Pipeline, Flow, or Chain? Picking the Right Tool to Wire LLM Calls Together

Short summary

The article clarifies vocabulary around LLM workflow tools—chains, pipelines, flows, and agent workflows—and divides the ecosystem into LLM-native chaining libraries (LangChain, LlamaIndex) and general orchestrators (Airflow, Prefect, Step Functions). The rule of thumb: use chaining libraries for few prompts with LLM glue, orchestrators for many steps that must not fail, and agents when the model decides the path. The author built PromptKit to make the trade-offs tangible.

• •LLM workflow tools split into chaining libraries (LangChain, LlamaIndex) and general orchestrators (Airflow, Prefect)
• •Use chaining for few prompts, orchestrators for reliability, agents for dynamic routing
• •Author built PromptKit to demonstrate the trade-offs in practice

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