How to Actually Build Agents with DeepSeek R1 in n8n (Without OpenRouter)

Key Takeaways

so we're going to send off this three-part message to our deep seek planning agent it's going to be taking that input right now it's going to be constructing a step-by-step plan of instructions to hand off to the tools agent the tools agent has no prompting all it's going to get is the actual plan that the Deep seek R1 agent made we can click into here and we can see what we got um it created a step-by-step instructions there's three tasks clearly outlined the first one is to create a calendar event second one is to email up a digital to check in on the project and the third one is to email Nate herk to confirm lunch tomorrow and as you can see everything that the tools agent needs is going to be given from the deep SE planning agent which is really cool we don't have a system prompt as you can see and it already went up and created that calendar event and sent both those email tools so let's dive into how is the right way to use deep seek R1 as a planning agent to feed into your tools agents So lately there's been a ton of hype around deep seeks new reasoning model deep seek R1 and this is because of the cost and performance which it's pretty much 96% cheaper than using open AI a one reasoning model as well as being able to perform just as well as it or even better but when it actually comes to using this model in nadn for your AI agents you probably ran into a few of these issues which would be connecting through open router and it's spinning forever taking 15 20 minutes or you're connecting it to tools and it's going to tell you that this model doesn't support tool calling or function calling or it's going to spin Forever on different tools and call them unlimitedly here's an example this morning where I asked it to send an email just saying what's up and it sent through like 70 and I had to stop it because it was just looping back and forth and I think it was going to be an endless loop anyways there's no doubt that deep seek r1's reasoning ability is next level so what I'm going to show you guys today is how I plan to actually use them to support building agents and having them call different tools also going to show you how to connect to deep seek R1 as a chat model without going through open router so hopefully it can fix any of those issues you're having with um you know 15-minute calls so the first issue like I said you guys may be experiencing is calling it through open router where we are setting up a credential with the base URL of open router. aapi V1 we enter in the model name that's given to us in open router and we actually go to chat to this thing if I can type hello um that's going to work for now um the issue is it's just going to be spinning forever and I mean it is a reasoning model so it will likely take a little bit longer than something like a regular gbt 40 but what I've been seeing is that this is just spinning and taking way way too long so what you can do is actually connect to the base URL straight from Deep seek so in here as you can see um I'm connecting to deep seek Reasoner which is the Deep seek R1 model and what we're doing for the base URL is connecting to api. Deep seek.com / V1 rather than going through open router to actually hit this model if you want to connect to deep seek like this what you're going to do is go to deep seek.com you're going to hit API platform once you get there it's going to pull up your dashboard as you can see I put in two bucks like last week um so far with um V3 I've used 880,000 tokens with R1 I've used 14,000 tokens and it's only cost me a little over 3 cents then you're going to go to API Keys you're going to create a new key and this will be used to set up our credential as well as the basee URL which we will find if we click right here on docs so we clicked on docs as you can see right here we have have a base URL and so this is what we're going to grab and put that in nadn as our base URL and then finally we have the option to choose a model of course we can choose deep seek D chat if we want V3 or deep seek D Reasoner if we want to get the newly released reasoning model which is deep seek R1 so back in N end looking at the credentials this is where you're going to put that API key you just generated this is where you're going to put that base URL that we just looked at in um deep seek docs and then finally the model right here will type in deep seek D Reasoner to access R1 so what we're going to do now is connect to this chat model and if we say hello you'll see how much quicker that we get a response back because we actually get a response um it's going to say why did the Scarecrow win an award because he was outstanding in his field another just ask so the reason it said that is just because in the system message it says you're an a helpful assistant who tells jokes so that's why it responded to us with a joke right away and similarly if we want to connect to deep seek V3 we can do the same thing use that exact same credential already all we have to do is change the model from Deep seek D Reasoner to deep seek chat we can come in here say hello and it should respond to us again with another joke because um hello there why don't scientists trust Adams because they make up everything what's up so it's because of the system prompt once again but then of course the question becomes how do we actually use this for Tool calling so if we connect um send email tool and we just say can you send an email to Nate asking um what's up so this is not going to work as you can see deep seek Reasoner does not support function calling um bad request please check your PR parameters so that's the issue everyone's seeing obviously it's frustrating because with such a powerful model and such a cheap model we want to be able to use this for our tool calling and for our AI agents that we're building um but what we want to do is think of this reasoning model as a really good planner it's going to create the steps and it's going to hand that off to another agent that can actually take action using tools so it's going to be a really simple example where we just have email and calendar but as you can see we have a deep seek planning agent that is hooked up to deep seek R1 it's going to receive input from us the human it's going to take that input construct a really step-by-step clear plan to feed over to the tools agent and um what we're going to do is in the tools agent we don't even have a prompt so it's going to just be relying on deep seeks planning ability to actually take action okay so let's give this thing a try I'm going to say I want to create a few calendar events the first one is with Nate herk 88 for tomorrow to have lunch at 12: p.m. then I want to send an email to up at digital to check on a project we've been working on finally I need you to send an email to Nate herk to confirm our lunch tomorrow at pole make sure to sign off emails as Nate so right now it's taking that input and it just created a list of instructions for the tools agent we'll take a look at those