Your n8n Workflow Has 40 Nodes. Should Any of Them Be an AI Agent?

Open an n8n workflow with 40 nodes and two thoughts usually appear at the same time.

First: This is getting out of hand.

Second: Could an AI agent replace half of it?

Sometimes the answer is yes. Often, the answer is: Only a small part, and only if you keep the dangerous bits deterministic.

A large workflow is not automatically a bad workflow. Forty nodes can represent forty clear, testable, observable steps. Or they can represent a fragile pile of string parsing, nested IF nodes, retry hacks, and manual exception handling that is begging for a smarter component.