LLM-Driven vs. Deterministic Workflow
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| Area | LLM-driven workflow | LLM-assisted deterministic workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Natural-language understanding | LLM | LLM |
| Next-step selection | Primarily LLM | Explicit workflow rules |
| Business decisions | Model-guided | Rule-driven |
| State transitions | Potentially flexible | Defined and validated |
| Mandatory confirmations | Prompt-dependent unless separately enforced | Enforced by engine |
| Reproducibility | More variable | Repeatable for fixed validated inputs |
| Audit explanation | May rely on model reasoning | Can record exact rules and transitions |
| Best suited for | Open-ended tasks and exploration | Controlled business processes |
This is not a claim that deterministic systems are automatically correct. Incorrect rules still produce incorrect outcomes. Rules need careful design, review, testing, and monitoring.
Adapted from 19_deterministic_workflow_engine_learnings.md · “12. LLM-Driven vs. Deterministic Workflow”. Code examples are study fragments. Difficulty and core labels are editorial estimates; version-specific behavior should be checked against your project.