Kind of. This explanation feels pedantic—like calling my morning routine a dynamically generated graph (which it technically is). Others have pointed this out, but the industry seems split. Workflows like those described in the article resemble Airflow jobs, making them, well, workflows.
Corporate buzzwords have co-opted "Agent" to describe workflows with an LLM in the loop. While these can be represented as graphs, I'm not convinced "Agent" is the right term, even if they exhibit agentic behavior. The key distinction is that workflows define specific rules and processes, whereas a true agent wouldn’t rely on a predetermined graph—it would simply be given a task in natural language.
You're right that reasoning about runtime is difficult for true agents due to their non-deterministic nature, but different groups are chipping away at the problem.
In my opinion, the split is between the people who want their tools to be called Agents so they can make more on AI hype, and the people who know better than to call a simple pre-defined software workflow an “agent”. It is harder to get large investments for “my program just calls an LLM” these days.
Corporate buzzwords have co-opted "Agent" to describe workflows with an LLM in the loop. While these can be represented as graphs, I'm not convinced "Agent" is the right term, even if they exhibit agentic behavior. The key distinction is that workflows define specific rules and processes, whereas a true agent wouldn’t rely on a predetermined graph—it would simply be given a task in natural language.
You're right that reasoning about runtime is difficult for true agents due to their non-deterministic nature, but different groups are chipping away at the problem.