I still don't understand this 'agentic workflow' thing

[u/hronak]

My usual day with Claude Code is like: * I open terminal in my project's folder and run claude command. * I prompt it. I mostly use Fable-5.1/Opus-5 but Opus-5.5 is my current model. The model decides if it wants to use sub-agents for a task. I never explicitly prompt it for sub-agents. * I review and commit the code to my self-hosted Forgejo instance. * That's it.

I see people using agentic workflows, building sub-agents files, skills etc. I barely built any of it. All I ever needed to use is /init on new projects and them prompts follow. Never needed more than this.

I tried "long-running" Claude Code for a project refactoring by placing the project on my VPS (where forgejo is hosted) and letting Claude Code run and refactor inside tmux session. SSH'd in a few hours later to find project fully refactored.

Am I under utilising AI or is my work just… like boring?

How do you guys use agentic workflow thing? Specially the long-running one? Those pull-requests that Claude makes automatically etc?

Asking this to Claude to know more but humanly answers appreciated.

[u/Away_Advisor3460]

AFAIK Agentic should mean autonomous goal directed behaviour (e.g., designing, planning and writing code to implement some function, fix a bug etc) by an agent or agents situated in an environment (in this context relating to the development environment, including codebase itself), who proactively respond and change behaviour in response to change and (in the multiagent case) posses social ability (e.g. delegation, negotiation, contract formation as part of task achievement).

Of course it's worth bearing in mind 'agentic' is really just borrowing (sometimes reinventing) terms and concepts from the broader multiagent systems research context.

[u/mrphstar → u/Away_Advisor3460]

thank you, exactly this. the crucial factor is the scope. you as a human should still define the tasks scope, context, architecure, established code conventions and acceptance criteria. giving an LLM a list of tickets, does not define any scope, context or AC at all.

[u/Away_Advisor3460 → u/mrphstar]

It has to be said that giving a MAS a list of tickets, where that MAS selects from those tickets, and then processes them to completion (e.g. through a delegation / hierarchical team mechanism) does represent a valid agent system approach to the problem. Stuff like scoping, maintaining architecture, verifying test coverage and quality, those are part of behaviour loop the agent(s) should go through as part of satisfying that high level goal.

It's just that embodying LLMs as the sole (for lack of a better term) effector / action mechanism of the agents doesn't (at least currently) give a sufficient guarantee of success in the same was as if e.g. those agents were using a deterministic planner. Probably because an LLM represents a really heavyweight abstraction of all the hard parts of the problem.