Transcript
There's an image that keeps showing up in my LinkedIn feed. A gravestone. Sometimes it's Photoshopped, sometimes it's an actual stock photo of a cemetery, and on the gravestone there's a logo. A tool. A platform. A category of software. And the caption is always some variation of the same thing: "RIP [Tool X]. You had a good run."
I want to talk about that gravestone today. Not because it's wrong about every single tool it gets planted in front of. Sometimes things do die. But because the people wielding that image have turned it into a blunt instrument — a piece of lazy intellectual shorthand that tells you more about the person posting it than about the tool they're eulogizing.
And I have had enough.
Let me give you the specific example that set me off this week. Someone posted — with full gravestone energy — that n8n is dead. That Claude can now do what n8n does natively, without an intermediary layer, without the learning curve, without the tool at all. The post got traction. People nodded along. Comments full of "so true" and "exactly what I was thinking."
Here's my problem with that. n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform with hundreds of native integrations, a self-hosting option, enterprise-grade deployment capabilities, and a community of builders doing genuinely complex things with it. It connects systems. It handles data flows. It runs on your own infrastructure. It has conditional logic, error handling, and versioning baked in.
What exactly is Claude replacing there? The guy built an AI agent in n8n. That use case — yes, that specific use case — has better options now.
Congratulations. You've discovered that your hammer is not the best tool for every nail. That's not a death certificate. That's just you learning something about your workflow.
I tried n8n myself. Multiple times, actually. Once to replace Zapier, once to build an AI agent. You know what I found? It was overkill for what I needed. My Zapier replacement became self-coded direct connections. My agent moved to Claude Code within a week. But I walked away thinking: this is a seriously powerful tool. I just didn't have the use case for it. That's it. That's the whole story.
And yet somehow that personal experience — my experience, my narrow slice of what n8n can do — does not give me the authority to declare it dead. Because the world does not end at my workflow.
So where does this pattern come from? Why are people so eager to write these obituaries?
I talked about this in a previous episode — the mechanics of standing out in a noisy feed. If you want to cut through, you don't need to be smarter. You don't need to be more original. You just need to be louder. And nothing is louder on LinkedIn than a strong, simple, provocative claim. This tool is dead. Three words. Instant engagement. People who agree feel validated. People who disagree get angry enough to comment. The algorithm rewards both reactions equally.
The gravestone image isn't journalism. It isn't analysis. It's a content format that works — until it becomes so overused that it stops working, at which point someone will write a post declaring that format dead, and the cycle continues.
And this is what the format does damage to: the thinking of the people who consume it. Because when someone with a large following posts with apparent confidence that n8n is obsolete, some percentage of their audience stops learning it. Stops exploring it. Writes it off before they've even understood what it actually does. That's not liberating people from a dead tool. That's intellectual vandalism dressed up as thought leadership.
Now, n8n is just the latest in a very long line of things that have been declared dead and kept right on living.
PowerPoint. God, the PowerPoints about PowerPoint being dead. I've lost count. And you know what? The person who first put a gravestone on PowerPoint had a genuinely interesting point — people were hiding behind features instead of communicating. The "Power" in the name is not accidental. It's a powerful tool, and people were using that power to obscure rather than clarify. That was a legitimate critique. But somewhere between that original insight and the thousandth iteration of the joke, the nuance evaporated. Now it's just a reflex. AI can make presentations. Therefore PowerPoint is dead. Never mind the 500 million people using it every day across every industry, every country, every context that exists outside the content creator bubble.
Books. I've watched ebooks get declared the future and then get declared dead and then watched physical books get declared dead and then watched ebooks get declared dead again. And yet. Go to any bookstore — if you can find one, because yes, they've had a rough time — and you will see people buying physical books. Not as a novelty. Not as a niche affectation. As the default format for millions of readers who simply prefer them. The ebook didn't kill the book. It became another way to read. Both exist. Both are fine.
Brick and mortar retail. E-commerce was supposed to have ended it. And yes — the pressure on physical stores is real, particularly around cost structures. But physical retail adapted. It transformed. The stores that died were the ones that couldn't adapt. The format itself? Still very much alive. Because it turns out human beings sometimes want to touch a thing before they buy it, or try on a shoe, or walk around a space. Revolutionary insight, I know.
Banks. I actually read — multiple times — that crypto and peer-to-peer payments were going to make banks obsolete. That one still makes me laugh. Yes, crypto has regulatory protection working in the banks' favor. But also — and I say this without any agenda — crypto is genuinely complicated and genuinely scary for most ordinary people. The decentralization that the crypto community sees as a feature is experienced by the average person as the absence of anyone to call when something goes wrong. Banks aren't dead. They're annoying, often slow, frequently paternalistic — and they're not going anywhere for a very long time.
Do you see the pattern? In every single one of these cases, the death announcement came from inside a bubble. From people who were so immersed in a particular way of working, a particular community, a particular set of tools and habits and assumptions, that they genuinely could not see past it. Their experience became reality. And their workflow became the world.
There's a German phrase I think about in these moments: Totgesagte leben länger. Those declared dead live longer. It's not just a cute saying. It's a reliable observation about prediction markets and human psychology. We overestimate how fast things change and underestimate how much inertia exists in systems that actually work. The people declaring tools dead are early adopters, power users, people who cycle through tools every six months looking for the new edge. They are not representative of how the world actually operates.
This brings me to something I discussed with Simon on The Human Perimeter just recently. We were talking about the AI bubble — whether it will pop. Simon thinks it will. I disagree. I think it will be like the internet. Remember the dot-com bubble? It burst spectacularly. Companies evaporated overnight. Billions of dollars vanished. And the headline was: the internet was overhyped. The internet is failing. Except — the internet didn't fail. It matured. It became infrastructure.
The froth came off, the real utility remained, and twenty-five years later it is quite literally the foundation of the global economy. I think AI follows the same arc. The hype is real. The overvaluation is real. The inevitable correction is coming. But the technology itself? It's not going anywhere. It's becoming infrastructure.
And here's the thing about infrastructure — you don't eulogize the tools that plug into it. You figure out what role they play in the new landscape.
So what do I actually want you to take from this?
First: distinguish between your use case becoming obsolete and a tool dying. These are completely different things. If you used n8n to build AI agents and now you have better options, great. Update your workflow. Write a post about what you learned. Do not write the obituary of a piece of software that serves hundreds of thousands of users in contexts you've never even thought about.
Second: step outside your bubble before you make general claims. The LinkedIn creator ecosystem is not the world. The AI early adopter community is not the world. The particular workflows you happen to use are not the world. There are industries, companies, and professionals operating at significant scale with tools you consider obsolete, and many of them are doing just fine.
Third: be suspicious of any content that asks you to stop learning something. That's the tell. A post that says "n8n is dead, stop wasting time on it" is not saving you time. It's doing your thinking for you — and doing it badly, on the basis of one person's narrow experience, packaged as universal truth. The most dangerous form of advice is confident advice delivered from inside a bubble to people who can't see the bubble's edges.
The race is not won by whoever has the best tool. I'll actually agree with that. But it's also not won by whoever declares the most tools dead the fastest. It's won by whoever takes the time to actually understand what a tool does, what problem it solves, who it serves — and then makes a considered decision about whether it belongs in their specific workflow.
That's harder than posting a gravestone. It requires you to think rather than react. It requires intellectual humility rather than hot takes.
And it requires you to accept that the world is significantly larger and more varied than whatever corner of it you happen to occupy.
Totgesagte leben länger.
The declared dead live longer.
Remember that the next time someone hands you a shovel.
