[sharperguy]

So I wonder, if a more powerful agent harness could have the agent basically write and exectute its own deteministic code, which when executed, spawns sub agents for each of the subtasks?

So far we've seen agents spawn subagents directly, but that still means leaving the final flow control to the non-deterministic orchestrator model, and so your case is a perfect example of where it would probably fail.

[tonylucas]

I've been working on an integrated deterministic/agent integrated system for a few months now. It basically runs an AI step to build a plan, which biases towards deterministic steps as much as possible but escalates back to AI when it needs to (for AI only capabilities or deterministic failures) so effectively (when I perfect it, I'm about 90% there) it can bounce back and forward as needed with deterministic steps launching AI steps and AI steps launching deterministic steps as needed.

Probably not explaining it very well but I think it's pretty effective at reducing token usage.

[dkersten]

I've been building a workflow engine for agent orchestration and the workflows are just data for the engine to execute. While I haven't experimented with it yet, I envision that an LLM would be rather good at generating the workflows based on a description of your needs (and context about how best to utilise the workflow engine).

LLM's are pretty good at reasoning about workflows, its just that when they have to apply them directly, the workflow context gets muddled with your actual tasks context. That's why using an orchestration agent that delegates work to worker agents works so much better.

I still think there's a huge amount of value in having the workflow executed in a deterministic way (as code, or by a workflow engine) because it saves tokens, eliminates any possibility of not following it, and unlocks other cool things, like being able to give each step in the workflow its own focused task-specific context, splitting plans into individual actions and feeding them through a workflow one by one, and having workflow-step specific verification.

But that workflow absolutely CAN be created by an LLM, it just shouldn't be executed by one.

[peyton]

I make codex do everything through a giant `justfile`. Simple, greppable, self-documenting, works great, and I don’t even need to read it.