The shape of a real n8n agent
Most tutorials show an agent as one node: trigger goes in, magic AI node does everything, result comes out. Production systems don't look like that. They look like five distinct pieces:
Trigger — a webhook, form submission, schedule, or inbound email.
Retrieval (optional) — pull the context the model needs: a CRM record, a support ticket history, a row from Google Sheets.
Reasoning step — the LLM call that decides what to do, given the trigger and retrieved context.
