Most developers start their AI journey by building a wrapper around a prompt. You send a user query, the LLM gives an answer, and the interaction ends. That is a chatbot. It is a linear process.
Agentic workflows are different. Instead of a straight line, you build a loop. An agent does not just answer; it plans, executes a tool, observes the output, and corrects its path until the goal is reached.
The mental shift: From Prompting to Orchestration
When you build a standard chatbot, your main concern is the prompt. You spend hours tweaking the system message to get the right tone. With agents, the prompt is just the starting point. The real engineering happens in the orchestration.
An agentic system usually consists of three things: a core LLM, a set of tools (functions), and a reasoning loop.
