Building Effective Agents
Anthropic's engineering essay separates predefined 'workflows' from LLM-directed 'agents' and catalogs five composable workflow patterns.
Argues for simple, composable patterns over heavy frameworks. The patterns are prompt chaining, routing, parallelization (sectioning or voting), orchestrator-workers and evaluator-optimizer. Defines workflows as LLMs orchestrated through predefined code paths, agents as LLMs directing their own process and tool use. Authors are Erik S. and Barry Zhang.
- Date
- Thursday, 19 December 2024
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Engineering guidance rather than a peer-reviewed paper; widely cited vocabulary for 'workflow vs agent'.
Sources
This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check