Orchestrating work — Workflows
So far we've seen a single agent with a well-written prompt, and subagents that split independent investigation across parallel processes. But for large or multi-perspective jobs — like reviewing a whole pull request and making sure every finding is real, not a guess — a single agent, even a well-pr
Like a factory assembly line with a separate quality-control station at the end: every part moves through the same fixed stations in the same order, and only a part that survives a second check by a different inspector moves on to packaging.
- workflow
- A fixed script of phases that several agents move through in the same order on every run — unlike a one-off prompt, the structure itself is the constant, not the wording.
- phase gate
- A checkpoint where the workflow does not advance to the next phase until every task in the current phase has reported back — so the orchestrator always works from a complete picture, never a partial one.
- adversarial verification
- A separate phase in which a different agent — one that did not author the finding — actively tries to disprove it against the actual code before it enters the report, because the agent that found an issue tends to trust itself.
- single-agent sufficiency
- The state where a task is focused and easy to self-verify, so a single well-prompted agent solves it as fast and as reliably as a multi-phase workflow — building a workflow for it is wasted effort.
