Flows: Building Blocks of Reasoning and Collaborating AI

“In this work, we argue that everything is a (control) flow defining potentially complex interactions between many diverse tools, where agents are just one type of tool. This induces a paradigm shift in conceptualizing and designing structured interactions involving AI agents, tools, and humans. For instance, an AI model used as a tool to pre-filter résumés is a flow of the simplest form — an atomic flow —comprising a single call.

We introduce a conceptual framework where Flows are the fundamental building blocks of computation. Flows are independent, self-contained, goal-driven entities able to complete semantically meaningful units of work. To exchange information, Flows communicate via a standardized message-based interface. The framework is depicted in Fig. 1. Flows can be categorized into two types: Atomic Flows, which encapsulate the execution of a tool, and Composite Flows, which organize interactions between other Flows.”