"The “Smart Agent” Trap: I tried making agents that could “figure out” what to do. They couldn’t. Be explicit."
So what about this solution is actually agentic?
Overall, it sounds like you sat down and did a proper business process analysis and automated it.
Your subagents for sure have no autonomy and are just execution steps in a classic workflow except you happen to be calling an LLM.
Does the orchestrating agent adapt the process between invocations depending on the data and does it do so in any way more complex than a simple if then branch?
Provide a tool schema that requires deep analysis to fill out correctly. Citations and scores for everything. Examples of high quality citations. Tools that fail or produce low quality results should return instructions about how to recover or interpret the result.
Have agents with different research tools try to corroborate and peer review output from competing agents. This is just one of many collaborative or competitive patterns you can model.
Yeah, it can get quite a bit more dynamic than an if statement if you apply some creativity and clarity and conviction.
You're right that this isn't the "autonomous agent" fantasy that keeps getting hyped.
The agentic part here is more modest but real. The primary agent does make runtime decisions about task decomposition based on the data and calls the subagents (tools) to do the actual work.
So yeah, it's closer to "intelligent workflow orchestration." That's probably a more honest description.
So what about this solution is actually agentic?
Overall, it sounds like you sat down and did a proper business process analysis and automated it.
Your subagents for sure have no autonomy and are just execution steps in a classic workflow except you happen to be calling an LLM.
Does the orchestrating agent adapt the process between invocations depending on the data and does it do so in any way more complex than a simple if then branch?