February 22, 2026
An agent without a workflow pattern is a chatbot. What separates an agent from a single-turn LLM call is the loop: observe the environment, reason about what to do, act, observe the result, and decide whether to continue. The loop structure determines everything – how the agent plans, how it recovers from errors, when it stops, and whether it can handle tasks that take minutes or hours.
February 22, 2026
An agent with access to 30 tools is not automatically more capable than one with 5. What matters is how it selects, sequences, and validates tool use. Poor tool use wastes tokens, introduces latency, and produces wrong results that look right.
When multiple tools could handle a task, the agent must pick the best one. This is harder than it sounds because tool descriptions are imperfect and tasks are ambiguous.