In this article, you will learn how to distinguish agentic workflows from autonomous agents by focusing on who owns control flow — a human writing code in advance, or a model reasoning at runtime.
Topics we will cover include:
Why the real axis separating these systems is predictability versus autonomy, not whether an LLM is involved.
How deterministic workflows, orchestrated workflows, reactive agents, and autonomous multi-agent systems differ, with runnable code that makes the control-flow distinction concrete.
Why workflows, not fully autonomous agents, dominate production today, and why hybrid architectures are the pattern that holds up.
