Agentic workflow is a design approach that combines agent-like autonomy with the structure of a traditional workflow — a pipeline with explicit steps, branches and role transitions, rather than a single LLM looping freely. Anthropic's 2024 'Building Effective Agents' essay made this distinction explicit: most production use cases are solved more reliably with a carefully designed agentic workflow than with a fully autonomous agent. Typical building blocks include prompt chaining, routing, parallelisation, Orchestrator-worker patterns and the Reflection Pattern. It has become the standard way to ship 'predictable, measurable, production-ready' outcomes instead of the open-ended uncertainty of an Autonomous Agent.
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