Workflows or Agents: Who Decides the Next Step

You will be able to

• Tell a workflow from an agent by who chooses the next step: code or the model.
• Apply the five workflow patterns (chaining, routing, parallelisation, orchestrator–workers, evaluator–optimiser) before reaching for an agent.
• Decouple planning from execution and validate plans in code before any tool runs.
• Name the planning failures a plan check catches (invalid tool, invalid parameters, too many steps) and the one it can't (wrong values).
• Describe sequential, parallel, conditional and looping control flows, and why model-judged loops need limits in code.
• Set a level of automation per action, with human approval for risky ones.
• Compare a workflow and an agent on resolution, handoffs, wrong actions and cost.

Topics

1. 1Who chooses the next step?
2. 2Five workflow patterns
3. 3Plan, validate, then execute
4. 4Check the plan in code
5. 5Control flow
6. 6People in the loop
7. 7Workflow or agent? And wrap-up