Agent Or
Workflow?

The One Question

People overcomplicate this. There's really just one question that tells you which to build: can you write the exact steps out ahead of time, or does the next move depend on what Claude finds along the way?

If you can write the steps out and they'd run the same way every time, you want a workflow. If the steps change based on what it discovers, you want an agent. That's the whole decision. Everything below just makes it obvious.

Here's the trap almost everyone falls into: they reach for the chef when a recipe would have been cheaper, faster, and more reliable. When you already know the steps, you don't need something to think. You need something to execute.

A workflow is a path you decide once and lock in. Same steps, same order, every run. You're not asking Claude to think, you're asking it to follow the steps you already mapped. In Claude Code that's a slash command: a file at .claude/commands/<name>.md that lists the steps, so typing /<name> runs the whole thing.

The tell: you can write down every step before you ever start, and nothing about the task changes based on what Claude finds.

Great Workflow Jobs

• Turn one video script into a caption, an email, and three tweets — same pipeline every time
• Build your weekly numbers report in your exact format from the same sources
• Turn messy meeting notes into a clean summary plus a list of action items
• Take a finished blog post and format, tag, and publish it the same way
• Run every new client through your standard onboarding sequence

Notice the pattern: in every one of these, you already know the steps. There's nothing to figure out, just a sequence to run. That's a workflow.

An agent is a specialist you hand a goal, and it figures out its own steps to get there. You don't script the path. You give it the outcome and let it decide what to do next based on what it actually finds. In Claude Code that's a subagent: a file at .claude/agents/<name>.md that runs in its own clean context, so it isn't dragging your whole chat history around.

The tell: you can't write step three until you see what step two turns up. The task needs judgment, not just execution.

Great Agent Jobs

• "Research what my top competitor changed this month" — it has no idea what it'll find until it looks
• "Look at my landing page and tell me what's hurting sales" — the problems it finds decide the next move
• "Go through my inbox and surface what actually needs me" — every inbox is different
• "Figure out why my ad costs jumped last month" — it's an investigation, not a checklist
• "Review this draft and flag anything weak or confusing" — real judgment, no fixed steps

In every one of these, you can't hand it a script, because you don't know what it'll run into. You hand it a goal and trust it to think. That's an agent. The simplest way to use one is to just say "use a subagent to..." on a task and let Claude Code take it from there.

The clean line: a workflow is a path you control, an agent is the model directing its own process. When in doubt, start with a workflow. Only reach for an agent when the task genuinely needs to think for itself, and you'll stop paying for autonomy you never needed.