Agentic workflow
A multi-step LLM pipeline whose steps are fixed in code, with the model filling in each step.
An agentic workflow orchestrates LLM calls through predefined paths — prompt chaining, routing, parallelisation, orchestrator–workers, evaluator–optimiser. Unlike a full agent, the control flow is written by the developer. Anthropic's guidance is to prefer workflows when the task structure is known, because they are more predictable and cheaper to evaluate, and to use agents only when the number and order of steps cannot be known in advance.