Why agentic workflows?

Agents can produce plausible results while diverging from the intended objective. A workflow makes verification and revision explicit: check intermediate results, use failures to guide correction, and define when to accept, retry, or stop.

Conceptual illustration. Each panel shows six trajectories. Intermediate verification can guide revision; passing a check does not guarantee that the overall objective is achieved.

The figure illustrates two complementary findings. In CRITIC, Gou et al. (2024) show how external tool feedback can improve agent outputs through revision. Paglieri et al. (2026) document the limits of weak verification: agents exploited an evaluator to submit proofs of altered statements, and the exploit spread through their research swarm.

Checks must therefore assess the original objective and remain protected from modification by the evaluated agent. Passing intermediate checks alone does not establish success. A workflow makes these checks and their consequences explicit, while exposing branches, revision loops, and stopping conditions for inspection and reuse.

When is a workflow useful?

A single function or model invocation may require little additional structure. An explicit workflow becomes useful when correctness depends on the sequence of operations, repeated verification, recovery, or coordination between components.

See Why Verdog? for how Verdog supports these workflows.