n8n looks deceptively simple but I actually find it much harder to use than a proper coding agent like Claude Code.
What seems to me like hours of frustrating debugging in n8n, takes a couple of delightful minutes in Claude Code.
At first glance, the visual workflow diagrams look so easy but it’s often the middle parts that become very frustrating to debug.
The complexities are hidden behind settings buttons that I find a little painful to manually update. And dependencies from one cell to the other always confuse me.
Case in point
A friend recently was showing me an agentic workflow he was trying to automate using n8n, and was stuck in the middle with errors he couldn’t understand.
I asked Claude Code to build a Python script to do the same functionality - and no surprise - in 15 minutes and just ~300 lines of Python we had ourselves a sweet little working agent!
Wait, it gets better
Since my friend really, really needed to deploy this only in n8n for work, I then just asked Claude Code to create a JSON equivalent of the same, which I imported into n8n, and with a couple of rounds of debugging, we had it up and ready - no manual fiddling with any settings.
Must say, that interface with the cells lighting up as the work flows through the workflow does look quite cool. Might be a billion dollar idea here to just have that interface on top of a coding agent.
The takeaway
If you’re an n8n ninja and don’t share the same frustrations, I’d love to hear from you. For the others, I do sincerely recommend giving your favourite coding agent a try at this!