langchain node types in workflows/ got replaced with n8n-nodes-base.noOp
Was parsing the workflow files for a side project and noticed something odd, figured you'd want to know.
Filtering workflows/ for @n8n/n8n-nodes-langchain.* types returns nothing. Zero matches across 2061 files. But filtering by node name returns 711 files with nodes called "AI Agent - Movie Recommendation", "OpenAI Chat Model", "Embeddings OpenAI" and so on.
Of 1573 nodes with AI-ish names, 1457 have "type": "n8n-nodes-base.noOp". Names, positions and parameters all look fine, it's just the type field.
Traced one file back through the history: workflows/Mongodbtool/0511_Mongodbtool_Stickynote_Automation_Triggered.json
- c4885eee (Aug 2025) — types are correct, @n8n/n8n-nodes-langchain.agent, lmChatOpenAi, memoryBufferWindow
- still correct in the next commit
- 3c0a92c4 (Sept 2025) — all noOp
That commit touched 2057 files under workflows/. Checked two other files, same thing, same commit.
Someone suggested it looks less like a serializer and more like a node type allowlist or package resolver that didn't recognise the scoped @n8n/ package and fell back to noOp. Would explain why only scoped types are affected and n8n-nodes-base.* nodes came through fine. Haven't confirmed that in the diff though.
Separate thing I ran into while I was in there: 27525 of 27544 connection target references point at node ids like error-handler- that don't exist in their files. 1363 files have at least one. There's a commit (5ffee225, Nov 2025) whose message says it restored connection definitions, but the example file above is byte-identical between that commit and HEAD, so at least there it didn't take. The cleanup script in it matches orphaned nodes by name while connections are keyed by id, might be why.
Main practical issue is that counting AI node usage by type gives you ~0, and by name everything looks normal, so it's easy to miss.
Code I used is here: https://github.com/sevenedge-pl/n8n-reliability — small python script over the json, pinned to 94007c1445d9.
Source: Zie619/n8n-workflows