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Agents· 3 min

Agentic workflows

Instead of one big prompt, break the task into steps: reflect, plan, use tools, review — often via multiple LLM calls.

Key idea

Andrew Ng's four patterns: reflection, tool use, planning and multi-agent collaboration — together they beat single-shot prompting on hard tasks.

Example

A coding agent writes code, runs it, reads the error, patches it, and only returns once tests pass.

What to remember

  • Small model + smart workflow can beat a large model + naïve prompt
  • Latency and cost grow — design for parallelism
  • Evaluation must be at task level, not per-call