The Autonomy Slider: A Decision Framework for When to Use Workflows, Single Agents, or Multi-Agent Systems

The article argues that the industry is over-indexing on multi-agent systems, when most production use cases work better with simpler single-agent or workflow architectures. It introduces the 'autonomy slider' framework with five levels of agent architecture, providing concrete decision criteria for choosing the right level of autonomy. Drawing from Anthropic's engineering guidance, the author emphasizes that if you can draw the flowchart, you don't need an agent.