Chapter 1 · Practice 2 of 4
Know the standard workflow patterns before reaching for full autonomy
Why it matters
The same article names five workflow patterns that cover many problems without a free-running agent:
| Pattern | What it does |
|---|---|
| Prompt chaining | Sequential calls, with code checks between steps |
| Routing | Classify the input and send it to a specialised prompt or a smaller model |
| Parallelization | Run subtasks at the same time, or the same task several times and vote |
| Orchestrator-workers | A central model splits the task into subtasks it decides on the fly, then combines results |
| Evaluator-optimizer | One model drafts, another critiques against clear criteria, in a loop |
Many production "agents" are really one of these with a tool or two. That is a good thing: each pattern is easier to test, cheaper to run and simpler to debug than an open loop.