n8n's essay, "We need to re-learn what AI agent development tools are in 2026," is useful because it pushes past the now-familiar shopping list of RAG, memory and tool calls. The claim is that those pieces are becoming table stakes; the hard part is reliable orchestration inside real business processes.
That distinction matters for an agency. A Laravel build, a workflow product like n8n and a hosted frontier model can all be valid choices, but they solve different layers. The client value is in making the hand-offs observable, recoverable and cheap enough to run.