Jordan challenges the default assumption that agents are the sophisticated choice for automation workflows. Using side-by-side testing data, he demonstrates that deterministic flows outperform agents on reliability and cost for 80% of production work. For the 20% where agents are justified, he shows exactly how to box them with tool allowlists, hard timeouts, per-run budgets, checkpoints, and approval gates. The episode includes a practical A/B testing harness to benchmark any agent against your deterministic baseline before going live, plus the framework updates from Microsoft Agent Framework and LangGraph that make strict guardrails possible.
