Agentic Development · Architecture
A model of an agent's workflow as a fixed set of states with defined transitions between them, so at any point there's exactly one current state and a known set of next moves.
Example: An onboarding agent modeled as states: collecting_info → verifying → complete — from collecting_info the only legal move is to verifying, never straight to complete.
In practice: This trades flexibility for predictability — useful once a workflow's shape is known, but rigid if the task genuinely needs open-ended branching.