I started building an open-source n8n repository. I don't think that's what I'm building anymore.

When I started this project, I thought I was simply collecting reusable workflows. But the more engineers I talked to, the less convinced I became. Nobody really cared about n8n itself. Nobody cared about the exported JSON. The discussions kept drifting toward the same engineering problems: workflow contracts, replay semantics, permissions, state management, approvals, portability, and how AI systems should actually be composed. Somehow, the workflow stopped being the interesting part. It became the evidence. The engineering became the discussion. That completely changed how I think about this repository. Maybe it's no longer just a collection of workflows. Maybe it's becoming a place to document how modern AI workflows are engineered—capturing not only what a workflow does, but why it was designed that way, the trade-offs behind it, and how other engineers can challenge, improve, and adapt those ideas. The best part is that this direction didn't come from me alone. It came from dozens of engineers who independently pointed at the same missing abstraction using completely different language. That collective discussion has shaped this project far more than any roadmap I could have written in isolation. I'm still figuring out where this leads. That's exactly why I'm building it in public. If this eventually becomes more than an n8n repository, I'd rather that evolution be driven by open discussion than by a decision I make alone.