Limitations of n8n AI Agents & Tools

#agents #ai #automation #llm

So guys I am gonna share with you all some of the limitations I have encountered while working with n8n. But please let me know if you know any way to resolve them.

Duplicating Google Sheet Documents -- Updating Auto Generated Documents

So what I wanted to automate with n8n was a Google Sheet document and sending an email to myself. So let's imagine we have a google sheet which looks like this:

timestamp	stock	quantity	equity ratio	fixed income ratio	price
8/6/2026 18:17:11	GOOGL	12	0.3	0.7	312.43
8/6/2026 18:17:11	MSFT	15	0.1	0.9	510.17

And what you wanna have is a new sheet each day and check if you still have 60% equity and 40$% fixed income ratio. Imagine you are updating your main google sheet each day after you finish trading. So this is just to ensure you are not loosing sight of how you are trading. You can even make it smarter to give you some insights over what you have been doing in the past.

Thus I said OK, I will have an active sheet and new sheets for each day inside the same Google Sheet document, something like this:

But then I learned that:

You cannot duplicate a Google Sheet document that easily in n8n. Or At least my first tries were all in vain. You can see more details here: https://community.n8n.io/t/how-to-create-a-new-sheet-in-a-google-sheet-document-with-the-same-columns-as-the-existing-sheet-in-it/306545
And more importantly when I auto create a document in the workflow and later I just wanna update it partially (so I am duplicating an existing document and then try to update it)

You can find the workflow here: https://gist.github.com/kasir-barati/cd7b3bd68ea6382e911ad097da344d47#file-portfolio-rebalancer-workflow-json

Keep in Mind Tools are NOT Nodes

Initially I did NOT realize there is a clear difference between AI Agent tools and nodes. That is you cannot use Google Sheet Tool in place of Google Sheet node! In fact you can see the difference here, just copy paste it in n8n and you will see it.