Hard20 minAI Engineering
UpdatedAug 6, 2026
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Agent Planning vs Workflows

Question Variations

  • "Which onboarding actions should never be agent-selected?"
  • "How do you set an agent's tool-call budget?"

Why This Is Asked

Your team wants an autonomous agent for a fixed employee-onboarding process. Explain when a deterministic workflow is safer, where model judgment adds value, and how to bound agent autonomy.

Key Concepts

  • Deterministic steps: Use conventional workflows for known sequences and policy-critical actions.
  • Model judgment: Reserve agents for ambiguous classification, drafting, or exploration.
  • Guardrails: Bound tools, budgets, time, and side effects.
  • Evaluation: Measure task success, policy violations, cost, and human intervention.

Question Variations

  • “Which onboarding actions should never be agent-selected?”
  • “How do you set an agent’s tool-call budget?”

Answers by Technology

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Expected Answer

Use deterministic workflows for fixed, policy-critical onboarding steps. Introduce model judgment only for ambiguous classification, drafting, or information gathering, with scoped tools, budgets, and approvals. Evaluate task completion, cost, violations, and human intervention before increasing autonomy.

Why It Matters

Autonomy adds nondeterminism where predictable automation may be safer.

Common Mistakes

  • Using an agent for a fixed checklist: It adds risk without capability.
  • Unlimited tool loops: Cost and side effects become unbounded.

Follow-up Questions

  • Where does an agent help? (Answer: Ambiguous reasoning and unstructured inputs.)
  • What bounds autonomy? (Answer: Tool, time, cost, and approval limits.)