Agent-Operated Workflows

An Agent-Operated Workflow is a bounded procedure whose control loop belongs to an agent. The agent observes, interprets, sequences bounded actions, verifies their effects, adapts, and escalates genuine ambiguity. Deterministic code remains the exact substrate; it does not pretend to understand every state of a brownfield world.

Name the architecture before using it

• AI-enabled software: application code owns the control loop and calls a model as one capability.
• Agent-Operated Workflow: an agent owns one bounded procedure with a start and stop condition.
• Agent-Operated Software: an OpenRig agent or rig participates in an ongoing application's live backend or control loop. It may run many workflows; see agent-operated-software.

Calling a model is not enough. A deterministic program that consults a model still owns its loop.

Decide whether the agent earns the loop

Use an agent when the happy path is deterministic but the environment is brownfield, variable, partially knowable, or disproportionately expensive to model exhaustively. The judgment is in discovering what is true and choosing the next safe act.

Prefer ordinary code when the state space is closed and code is simpler and more reliable than judgment. A parser, fixed data transformation, or fully enumerated state machine does not become better because an agent drives it.

Keep ownership explicit

Owner	Responsibility
Runbook	owns policy, the mental model, checkpoints, stop conditions, and escalation rules
Deterministic tools	own context gathering and bounded exact actions
Agent	owns interpretation, sequencing, adaptation, and effect verification
Human	owns destructive ambiguity and product policy

The runbook guides judgment; tools enforce the invariants that must not be arguable.

Operate