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Handoffs vs. flowcharts for agents, in light of OpenAI's visual builder
- segmenta 1y agoContext: Posting this after yesterday’s OpenAI visual agent builder announcements. The link is not vendor specific; it isolates one design choice in the visual layer: static flowcharts vs runtime handoffs with full history. Scope: We are comparing a pure visual flowchart to a handoff model built around one primitive: handoff(agent, history). Each agent takes the full conversation history H, updates it, and decides which agent should act next (or halt). The entire history travels with control, so routing happens dynamically. Takeaways: • Topology: flowchart = fixed graph; handoffs = graph generated at runtime from H • State: flowchart stores state in the diagram; handoffs keep it in the shared data (H) • Routing cost: flowchart needs explicit branches (many edges or a large router); handoffs keep routing as a small function over H • Extensibility: flowchart adds edges; handoffs add a function COI: We built Rowboat around handoffs. The code is open source: https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat