Isn’t this just software? But with an LLM at various points instead of a deterministic call to some function?

Thanks, that helped. I get it. Yea, that’s the harness executing the workflow with the LLM being called at the right time. That ensures the process is consistent no matter what, in contrast to the agent calling out to tools and possibly doing different things every time. Basically, standard code being in control rather than the LLM being in control. Fully agree with this model. We should use deterministic code when we want the same process or algorithm every time and choose LLM callouts when we want “fuzzy” processing that is not as deterministic.

I would call that a pipeline, which may be a type of graph, but might have communicated your point more concretely to begin with

This is a great point, and one that has been blowing my mind for a while. The public think of AI as this black box thing approaching human intelligence. They don't know that when you look under the hood of a lot of ai products you see a string of prompts that anyone could put together themselves. The companies are just putting them together in a workflow.

Can I have graphs as the default and fall back to agentic behavior if the prompt / task can't be mapped to a known process graph?

I jump straight to graphs (unless it truly cannot be solved with a graph), but then the stakeholders get upset that I didn't use agents. Doesn't fit their marketing plan, I suppose. I don't mind dealing with that, but I can see why most jump to agents in order to avoid the human conflict.