For business
What it is
The coordinator: it breaks a task such as “write the meeting report” into steps, picks the tools, and checks each result before moving on.
Why it matters
Multi-step work gets done reliably instead of in one fragile prompt, and every step is visible, so you can see why the system did what it did.
Risk without it
Unbounded agents loop, spend money and take actions nobody approved.
For engineers
How it works
A plan–act–observe loop with a fixed tool set, step and budget limits and explicit stop conditions. Where the path is predictable, a deterministic workflow with model calls at defined points beats free-form planning; agents are kept for tasks that genuinely vary.
Typical stack
- TypeScript orchestration
- LangGraph
- Step Functions
- model tool use
Pitfalls & trade-offs
- Cap iterations, tokens and cost per run.
- Log every step and tool call so a run can be replayed.
- Plain code beats an agent wherever the path is known.
In this example
In
→ task: draft the meeting report
Out
1 retrieve goals 2 look up client 3 draft 4 check
Fictional sample · not a client system