Don't hand a bazooka to an agent making a sandwich (Jeremiah Lowin)

“Hey Claude, can you go make me a sandwich? And by the way, here's a bazooka in case you run into any zombies." Jeremiah Lowin, founder and CEO of Prefect, on why a 15-step workflow in a single skill file hands agents a dangerous tool at step one. He joined Tristan Handy this week on the Analytics Engineering Podcast. Three ideas from the episode: 🔸 A skill file is a polite note the agent is free to ignore. Fine for steering behavior. Less fine when steps 1-14 check that everything is correct and step 15 moves the money. 🔸 Agentic workflows are DAGs of outcomes. Traditional workflows are DAGs of implementations. Every workflow tool we have was built for the second kind. 🔸 You can't archive your way to a context layer. A stock price changes by the second, so the layer with real gravity governs access to context rather than storing it. Listen wherever you get your podcasts 🎧