Member-only story
You’re not building agents. You’re building workflows (and that’s fine)
7 min readJust now
–
Watch the video!
SECTION 1: WHAT PEOPLE CONFUSE
It’s almost 2026, and words like workflows, agents, tools, and multi-agent systems are still getting mixed up. Beyond terminology, this has also led to overengineered solutions. Fortunately, we just created a cheatsheet for you to use to understand what you need to build, which I’ll share shortly. But first, let’s start by clarifying two things that trip people up.
First, not every LLM application is an agent. The key difference is autonomy. In a workflow, you control the flow, you decide the steps and their order. In an agent, the model controls the flow; it decides what to do next based on the goal you…
Member-only story
You’re not building agents. You’re building workflows (and that’s fine)
7 min readJust now
–
Watch the video!
SECTION 1: WHAT PEOPLE CONFUSE
It’s almost 2026, and words like workflows, agents, tools, and multi-agent systems are still getting mixed up. Beyond terminology, this has also led to overengineered solutions. Fortunately, we just created a cheatsheet for you to use to understand what you need to build, which I’ll share shortly. But first, let’s start by clarifying two things that trip people up.
First, not every LLM application is an agent. The key difference is autonomy. In a workflow, you control the flow, you decide the steps and their order. In an agent, the model controls the flow; it decides what to do next based on the goal you give it. If you can write down the exact sequence of steps in advance, you’re building a workflow, not an agent. Second, and this is where many people get confused, tools are not agents. A tool is a capability, such as a calculator, a database query, a web browser, a validator, or an API call. An agent is the decision maker who chooses which tools to use and when. So if someone tells you they built a “multi-agent…