Dr. Violet Howard shows how to build autonomous agents with MCP servers and n8n that discover and use tools without explicit prompting. The agent queries available tools, picks the right one, fills in parameters, and executes: searching Airbnb listings in Miami or scraping Chipotle's homepage with Firecrawl.
Here's how you can build anything with MCP servers and N8N. All right, so keep in mind there is zero prompting going on within the actual agent. It just says, "You are a helpful assistant." Now I'm going to ask it to get Airbnb listings in Miami. It's hitting Airbnb's MPC server in order to understand, okay, what resources do I have? What actions can I take? What are the tool names? And now it's hitting its execute tool in order to fill in the tool name and fill in the different parameters that it needs to pull back those listings that we're looking for. So it should be finishing up any second now, and we will be able to see these listings that we got. There we go, so we have, here are some Airbnb listings in Miami. 126 Sailboat, it gets us price information, location, all this kind of stuff. If we click into here, we should see an actual picture of Airbnb listing. This is actually kind of just a boat, but either way, we got 5 total. Here's a beautiful suite in Miami, which once again, Airbnb Miami. So because the agent was able to understand this is what I have access to and this is when I use each one, I'm gonna fill in my tool, which is over here, the tool I used is airbnb_search, and I know that one of the parameters I need to fill out is the location, which I will put Miami. Cool. We're gonna do one more quick example, which is asking it to scrape Chipotle. So set that off. It's gonna hit Firecrawl's MCP server this time in order to understand what actions do I have over here, what can I do? And now it's hitting the actual tool to take action for us, and we should get back, you know, the, the scrape results from chipotle.com. I've scraped the main content from Chipotle homepage. Here's a summary. We have new Chipotle honey chicken, Chipotle rewards, menu highlights, guacamole, all this kind of stuff. And then the execute tool is able to say, okay, in this case I need to scrape, I need to use this URL, I am going to format it in Markdown, and then we get our answer back here. If you want to watch the full breakdown, the link for the video is in the description. I'll see you guys over there.
