[TeMPOraL]

> Agentic systems can be simply the LLM + prompting + tools[1]. LLMs are more than capable (especially chain-of thought models) to breakdown problems into steps, analyze necessary tools to use and then executing the steps in sequence. All of this is done with the model in the driver seat.

Sort of, kind of. It's still a directed graph. Dynamically generated graph, but still a graph. Your prompted LLM is the decision/dispatch block. When the model decides to call a tool, that's going from the decision node to another node. The tool usually isn't another LLM call, but nothing stops it from being one.

The "traditional workflow" exists because even with best prompting, LLMs don't always stick to the expected plan. It's gotten better than it used to, so people are more willing to put the model in the driving seat. A fixed "ahead of time" workflow is still important for businesses powering products with LLMs, as they put up a facade of simplicity in front of the LLM agentic graph, and strongly prefer for it to have bounded runtime and costs.

(The other thing is that, in general, it's trickier to reason about code flow generated at runtime.)

[infecto]

Kind of. This explanation feels pedantic—like calling my morning routine a dynamically generated graph (which it technically is). Others have pointed this out, but the industry seems split. Workflows like those described in the article resemble Airflow jobs, making them, well, workflows.

Corporate buzzwords have co-opted "Agent" to describe workflows with an LLM in the loop. While these can be represented as graphs, I'm not convinced "Agent" is the right term, even if they exhibit agentic behavior. The key distinction is that workflows define specific rules and processes, whereas a true agent wouldn’t rely on a predetermined graph—it would simply be given a task in natural language.

You're right that reasoning about runtime is difficult for true agents due to their non-deterministic nature, but different groups are chipping away at the problem.

[therealpygon]

In my opinion, the split is between the people who want their tools to be called Agents so they can make more on AI hype, and the people who know better than to call a simple pre-defined software workflow an “agent”. It is harder to get large investments for “my program just calls an LLM” these days.