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What patterns make a workflow 'agentic' rather than just a wrapper around an LLM?

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Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

Reflection, self-correction, knowledge expansion, coordination.

A few recurring patterns. Reflection: the system plans, asks “is this approach good, does this make sense, can you double-check,” and only then executes, the way a reasoning model breaks a request into several approaches, picks one, and verifies the answer. Self-correction: it looks at the result, notices it went wrong, and tries a different route. Knowledge expansion: when the answer is not in its memory, it searches the web for current information. Coordination: it splits a job into sub-tasks and routes each to the right tool, for example handing a math question to a calculator instead of guessing. Wrapping a chat box around an LLM is none of these.

The Edge: “AI Agents: The Future of Work?” · Podcast


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