I stopped building single agents. Here's why I switched to workflows instead.

Started with single agents. One agent, one task, one prompt. Felt clean and simple. Worked fine for straightforward things. The problem showed up when the task got even slightly complex. A single agent trying to research, analyse, format, and output in one pass kept producing inconsistent results. Sometimes good. Sometimes completely off. No reliable way to predict which one you'd get. The issue is that you're asking one context window to hold too many competing instructions at once. The agent loses coherence partway through, especially on longer tasks. It knows what it's supposed to do at the start and forgets by the end. Switching to chained workflows fixed this in a way I didn't expect. Breaking the task into discrete steps one node researches, the next filters, the next formats, the next outputs meant each step had a narrow, clear job. The outputs became predictable almost immediately. The other thing that changed is debugging. With a single agent when something goes wrong you have no idea where in the process it broke. With a workflow you can see exactly which node produced bad output and fix just that step. That alone made it worth switching. The tradeoff is complexity upfront. Building a workflow takes longer than prompting a single agent. But the reliability difference is significant enough that I don't build single-agent solutions for anything non-trivial anymore. Anyone else made this switch? Curious where people are drawing the line between single agent and chained workflow.