I have been thinking about the exact same problem for a while and was literally hours away from publishing a blogpost on the subject.
+100 on the footnote:
> agents or workflows?
Workflows. Workflows, all the way.
The agents can start using these workflows once they are actually ready to execute stuff with high precision. And, by then we would have figured out how to create effective, accurate and easily diagnozable workflows, so people will stop complaining about "I want to know what's going on inside the black box".
I've been building workflows with "AI" capability inserted where appropriate since 2016. Mostly customer service chatbots.
99.9% of real world enterprise AI use cases today are for workflows not agents.
However, "agents" are being pushed because the industry needs a next big thing to keep the investment funding flowing in.
The problem is that even the best reasoning models available today don't have the actual reasoning and planning capability needed to build truly autonomous agents. They might in a year. Or they might not.
Agreed, I started crafting workflows last week. Still not impressed with how poorly the current crop of models is at following instructions.
And are there any guidelines on how to manage workflows for a project or set of projects? I’m just keeping them in plain text and including them in conversations ad hoc.
+100 on the footnote:
> agents or workflows?
Workflows. Workflows, all the way.
The agents can start using these workflows once they are actually ready to execute stuff with high precision. And, by then we would have figured out how to create effective, accurate and easily diagnozable workflows, so people will stop complaining about "I want to know what's going on inside the black box".