[sothatsit]

I think the distinction is more about the "level of railroading".

Workflows have a lot more structure and rules about information and control flow. Agents, on the other hand, are often given a set of tools and a prompt. They are much more free-form.

For example, a workflow might define a fuzzy rule like "if customer issue is refund, go to refund flow," while an agent gets customer service tools and figures out how to handle each case on its own.

To me, this is a meaningful distinction to make. Workflows can be more predictable and reliable. Agents have more freedom and can tackle a greater breadth of tasks.

[gwd]

Just to emphasize your point, below is a workflow I wrote for an LLM recently, to do language tagging (e.g., of vocab, grammar structures, etc). It's very different than what you'd think of as an "agent", where the LLM has tools and can take initiative.

LLMs are amazingly powerful in some ways, but without this kind of "scaffolding", simply not reliable enough to make consistent choices.

---

1. Here are: a) a "language schema" describing what kinds of tags I want and why, with examples, b) The text I want you to tag c) A list of previously-defined tags which could potentially be relevant (simple string match)

List for yourself which pre-existing tags you plan to use when doing tagging.

[LLM generates a list of tags]

2. Here is a,b,c from above, and d) your own tag list

Please write a draft tag.

[LLM writes a draft]

3. Here is a-d from above, plus e) your first draft, and f) Some programmatically-generated "linter" warnings which may or may not be violations of the schema.

Please check over your draft to make sure it follows the schema.

[LLM writes a new draft]

Agent checks for "hard" rules, like making sure there's a 1-1 correlation between the text and the tags. If no rules are violated move to step 5.

4. Here is a-e from above, plus g) your most recent draft, and h) known rule violations. Please fix the errors.

[LLM writes a new draft]

Repeat 4 until no hard rules are broken.

5. [and so on]

[kodablah]

> Agents, on the other hand, are often given a set of tools and a prompt. They are much more free-form.

This defines how workflows are used with modern systems in my experience. Workflows are often not predictable, they often execute one of a set of tools based on a response from a previous invocation (e.g. an LLM call).