PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A utility outage assistant handles routine requests such as "is my address affected" alongside occasional ambiguous multi-site incident reports. The lookups have one predictable path; the investigations do not.
Which architecture best fits this traffic?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Send routine lookups to a deterministic workflow and incidents to a scoped agent.
Workflows orchestrate tools through predefined code paths and suit the lookups, whose steps are known ahead of time; agents direct their own process and earn their cost on the investigations, whose steps cannot be predetermined. One agent for everything pays model latency, cost, and nondeterminism on what is a single API call. A fixed chain forces investigation steps onto lookups and still cannot branch. Running both paths doubles the spend and returns the faster answer, not the right one.
Official Source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents ↗