and as you can see it already created the event and sent two emails so hopefully those are correct but remember this prompt or sorry this agent is using GPT 40 and it's or sorry 40 mini and it's has no prompt inside of it so um first let's take a look at what it responded to us with I've successfully completed the requested tasks the event was created it's titled lunch with Nate um it's tomorrow January 25th at 12:00 p.m. local time at Chipotle reminder 30 minutes minutes before okay we can also view the event if we click on the link email has been sent to up a digital and a confirmation email was also sent to um Nate herk confirming lunch tomorrow at noon so let's take a look at what happened real quick as you can see the Deep seek agent got our prompt and then it output this prompt for personal assistant create calendar event for lunch tomorrow it gave the date gave the location um added participants it then um gave more details and set a reminder then the next step task number two was to send an email to up a digital it created a subject and a body and then it signed off as Nate and then finally it created a subject and a body for the final task which was to send a confirmation email to Nate herk about lunch tomorrow as far as the actual prompts we give this thing basically just said you're an AI agent responsible for creating clear and actionable prompts that guide a personal assistant in completing assigned tasks your context is to not use external tools because that would have it mess up of course um all you need to do is just focus on receiving the input and then understand the tasks creating a step-by-step list of instructions and handing off all the information it needs the next agent needs to it so yeah real quick wanted to say if you want to dive into this prompt a little more in depth or you want to play around with this agent that I made as well as the next one we're going to be looking at which is using an HTTP request then you can download this workflow completely for free by joining my free school Community the link for that is down in the description once you get in the free school Community you'll click on YouTube resources click on the post associated with this video and then you can download the workflow right here and import it into your nadn environment finally if you're looking to take your nidn and a automation skills a little bit farther and you'd like a more Hands-On approach then please check out my paid Community the link for that's also down in the description got a great community of members who are also learning Inn sharing their challenges sharing resources great classroom section with different Deep dive topics as well as a calendar with five live calls per week to make sure you're always getting questions answered and never getting stuck so I'd love to see you guys in this community anyways let's take a look at the tools agent real quick and see what actually happened so as we remember it's just getting the chat input from the previous um deep seek planner agent so this is all it's getting which is as you can see it's outlined very clear you have one task which is calendar event for lunch tomorrow and then it's going to give some specifics second task is to send an email to upid digital once again it gives a subject in a body and then finally the third task is to send a confirmation email again subject body and then final notes so that's all that the tools agent is actually getting like I said there's no system prompt so you know that the plan that it's actually getting from the deeps agent is pretty good and now let's take a look at um the actual tool calls so the first one was event as you can see it made it at noon and it called it lunch with Nate we have two emails being sent so the first one was to up a digital project check-in and it says I wanted to check in on the status of the project we've been working on blah blah blah and then the second one is um confirming lunch tomorrow with Nate just confirming our lunch at 12:00 at Chipotle let me know if anything changes and here's that second email which is checking in the status of the project and then a calendar invite for noon for lunch well it's actually 1: p.m. because I'm in Central Time right now normally I'm in mountain standard time so my agent didn't think I'm in Mountain soon in time but anyways um it successfully created that calendar event with Nate herkelman as you can see um lunch for lunch with Nate so I hope this architecture makes sense and I hope you understand that if you have something way more complex the Deep seek planner agent was did a really really good job at the way that it broke down the tasks as you can see it pretty much you know said here's here's step one here's all the information you need for task one here's task two here's everything you need to do task two and then it's feeding that into the tools agent so that the tools agent can use um its model that it needs to use and the tools that it has access to to actually do that kind of um stuff and so this is going to be a very similar process if we actually want to do it with an HTTP request rather than an agent um so all we're doing is we're using an HTTP request to connect to um the Deep seek reasoning model as you can see and if you want to understand how to do this step by step um the previous video I made I'll I'll link it in the description and tag it right here I'll show you guys step by step how to do this but what we're doing is we're setting up the system role as you're a helpful assistant who is tasked with creating a step-by-step plan of action for a personal assistant and then we're just feeding in the chat input as the actual user message so as you can see we already got that back we can see we've got step-by-step plan of action um here's all the information that's coming out and um now if we went into the tools agent what we're feeding it is once again that step-by-step plan of action so as you can see it's very similar there's a few differences as far as um the structure and probably in the actual body messages and stuff like that but this is basic basically the idea that we're going to be using deeps R1 reasoning as a planning um planning tool to basically take the input and make it just more detailed so that we can feed that right into an actual agent that has access to tools so I hope that all made sense um I just wanted to make a quick one about these different methods that I plan on using in order to actually have deep seek R1 reasoning model involved in my agentic functions which I think will be super cool you know this was a really simple example but as we start to add on more tools and a bit more of a complex use case I think that having a step to actually plan out some of this stuff to feed into your agents is going to be super super beneficial and super cool so that's going to be it for this one if you guys enjoyed the video please um give it a like let me know what else you want to see with deep seek in the comments and as always really appreciate you guys making it to the end of this video I will see you in the next one