08-05
What Is an Agent? Agents vs Workflows
This short post clarifies Anthropic's now-canonical distinction between agents and workflows. Both orchestrate multiple LLM calls, but workflows hard-code the sequence and termination condition in developer-written code, while agents hand tools to the LLM and let it decide which to call and when to stop. The post notes that a single LLM call is neither, and argues that workflows often outperform agents on clearly specified, repetitive tasks. Includes simple diagrams contrasting the two. A useful conceptual primer for engineers new to agent architecture.