What Makes an AI Agent Actually Agentic? Building Beyond the Basics with LangGraph

There’s a spectrum here, and it matters where you land on it. We covered this in detail in the previous article, but here’s the short version. A workflow is fixed steps in a fixed order - fetch data, process it, respond. The developer decides everything at build time. A smart workflow adds an LLM to one of those steps - maybe it classifies user intent or generates a natural language response. But the paths are still hardcoded. The LLM is a component, not the decision-maker. It’s a loop.