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Agents and Workflows

internal/website/docs/guides/agents-and-workflows.md

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Agents and Workflows

Go Micro's AI primitives map directly onto the taxonomy in Anthropic's Building Effective Agents. That post draws one distinction that matters:

  • Workflows — "LLMs and tools orchestrated through predefined code paths." Deterministic.
  • Agents — "LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage." Model-driven.

Go Micro has both, plus the building block they're made of — and expresses them as plain services and tools, with no graph DSL. That's deliberate: the same post advises finding "the simplest solution possible" and being "cautious with frameworks… they obscure the underlying mechanics."

The building block: the augmented LLM

Anthropic's foundational unit is the augmented LLM — a model with tools, retrieval, and memory. In Go Micro:

Augmented LLMGo Micro
the modelai package (7 providers, one interface)
toolsevery service endpoint, discovered from the registry
memorythe store (file, Postgres, NATS KV)

Every endpoint is automatically a tool, so the augmented LLM is the default, not something you assemble.

Workflow ↔ flow

A Flow is a workflow in Anthropic's exact sense: a predefined path — an event on a broker topic triggers a prompt with a fixed set of tools, deterministically. Use it when the task is well-defined and you want predictability.

go
f := micro.NewFlow("onboard-user",
    micro.FlowTrigger("events.user.created"),
    micro.FlowPrompt("New user {{.Data}} — create a workspace and send a welcome email."),
    micro.FlowProvider("anthropic"),
)

Flow triggers, Agent reasons

A flow doesn't have to do the reasoning itself. Point it at an agent and it becomes a pure trigger — the event fires, the flow renders the prompt, and a registered agent handles it over RPC with its full capabilities (plan, delegate, memory, guardrails):

go
f := micro.NewFlow("onboard-user",
    micro.FlowTrigger("events.user.created"),
    micro.FlowPrompt("New user {{.Data}} — get them set up."),
    micro.FlowAgent("conductor"),   // the conductor agent reasons; the flow only triggers
)

This is the clean seam between the two halves of the taxonomy: the workflow (deterministic, event-driven) hands off to the agent (dynamic). One engine, two front doors — an event (flow) or a conversation (agent.Ask).

Agent ↔ agent

An Agent is an agent in Anthropic's exact sense: it directs itself — plans, calls tools, evaluates results, and decides the next step over many turns, with memory across them. Use it when you want flexibility and model-driven decisions.

go
a := micro.NewAgent("conductor",
    micro.AgentServices("task"),
    micro.AgentProvider("anthropic"),
)
a.Ask(ctx, "Plan the launch, create the tasks, and have comms notify the owner.")

The patterns — most are already here

Anthropic lists five workflow patterns. Go Micro implements the two richest ones natively, as services and tools, and the rest are ordinary compositions:

PatternGo Micro
Routing — classify input, dispatch to a specialistmicro chat's router — discovers agents, classifies intent, routes over RPC
Orchestrator-workers — a central LLM breaks down a task, delegates to workers, synthesizesthe agent with plan (break down) + delegate (hand to workers) + reply (synthesize) — see Plan & Delegate
Prompt chaining — sequential stepschain flows, or steps in an agent's plan
Parallelization — independent subtasks at onceGo concurrency + multiple services/agents; fan out with delegate
Evaluator-optimizer — one LLM generates, another critiques in a looptwo agents over RPC (generator + evaluator)

The orchestrator-workers example is worth calling out: the conductor agent that plans, creates tasks, and delegates the notification to a comms agent is orchestrator-workers — built without a graph engine. See examples/agent-plan-delegate.

Choosing

Follow Anthropic's guidance:

  • Start with the augmented LLM (a single service call through a model). Most tasks need nothing more.
  • Reach for a workflow (flow) when the path is well-defined and you want predictability.
  • Reach for an agent (agent) when the task needs flexibility and model-driven decisions — and accept the higher cost and the need for guardrails.

Guardrails

Anthropic is emphatic that autonomous agents need stopping conditions, human checkpoints, and sandboxed testing. Go Micro's agent has two built-in guardrails, both as plain options:

Stopping condition — MaxSteps bounds the number of actions an agent may take per Ask. Once exceeded, further tool calls are refused and the model is told to stop and summarize.

go
micro.NewAgent("conductor",
    micro.AgentServices("task"),
    micro.AgentMaxSteps(8),       // at most 8 tool calls per request
)

Human-in-the-loop — ApproveTool gates each action before it runs. Return false to block it; the reason is shown to the model so it can adapt. The internal plan tool is never gated (it's bookkeeping, not an action).

go
micro.NewAgent("conductor",
    micro.AgentServices("task"),
    micro.AgentApproveTool(func(tool string, input map[string]any) (bool, string) {
        if strings.HasPrefix(tool, "billing_") {
            return false, "billing actions require human sign-off"
        }
        return true, ""
    }),
)

These are guardrails, not a framework — a counter and a callback on the path every tool call already takes. For anything that must be predictable, still prefer a workflow, and test agents against the integration harness.

Why no graph DSL

Anthropic: "be cautious with frameworks… understand the underlying code." Go Micro's answer is that there is no separate framework to understand — workflows and agents are services, and tool use is RPC. plan and delegate are tools, not a harness. The patterns above are code you can read, not a DSL you have to learn. That's the direction we took going all in on AI.

See also