Pure AI vs Deterministic Software in Workflow Orchestration

Useful framing for deciding where LLM calls belong in a workflow. Keep judgment-heavy steps probabilistic, but make routing, validation, and state deterministic.

• —Pure AI flows trade control for flexibility. Good for fuzzy judgment, weak for repeatable production behavior.
• —Deterministic software handles routing, retries, validation, and persistence better. That is where reliability compounds.
• —A practical LLM workflow should separate model judgment from execution rules. This reduces cost, drift, and debugging pain.