and confusing.
For reason like that (there were even more that I do not remember right now anymore) did I decide that it is probably not best.
Thank you for the reply. I definitely understand the difficulty of making it intuitive. My only other comment, though, is that more and more customers are going to be coming to n8n primarily for the Agentic capabilities, and less for the workflows. Catering to Agentic AI creators over Workflow creators might be a necessary choice.
There may be a misunderstanding. I did not mean we did not implement it because we thought the “workflow creator” experience was more important. We did not implement it because it would generally be probably more confusing and make debugging horrible without a bigger rework.
And to make it clear. Also, I’m not saying it would not be possible; we would never do it, and so on. It is just something that would not be simple or fast and would probably require more significant resources as a lot of research would have to be done as well.
Thank you so much for the response. That makes sense