tl;dr from Anthropic:
> Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths.
> Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.
Most “agents” today fall into the workflow category.
The foundation model makers are pushing their new models to be better at the second, “pure” agent, approach.
In practice, I’m not sure how effective the “pure” approach will work for most LLM-assisted tasks.
I liken it to a fresh intern who shows up with amnesia every day.
Even if you tell them what they did yesterday, they’re still liable to take a different path for today’s work.
My hunch is that we’ll see an evolution of this terminology, and agents of the future will still have some “guiderails” (note: not necessarily _guard_rails), that makes their behavior more predictable over long horizons.
[0]https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age...