About a year ago, n8n was the smart choice. A visual workflow builder that let you stitch together APIs, automate processes, and feel like you were ahead of the curve. And you were, for that moment.
When steam engines became a thing, there was an era when ships had both sails and steam engines, because the latter wasn’t there yet in terms of reliability and performance. Once the technology matured, ships removed the sails and went full steam. Nobody celebrated the sails. They were just gone.
n8n was a bridge from Python-based specific agents toward more autonomous ones. It solved a real problem. With the new generation of coding and orchestration tools, the path is cleared for the new era, and there, n8n is a burden, just like carrying extra sails on a ship.
This points to something worth thinking carefully about: first-mover advantage during a paradigm shift is not what it is in an established technological status quo.
The traditional logic holds that arriving early builds moat: brand recognition, user lock-in, data advantages. But that logic assumes the technology you bet on is close enough to the final form. If you build on an intermediate solution, you don’t accumulate advantage. You accumulate technical debt wrapped in a brand. You build a system that becomes obsolete.
The faster the field moves, the shorter the window between “this solves the problem” and “this is the problem.” In AI right now, that window is measured in months, not years.
Course correcting on the fly is traditionally one of the hardest things to do with a product. That, however, is the smart choice. With every pivot comes real value: learning, overcoming difficulties, seeing problems others miss, collecting signals the market is sending. First movers still win, if they treat pivoting as a feature, not a failure.
