philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How Anthropic Thinks About Agents, Workflows, and Tasks

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Task – A single model call: Summarize this. Classify that. Extract these fields. Two years ago this felt like magic. Today it is table stakes. The cost is predictable and the failure modes are bounded.

Workflow – Multiple model calls in a predefined control flow. You decide the steps, the model fills them in. Route the customer email to the right queue, draft a response, check the response against policy, then send. The control flow is yours. The intelligence happens at each node.

Agent – A model using tools in a loop, deciding its own trajectory. You give it a goal, a set of tools, and a system prompt. It decides what to do next based on what just happened. The control flow belongs to the model. ...

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