In Production: Are Agents Driving Workflows or Are Scripts Orchestrating Them?

Trying to sanity check how multi-step workflows are actually handled in production.

The way I’m currently thinking about it:

When building, it feels very agentic (using markdown like claude.md, rooms, skills, etc. to structure everything and have the AI help design the system).

But in production, I’m trying to understand how control actually flows across multiple steps.

Is it more like this:

Option A (AI-led flow):

- Trigger fires

- Script collects data + relevant markdown

- AI is called

- AI responds and decides the next step

- AI continues task-to-task from there

Option B (Script-orchestrated flow):

- Trigger fires

- Script collects data + relevant markdown

- AI is called for a specific task

- AI returns output

- Script takes that output, decides next step

- Script loads new context/markdown

- Script calls AI again

(and this repeats for each step)

So basically:

👉 Is the AI “driving” the workflow once triggered

👉 Or are scripts orchestrating each step and calling AI as needed

Feels like it might be more B or somewhere in the middle, but not sure what’s actually best practice.

Would love to know how others are structuring this in real systems.

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Clief Notes

skool.com/quantum-quill-lyceum-1116

Jake Van Clief, giving you the Cliff notes on the new AI age.

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